Besides Dreamweaver, FrontPage web hosting is probably what most people who are familiar with web design software will use if they don’t know scripting and want to design and manage their own site. Many cheap web hosting companies offer free site builders along with their packages, but unless you have a really simple site, you should avoid these free site builders. Even though they have come a long way, free site builders are best used for personal sites. This is because most can’t handle advanced functions like shopping carts, and larger product catalogs. So if you are into serious ecommerce, you don’t want to fool around with a rinky-dink free site builder.
You can’t knock a free site builder too much, however. The results can be professional looking, but they are still static. What this means is that you probably have a site with pages that have some pictures, some text, your phone number, a list of services and merchandise, and some “about us” information. However, if your site starts to get traffic, what you really need are active web pages. Active web pages have flash, a shopping cart and lots of other features that you can use to make your site really pop. This includes hit counters for your pages, forms to collect data, form handlers, discussions forums, blogs, and link bars to get to other pages within your site and other sites as well. Your site also needs to be easy to navigate, and a free site builder just can’t stand up to the challenge.
That is where FrontPage web hosting comes in. Having an incredible web site that has everything you can imagine sounds great, and if you are on a budget sounds even better, but when you sit down to do it yourself you can run into a lot of problems. If you are like many business owners that are product specialists first and web masters second, you have a lot to learn about building and managing a really functional web site. More to the point, the time it would take you to effectively learn HTML, PHP, CGI, and ASP along with other web programming tools would significantly take away from the time you would normally spend making sales. Since you aren’t just building your site, but also managing it, this would be and ongoing process if you had to do it yourself.
Microsoft FrontPage can get you started designing a professional website quickly. With FrontPage hosting, you can generate dynamic pages without mastering computer programming scripts for yourself. This is because FrontPage uses a point–and-click process to produce basic “What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get” (WYSIWYG) pages. The most that you have to do is paste in your text and graphics. After that, the FrontPage software handles the job of creating the correct HTML so that your web pages become dynamic and interactive. This saves you from the poor results of producing a static site on your own, or hiring an expensive web designer to build the web site for you.
If you haven’t ever built a website, there are enough tutorials out there to help get you started. For the absolute beginner, FrontPage comes with many website templates in all kinds of sizes and designs. These templates are absolutely mistake-proof when it comes to creating new dynamic pages. They also come in a variety of styles, including those for retail and service industries as well as those for personal and organizational sites. Because they all have the HTML code, these templates can also help advanced web designers create new, active pages quickly as needed. FrontPage also lets you import third party CGI Scripts, Active X Controls, Web Browser Plug-ins, and Java Applets. This provides more possibilities as your traffic and you business expands.
Just remember, if you sign up for a cheap web hosting package that it has FrontPage extensions included. Otherwise, if you get a Linux operating system, you won’t be able to use FrontPage. If you are going to use FrontPage, it is always better to sign up for a hosting plan with a Windows hosting environment because it will work better. It does cost more, but it is worth it.
FrontPage web hosting will allow you to build active and dynamic pages for your web site easily and without a lot of experience. If you are new to website design, this will help you get started much more quickly than if you had to start from scratch, and produce much better results than a free site builder.
