If crap is good for your Intranet, why not? Punish the in house viewers with sappy templates.

How about Geocities for your extranet?

Plain laziness drives these notions. Gack. C'mon, can it really be *that* hard to do good design in and out?

Posted by: Dogbot on August 14, 2002 02:03 AM

 

I don't like the article for the same reasons then the one mentioned by Dogbot.

Beside, I would like to point out that Dreamweaver also offer templates but it's easier to implement. Correct me if I'm wrong, but with the Microsoft product, you have to save the template in a special sub-folder of window to be able to use it. With Dreamweaver, it sit just beside the other folder of the site. You can also be very restrictive about the places in a page that can be edited.

It's almost as good has a content management server but much cheaper.

I know almost nothing about GoLive. Does it have templates?

Posted by: Richard Lehoux on August 14, 2002 06:57 AM

 

How do you get across to uninitiated web content editors that the world's leading software maker (!) has created a program that is inefficient with code, has ugly templates, doesn't encourage semantic documents (many users fail even to change the title), that hurts anything other than graphical browsers, and saves files with .htm. Not sure how well it works with style sheets.

It's been a while since I looked last at FP, but this still blights a lot of sites I see created with it.

Posted by: Chris on August 14, 2002 09:20 AM

 

FrontPage sucks in so many ways. However, I still use it quite often. I can easily workaround many of the problems and I can live with the rest. Fortunately, I don't need it to run WebWord. I mainly use it for mockups.

Posted by: John S. Rhodes on August 14, 2002 09:24 AM

 

I used FP for an intranet in a 3000 employee company with approximately 30 content providers. It worked well, in my estimation. I designed a custom theme/template set for a better design. It was cheap (actually our parent company had unused licenses we took advantage of). Training was easily found from local providers. It looked and worked alot like the MSOffice applications that people had worked with. Pages looked fine since the corporation was standardized on IE. I setup the IIS index server and had instant usuable search results. Org. changes that affected the organization of the intranet were easily handled using the navigation view/nav bars. I was even able to write VB code to work through all the pages and update them in a particular way.

My only real complaint was as content grew the response times while saving a doc became longer and longer. We just threw bigger hardware at it.

All this while the parent company spent big $$ for a custom Notes-based intranet application that made it practically impossible to update the structure of the site, wasn't WSYWIG, didn't allow users to easily create tables or forms, produced crappy search results, required custom training to be developed, etc.

I'm not saying FP works well for everything, but it's a tool - it has it's place and time for use, and there are places and times where you wouldn't. I also still use it for Wireframe development.

Posted by: Mike Boyink on August 14, 2002 12:26 PM

 

FP? AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!! Run away, Run away!!!

WSYWIG? ...hmmm not familiar with that one...

...processing...

WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get
WYSINWYG - What You See Is Not What You Get
WYSIAYG - What You See Is All You Get
WYSIWYM - What You See Is What You Mean
YAFIYGI - You asked for it, you got it

...ahh...here it is...
WSYWIG - What some yahoo wanted I guess

Posted by: Lyle - Usability Guru on August 15, 2002 12:47 AM

 

Sure, FP is not the greatest HTML editor out there. But it is very easy for Office-savvy users to learn, and cloaks much of the complexity of web-site maintenance.

We usually train our (non-CMS using) clients in Dreamweaver, not because it is a better piece of software (though it is), but because our production people are used to building templates in it! Not the best reason, really. For the ininitiated, Dreamweaver is an intimidating piece of software.

I've implemented client-maintained sites in FrontPage with very few issues. Building an attractive template in FP is no harder than in DW. Most kinds of page design can be accommodated without hassle, once you get to grips with the software's eccentricities. The code it outputs is mangled, but that's not a huge issue for little Intranet sites, which are unlikely to join the mythical "semantic web" anytime soon.

At the end of the day, it's about getting the job done. In my opinion, allowing users to maintain their intranet site with a tool that they feel comfortable with is "good user experience"

Posted by: Che Tamahori on August 15, 2002 07:19 PM

 

Oh -- and Quark XPress as a web development tool? Puh-leeze.

Posted by: Che Tamahori on August 15, 2002 07:22 PM