The following suggestions are intended to help with web design. Is this confusing? Please feel free to contact me.

Navigation Structure

Begin your project by developing the navigation structure.

Revision Control

Use some form of revision control on your files. Even if you choose not to indicate which revision you have on a page, you should have comments indicating what happened in each revision. The images show two examples, one as it looks in FrontPage, and one as it looks in your browser. Click on each image for a larger picture.

Although the comment doesn't show in the browser, it is embedded in the HTML code. If privacy is important, add the comment to the file properties, or use FrontPage 2003 and set it to optimize the code by removing comments when you publish.

Include Pages

You may include a page by going to Insert==>Web Component, then choosing Included Content on the left and Page on the right. If you use it for shared borders, your html code show very little, as the image shows:

Keep the file you are including in a folder named _private with permissions set to being non-browseable.

Shared Borders

Maintain copies of your shared borders in case they are overwritten. To see the _borders folder, you must go to Tools==>Web Settings, select the Advanced tab and select Show hidden files and folders. See the Shared Borders page for more information.

Backups

You can backup your webs by publishing to a personal web server and selecting subwebs and publish all pages. Publish to a numbered subweb and you can then rotate backups so you maintain several copies of all of your pages. The advantage of posting to a web server versus just folders on your desktop is that you can access the files from anywhere and you don't get an error message for each Frontpage component that requires a web server.

Revision A

Last Maintained 09/06/2003