Take any HTML file you have and rename it to a PHP extension. (So for example, if your HTML file is named sales.html, rename it to sales.php).

Put sales.php on your web server and run it in your browser. You get exact same result as you did with HTML page. Now, for good part.

Say you wanted to personalize one of your sales pages. Let's call that sales.php. Now, if you had a newsletter or wanted to give this "personalized link" to someone, your visitor's name could be added on-the-fly to your sales page.

Your link should look something like this:

http://www.your.host/sales.php?firstname=Big&lastname=Bird

Let's try it out:

http://www.jumpx.com utorials/1/example.php?f=Myfirstname

Click that link and your name should be near top of page.)

In this example, yourdomain.com represents your domain name and sales.php your HTML file turned PHP script. This would be link you could give Big Bird when you ask him to visit your sales page.

Now, edit sales.php and find where you want Big Bird's name to appear. The first and last names are given to script separately so you could have anything from "Hi Big Bird!" to "Dear Mr. Bird..." For simplicity let's just stick with showing both first and last names for now.

Insert this anywhere into your "script":

Now try that sample link I gave you earlier on that sales page of yours. You should see phrase "Big Bird" anywhere on your page.

Remember that you can stick this in anywhere on page. So for example if you wanted it to say "Dear Big Bird," you would just do this (with comma at end):

Dear ,

This article is not intended to humiliate Dreamweaver or FrontPage editors. I just attempted to analyze both programs from different points, based on Internet research, experience of other users and my years of html coding experience.

To say honest I am not fan both of them. In our production we regularly use AceHtmlPro but fact is that many of our customers DO use either FrontPage or Dreamweaver and that's reason our employee have to be familiar with both. Writing article I have talked to our stuff and did some research about both editors and I came up with facts I'd like to share with you.

Pluses and minuses of MS FrontPage:

1. FrontPage as all Microsoft product has so many templates and ready to use solutions that you cannot admit it is easier for beginner to start using FrontPage to build his first website. You can create simple website personal or business with several clicks and all you will need to do next is to enter your text and pictures instead of used by FrontPage by default.

2. The good news is FrontPage html pages look exactly as they appear in MS Explorer and bad news is that they look perfect ONLY in MS Explorer. However you may program FrontPage to get rid of nasty tags but I believe it requires some hand coding to adjust pages to Netscape or Opera. Another good news for FrontPage users: about 93% of all internet clients use MS Explorer 5 and higher.

3. As Microsoft application FrontPage is better with ASP pages, which are standard for Windows based hosting and windows based programming.

4. MS FrontPage perfectly interacts with other MS Office products. For example you can easily cut and paste some chart from MS Excel into FrontPage working area.