Is Front Page REALLY that bad?

[mbangel]

I've been designing web sites for ten years with front page. I've been using it because I host web sites on windows based servers. I'm wondering if front page specific tags are affecting my rankings? Has anyone had any experience with this concept? I have one site that we've been working on in particular that we took all front page specific tags out. At the same time, we also got some really good links to popular sites. Now, we're getting google rankings. Now I need to figure out if it's the good links, or the meta tags we changed? It's a 13 month old site.

http://dragraceusa.com

I only post the link in case someone wants to see the site and do some research, not to have my site critiqued, which would belong in the appropriate discussion. The purpose of my post is to discuss front page as a tool and search engine optimization affected by it.

[coder]

Welcome to the forum.
I personally wouldn't use front page, dreamweaver, or any other wysiwyg program. The sites will still be indexed by search engines, I don't think they should effect your ranking. If ranking is a problem work on ibl's and on keyword rich content.

One of the biggest problems I see using those programs are the larger file sizes. They add a lot of garbage in your code that you don't need which also slows down your site.

[PizdusInc]

I would agree with the comment of Front Page adding a lot of extra and unnecessary code... this indeed does make pages bigger and longer to load. Dreamweaver, as far as I am aware, does not add extra code... this is the program of choice for most!

[LLFitness_Derek]

Your safe with dreamweaver~ Two of my dreamweaver sites are at the top of all the serps. Now front page... (Off Topic) Dont set your website up like this guy did:

Get your free aut0s0u*rc3 guidebook..

https://69.56.135.42/order2.html?

Front Page + Shopping Cart = Bankrupcy
---------------------------

Front page adds a whole lot of JUNK to your source code. The weaver is cleaner~

[Faglork]

I sometimes do re-designs on pages made with Frontpage. Usually, I can reduce the amount of code by 60 to 80%(!)

All MS products seem to write wrong code on purpose, so as to make the pages look bad in other browsers than IE. Many of the code constructs are downright ridiculous, like writing 1000 characters of code to obtain a 1 pixel margin between two elements.

I agree that dreamweaver is a good product - much better code quality than FP. However, my general opinion is that NO editor *knows* what I want and therefore adds a lot of unnecessary code just to get it "right" from a wysiwyg point of view - and this is not necessarily the best way to look at the construction of a page.

But *I* know exactly what I want - so what do I need a wysiwyg editor for? I code by hand - zero code garbage, ultra-fast pages, validated code.

Alex

[voasi]

I've used DreamWeaver and Frontpage and have top rankings for lots of domains. It doesn't really matter. As long as you have good internal anchor text linking structure and good amount of anchor text incoming links from various IP addresses and networks, you shouldn't worry about what wysiwyg program you use.

You should attribute the increase in rankings with the high valued incoming you got.

[coder]

Originally Posted by faglork

But *I* know exactly what I want - so what do I need a wysiwyg editor for? I code by hand - zero code garbage, ultra-fast pages, validated code.

Exactly
I feel like a dying breed when I tell people I hand code all my websites. Especially when everyone out of college has no idea how to hand write decent code.

[voasi]

Originally Posted by Phantom

Exactly
I feel like a dying breed when I tell people I hand code all my websites. Especially when everyone out of college has no idea how to hand write decent code.

For me it's like people who do their own taxes. That's great! If you can. But for me, I'm goint to use Turbo Tax to get the job done. Some people like to 'out-source' getting their taxes done. That is fine too, whatever gets the job done, then stick with it. :)

[rivux]

Originally Posted by voasi

For me it's like people who do their own taxes. That's great! If you can. But for me, I'm goint to use Turbo Tax to get the job done. Some people like to 'out-source' getting their taxes done. That is fine too, whatever gets the job done, then stick with it. :)

Horrific analogy, it is nothing like doing your taxes. When you outsource or use Turbo Tax for your taxes the assumption is that the taxes will be done the same. But editors like frontpage can make code unreadable by many different browsers and devices, it is also spits out the least accessible code possible.

Though from a competitive standpoint, I encourage everyone to use Frontpage, because I will be more then happy to take the visitors and sales you turn away because of poor coding.

[mbangel]

thanks for all your great replies. I know that most of the web design community feels negatively about front page. I don't think it stops me from designing good sites, and like one person said... I use the tools to speed up the process. I just changed two things at once on this site, and couldn't decide which worked.

Again, thanks for your opinions!

