Why I don't use the Front Page WYSIWYG EditorA few years back, A new client approached me to webmaster his website. His webmaster had just retired and he needed someone to be able to update the products he was selling on his website. His first request was to update a few prices on featured products The changes were really simple, so rather than going through the hassle of setting up the entire site in Front Page and syncronizing it with the production website, I opted to just download it, find the changes with my trusty Ace HTML Editor and make the changes. The update only took about 20 minutes and I simply FTP'd the changes up to the server. Done deal... No Problem, right? Wrong! I had failed to note that 3 or 4 designers had done work on the website and one of them had decided to use Front Page Extensions to create some order functions. A day later I received an email from my client, informing me that his order forms no longer worked and he wasn't getting any orders. Didn't make sense to me, since I didn't touch his order forms. After hours of back tracking, I discovered that his order forms were processed via the Front Page Extensions, and by me not using Front Page to upload the changes, the site processes crashed. If you design a site with Front Page, plan on only using Front Page to touch it... And be kind to a new webmaster who may be contacted to help you. Tell him you designed the site with Front Page and are using Front Page Extensions. Tell him what version you designed it with. Then he can plan his extra time and costs to webmaster your site... If he wants to touch it at all in it's current state. Oh... I forgot to mention... If you use Front Page without modifying it, it will change all of your php tags to asp tags. That will rock your socks when you finish an hour or so of coding. In short... There are plenty of wysiwyg editors, some are even free, that will actually make your web designing life far less stressful. |
