Why Front Page Should Not Be Used By Adult Webmasters

By

Mitzy

of

Get A Nut

If you are reading this, Front Page has already done it's job. The only thing Front Page is good for in Adult Webmastering is to give us the confidence to get into this business. You found our board, and now that it has done it's job, it's time to get rid of it.

Why? Well that's what this page is all about.

Front Page and other "What you see is what you get" software, like Dreamweaver and others, write the code for you based on how you want the page to look. In Page View. The result of that is very code-heavy pages.

Front Page is the worst. It adds useless code that you don't need that adds up in Bandwidth and Load Time. I will give you an example: look at this page in view source. (right click and click on "view source") Here is the same page written in Front Page: click here. View source in that page. Now look at that code. See the difference? Now it may not seem like much, but every character you use on a page adds to the amount of bandwidth used to view the page. Every little bit adds up. Now right click on the pages again and click on properties. You can see that the file size on the page written in Front Page is almost triple of the one hand coded. And this is just a simple page. With multiple tables and images it's even worse.

Another thing about Front Page, is that it thinks it's smarter than you so it adds code where you don't need it. When you put in your sponsor code in the hyperlink box, and press enter, Front Page changes the code. An "&" turns into "& amp". Well, that negates your code and you won't get credit for any signups. Yes, you can go into the source and change it, but if you add anything else to the page in page view, Front Page changes it back. That alone is a good reason to get rid of the software.

But yes, there are more reasons, writing in Front Page, seems to me to make you pages look clunky. You don't have as much control over the way they look than if you write your own code. Also, if it does not look the way you want it, it can take hours to change just one color in a hyperlink, because you don't know HTML.

After a while it gets very aggravating. If you use Front Page long enough, you will give it up on your own. Like I did. But that's not recommended. If you use it as long as I did, (I'm hard-headed) you will already know a little code because you had to go into the page and change things so often.

But you can't learn code? Yes you can. If I can anyone can. It just takes a little practice but after a couple of sites, you will be an old pro.

Just don't let it intimidate you. Pick a tutorial that's right for you and learn. It is very gratifying after writing a bunch of words and tags on a page, opening it up in your browser and seeing the great colorful site you just created. It is even more gratifying after you made a sale with that page. You will also find that writing your own pages is faster and easier than writing them in Front Page.

Important! Read This!!!
LEARN HTML IN NOTEPAD BEFORE USING A HTML EDITOR!!!

Tutorials

Below is a list of Tutorials I found useful. Each has it's own format. You are sure to find one right for you.

Page Tutor	A very good place to start. This site walks you through building a website. Also gives very useful information.
Html Made Real Easy	This is more of a text oriented tutorial that is very informative and easy to read.
Webmonkey	This tutorial gets a little more involved. They explain everything.
Big Nose Bird	This is more of a tips and tricks site, not a tutorial. But it is laid out in Q&A format that has helped me a lot when I got stuck.

Page Tutor tells you on the first page not to use an html editor when learning to write code. I cannot stress that more. You should first learn the language by writing it by hand in notepad. Html editors are good to speed up your work by using hot keys and other shortcuts after you feel comfortable writting code in notepad. But they will really slow you down if you don't learn html first. You may decide you don't need an editor at all. Here are a few the newbies use. I won't go into detail, because I only know how to use one. You can find these at Tucows.com

Arachnophilia | Hot Dog
Coffee Cup | WebZard

Mitzy