[rivux]

Originally Posted by mbangel

I don't think it stops me from designing good sites

Not sure how many times this can be said before the Frontpage followers finally get it, but it DOES stop you from designing good sites. If people want to argue that they don't care that they are writing substandard sites because the extra effort isn't worth the visitors, then fine lets argue that. But to say that Frontpage can generate sites as good as handcoding is laughable and patently untrue.

[JSeverson]

FrontPage adds a lot of garbage and/or IE specific code, just as any other Microsoft product. I started coding by hand, moved to FrontPage and then began using Dreamweaver. From my experience, with each new version of FrontPage, there's more and more unnecessary code added.

I now create my designs in Firework, export them to XHTML, and set up/load content via Dreamweaver. Any coding that I do (e.g. ASP, PHP) is done in Homesite. After using Dreamweaver for 4 - 5 yrs, I haven't really found anything wrong with it. Does it add code? Yes, on occasion, it throws in an unneeded DIV or SPAN tag here or there, but, overall, I've not really had all that much of a problem with it. My pages validate and, if I happen to catch an unneeded tag, I remove it.

FrontPage? <<shudder>> :-)

[cspelts]

I use FrontPage and have since it was in Beta. At the time I worked for a software development firm that was a Microsoft Solutions Provider, so I had to use it - but that was ten years ago, and I'm still using it!

I will say that I work in Code View ninety percent of the time. I rarely hand code a page from scratch - but once the basics are in place, all of the tweaking is done to the actual code.

And yes, I have some pages that I can't open in FrontPage, because the program would rewrite my code, but I can open them and work on them within FrontPage using Open as Text.

There are some things that FrontPage does not do well - so I don't use those features!

Would I recommend the program? Well that depends. I would recommend it to someone with no experience who wanted to just do their own little site. I think it's much easier to get started in, than Dreamweaver. I'd also recommend it to someone who can hand code, who just wants to use a wysiwyg design tool occasionally, and is sophisticated enough to be able to determine when hand coding is better. But if you want a wysiwyg tool you can use indiscriminately, then FrontPage isn't the best choice for a serious web designer.

As for FrontPage code affecting your rankings, it's always best to have clean, validated code. You can test your site at:
http://validator.w3.org I've seen sites that don't validate and have tons of bloated code, that rank really well, but it's not that hard to get a site to validate, and it might give you an edge, so I'd highly recommend it!

[macdesign]

I use Front Page for most sites for customers. I have sites that rank #1 ahead of their competition, so I've never considered that a problem. Yes, it has annoyances, produces bloated code, and loves to insert extra paragraph tags. As in the previos post, I spend a lot of time in code view, especially with tables.

I have some sites where part of the site is in FP, and part is generated by PHP code that uses the FP templates.

I just created a web site for a new customer using FP, I was going to prototype in FP, than once the customer was happy with the page navigation and content, switch to hand coding and make a custom design. But he's so happy with the design that's using a standard FP template, he wants to leave it as is. The site was created two weeks ago, and is now in the top five for several targeted keywords.


I also do some pure hand coding, but much less than I used to. I keep trying to do sites in Dreamweaver, but it alwayt seems like such a pain having to do extra work creating graphics links with embedded text each time I add pages and change the navigation. In FP, I can dynamically add pages, and change the mapping with so much ease, it would be hard to justify the extra time on Dreameaver, unless you have a rich customer. My first web site was hand coded, with pages generated statically from a database [before ASP became usable] The customer paid $12,000. These days, most customers want to pay less than $500.

Luckily web design is not my main source of income.

[jawn_tech]

I personally use GoLive and toggle between layout view and source view. If I need to add a table with many items, I'd much rather use a wysiwyg view than handcode it, but that's only a personal preference -- most other things I do handcode however. I enjoy toggling back and forth, but to echo what others above have stated, if one doesn't know html (at least) -- it's very rewarding to learn it. In fact, to remain competetive in SEO, it's a must. So if you do continue to use Frontpage for time-saving purposes, get to know code as much as possible so you can edit it in the source code view (I forget what FP calls their source code view). That way you can edit any extra code not needed, tweak your tags (and delete the "created by frontpage" author or generator tag). I'm known for wacky analogies, so I would compare it to sculpting -- layout view chops the clay down to the basic shape you want, but editing code in source view fine-tunes the details and allows you to make it right.

[SEOforGoogle]

I'd rather code a 10,000 product e-commerce site using notepad and static pages than use FrontPage. Just my .02