Microsoft FrontPage 2003 review

FrontPage is the most expensive program in this test.

It offers plenty of options and features, and provides loads of templates and step-by-step wizard routines to make the design process simple. These help you quickly build a site containing lots of pages, all linked in a logical structure. Unfortunately, your site will be more like a blueprint than a finished product, with lots of blank spaces in which you need to insert text, images and other elements. Novices could easily find themselves not knowing what to do to next. Disappointingly, there are no tutorials included in the help system.

FrontPage 2003 does make it easy for those with a little design experience to create a page from scratch. There are simple, flexible and precise tools for creating page layouts using tables, or frames. You can also use Cascading Style Sheets to provide a unified style for all the pages in your site. FrontPage also has something called the 'task list'. You tell the task list what you're trying to accomplish, and it tells you what steps you need to go through to get the job done.

Plenty of the features in FrontPage 2003 will appeal to experienced users. You can edit the HTML code directly, while keeping the graphical view of your pages open alongside. Each time you refresh the page, the changes you've made to the HTML will show up, so you can see exactly what you're doing as you do it. There's also a superb preview function, letting you check the appearance of your site in various browsers at various screen sizes.

Unfortunately, these advanced features come at the expense of simplicity. This program doesn't come with enough templates, and the ones that are supplied are rather dull. The half-finished pages created by the wizards will baffle beginners, and from there on, help is rather cryptic. At this price, these omissions earn FrontPage a disappointing score. You may be familiar with Office programs, but FrontPage is too complicated for you to just jump over from Word and get cracking.