MS FrontPage deserves special mention. This software used for creating web pages quickly comes with the Microsoft Office Suite. So if you have the MS Office, you probably have MS FrontPage for free. Of all web creating software, MS FrontPage appears to be the easiest to use. The reason is, it has the same interface as Microsoft Word, the widely used Windows word processing application. The menus, the tool bars, the windows and the usage mechanisms, follow that of the MS Word.
MS FrontPage is also specially supported by Windows web hosts. There is a component called FrontPage Extensions that ensure that once you create your pages with MS FrontPage, you are assured of compatibility and secondary resources on the server.
These reasons make MS FrontPage a favorite tool with web designers. It has the ability to develop pages quickly and then launch these same pages on the internet at the same time. You will not need any knowledge of html, coding or programming to run MS FrontPage. You simply point and click.
To create pages on MS FrontPage, you simply type your text and add pictures. You use the same process you apply in MS Word. Infact, aside the task bar, you can hardly tell if you are running FrontPage or MS Word. Like Word, you simply click File, go to New, choose a new page and begin typing. You can format the text as you want right inside the text area. You can make them bold, change the font, change the size and even create your links with GUI tools.
Figure 7. A FrontPage GUI interface and icons
FrontPage comes with templates to ease your job of creating web pages. Templates are preset pages that are tailored towards specific themes. So you have templates for creating sites that relate to computer, cars or houses. These templates provide quick launch websites as you only add text and then have the software do everything else for you.
Publishing your web content to the net is a breeze. From the software, you will click the Publish button and the wizard will initiate the publishing process. You will be prompted for a login to your web host and then your files will be loaded onto your server. The pages you so publish are immediately available on the web for viewing.