If you are going to use FrontPage to develop and manage your site, you should try to find a budget web hosting service with a Windows hosting environment. It will be a little more expensive, but it is worth it. Most hosting companies offer a Linux operating system with FrontPage extensions because it is cheaper, but there are more people that complain about this kind of configuration than are happy with it. This is because their budget hosting company may have FrontPage extensions, but hasn’t spent a lot of time fine tuning them. Anyway, using FrontPage on a Linux operating system is sort of like driving a Cadillac on a dirt road. Why spend the trouble of getting FrontPage if you aren’t going to use it in the right environment?
Besides finding a budget web hosting service with a Windows hosting environment, you should also find one that provides ASP and ASP.net. This is the server side scripting that works with Microsoft products like FrontPage to generate dynamic pages. While it’s true that the main purpose of FrontPage is to do a lot of the scripting work so that you don’t have to, there are so many more thing that you can do with ASP, JavaScript, DHTML, and PHP to make your site run more efficiently that the possibilities are really worth exploring. Once you understand how FrontPage works to create a functioning website, it’s time to look at ASP.
ASP is server side scripting which allows FrontPage to produce dynamic pages by connecting to the databases you have created on your server. This allows you to create customized and dynamic pages for your customers and users. For example, if you run an online store that sell sunglasses and you have a repeat customer that logs onto your site, you can totally customize their shopping experience. You do this with ASP. Once your customer logs in with a code, ASP can take that code and retrieve your customer’s information from the databases you have created on your web site. Then ASP takes this information and puts it into the Active Server Pages you have created.
The results are a personal greeting for the customer, welcoming them back in the context of a greeting page you have created with ASP. Then, you can pull up their buying history, and let them know the status of a shipment or a return. They can also change their customer information online, like their shipping address, which will be changed in your database right away. You can see how this creates an entirely different shopping experience than having a website that just has static pages. An example of shopping on static pages would be one of your customers going to your site and leaving an email for you to get back to them later to find out where their merchandise is. By the time you get back to them, you may find another email saying they have canceled their order. It is much better to use FrontPage along with ASP and other server side scripting to create dynamic pages than it is to rely on old fashioned emails on a budget web hosting service to communicate. It may seem confusing to create at first, but the technology really isn’t that hard.
Essentially, ASP pages have pieces of code that are embedded into the page that the server processes before the viewer sees it on their browser. When the browser pulls up a page with the customer greeting on it, the ASP code tells the server to go to the database and retrieve the information for that particular customer on the page. The result is a personalized customer greeting.
With FrontPage wizards, this is easy to set up. When a customer first comes onto your site, they will enter their information in a form that you have created with the forms wizard from FrontPage. This information will be automatically sent to a database that you have also created, using Microsoft Access, Excel, or another program. If you also create ASP code to generate a unique number for this customer, all of their customer information will be stored in your database under their name. Anytime they want to update it they can, but you can update it as well. If you want to enter in shipping information or create a special message like a sales announcement, you can have ASP display this message as well. Instant and ongoing communication is what dynamic pages are all about.
This is how FrontPage and ASP help you manage your website. You can see that it is much more sophisticated and engaging than having static pages. This is why you should sign up with a budget web hosting service that not only offers a Windows hosting environment, but offers ASP as well. Trying to make FrontPage work with extensions on a Linux operating system isn’t worth the effort.
