Help - Frontpage is crap

[CVW]

Hi all,

The title may be old news but I have just seen the site of a friend of mine.

Lizzie Kay - Home

They have only just finished it and have no web experience - I gave them a few pointers about SEO but I can see that I will now need to help some more. The site has been built in FP so I don't understand half of the code but....

site looks fine in IE but is practically non existant in FF. I have NEVER been anywhere near Frontpage but I can feel the question "what can I do about this?" coming my way.

Does anyone know about FP and (apart from the code is shocking) why this site is SO quirks modey that is disappears altogether. I know how much hard work goes into building a first site and don't want to come back with answer of "write better code, mate".

Any experience of the dreaded Frontpage appreciated.

Rob

[MickyO]

The site could be build in valid css xhtml in a few hours offer to redo it correctly for like £50 mate rates, save all the time and hassle

[flick]

oh my good lord, no-one is going to use their services off the strength of that mess, I agree with mickyo, you'd be much better just putting it together from scratch with css and xhtml

[CVW]

Well, those were the kind of answers that I was expecting but not really hoping for.

I could easily do it from scratch (if asked) but the point is:

The person who built it has no idea what they are doing but I am sure they have tried hard. Surely Frontpage produces at least some vaugely parseable code - it is quite popular among a certain level of hobbyists.

I have a sneaky suspicion that there is a vital piece of workflow missing from their site creation that is unique to using FP - like a "make my site" button. How else do all the crazy templates and conditional comments turn into a website?

// edit: BTW there is nothing actually inherently great about XHTML over HTML 4 apart from one being extensible and the other one not.

[MickyO]

The Most Important Differences:

• XHTML elements must be properly nested
• XHTML elements must always be closed
• XHTML elements must be in lowercase
• XHTML documents must have one root element

[CVW]

Originally Posted by MickyO

The Most Important Differences:

• XHTML elements must be properly nested
• XHTML elements must always be closed
• XHTML elements must be in lowercase
• XHTML documents must have one root element

Yes, I am well aware of the differences between the two . But the strictness (or not) of a standard does not make it any more of a standard than any other.

I take it from the answers that nobody actually know anything about Frontpage then.

[Cwilk]

I think most of the programmers on here use Dreamweaver.

[tommylogic]

Yeah.. Front Page is a mess. Start fresh.. that's your best bet.

If you don't have the time, you can try to run it through Dreamweaver. It has tools that clean up a lot of MS code.. but it's still a mess.

[PaulClark]

Congratulate them on having completed their first website, which can now be used by maybe 70% of web users.

Offer your professional services if they would like to be seen by ALL web users.

And search engines.

[CVW]

Thanks for all the replies.

I'm sure it's frustrating. I remember building my first site and finding all kinds of things that need re doing. But I did start with DW at least.

I am able to help them but I still can't get over the fact that Frontpage can even call itself web building software if it produces such tosh. I did try to steer friend away from Frontpage originally, thinking that it isn't all that great but I didn't realise it could do THAT to a page.

Hadn't thought about DW tidying up code - last time I used DW I spent a bit of time tidying up the code myself.

Oh well, more work for the professionals I suppose.