FrontPage 98 reviewed!
By Steve Williams (Visit his website here.)

Here are a few of my own comments you may wish to convey to your users regarding the use of FrontPage98. Overall, I found it to be a very nice package, but there are just a few things one should be aware of when setting up a page for a service like Geocities that doesn't use the FrontPage98 extensions.

As a former FrontPage97 user, I found FrontPage98 to be a very nice improvement to an already splendid package. Before I get into the nitty gritty, let me say one thing for certain. If you are currently using FrontPage97 to maintain a Geocities site (or a site anywhere which does not allow you cgi-bin access), and are happy with what you have, then stick with FrontPage97. FrontPage98 has some really nice features, but unfortunately, many of these depend on you either having CGI-BIN access or on your server running the FrontPage98 extensions. Since, to my knowledge, Geocities never ran the FrontPage97 extensions, I doubt they will be running FrontPage98 extensions. The other thing to beware of is the _derived directory within your web. This is where it creates the images for your navigation bar it happily (and effectively I might add) creates for you. This directory doesn't show up within the FrontPage Explorer regardless of whether you ask to see hidden directories or not, but one look from outside FrontPage98 and there it is.

One more thing on the derived directory. While FrontPage98 does a wonderful job of creating the images, it does a lousy job of cleaning up after itself. So if you change themes several times or change the way your navigation bars appear, you will have extra files in here that you can (and probably should) clean out. The file names are a little funky, but suffice it say you should have ONE file for each button regardless of how many different pages it appears on, and ONE file for each banner (if you use them). The first part of the file name should be your current theme, if it's an old theme, it can go bye-bye.

Want to do a review of your own? Click here to find out how to submit it to me.