FrontPage - What to Do, What Not to Do

I just finished creating a tutorial teaching FrontPage users how to insert a picture. Not all that difficult. Right? Well, yeah. You can click on the little picture icon and insert your picture. FrontPage let's you size the picture. But here's the rub: If you simply resize the picture using FrontPage - or any other editor, for that matter - you are still saving the picture that you originally inserted. "What's wrong with that?" You say. "That's what I want to do." You say.

Not necessarily. File size matters. Developers can complain about clunky code all they want. This is not what is going to slow down the download of your page on the net. What will slow the download is large files. Picture files are particularly culprits of this mass conspiracy to slow the download of your site to browsing visitors.

Here is what you do: You work alongside the html editor - FrontPage we are using because it's everyman's wysiwyg (what you see is what you get, well, to some degree it's what you get, depending on the browser and screen). First you insert your picture onto your page in FrontPage. Then you go to picture properties. Pretty big file. Well, you know it's a big file because the picture is way too big on the page. You are going to have to small it down. So you do that. FrontPage allows you to easily do this. Unfortunately, FrontPage does not warn you that even though you are smalling down the appearance of the picture on the page, the file size will remain big. Not good.

Go back to picture properties after you have resized the picture. Now you know what size the picture really needs to be. Enter your photo-editing software. I use Arcsoft 2000. It is still a good photo-editor, and tons cheaper than the latest edition of Photoshop. Insert the same picture that went into FrontPage now into the photo editor. Copy the picture. Press new. New will have saved the file size and dpi of the picture you just saved. Good. Paste the picture into the new space that Arcsoft has created for you. Now, size the picture down! Press copy. Press new again. Is your photo editor giving you a smaller file size? Good. Paste. Keep doing this until you arrive at a picture size appropriate for the page on FrontPage. Once you've accomplished this, insert that picture into FrontPage. Get rid of the old one. And if you had saved the file of the old picture, delete that file as well in FrontPage's collection of files for the site you are working on.

I will admit that a video tutorial works better at explaining all this. The point I want to make is that the file size of your picture needs to be correct when placing it into your html editor. Otherwise, you will have a slow loading page, and we all know how well that performs with visitors. Or rather, we all know how well that doesn't perform. The remedy is easy.

I advise businesspeople, professionals, artists, and other ambitious souls to learn how to do their own webmastering. That said, please learn the basics - which, by the way, many books and tutorials won't even teach you. For example, playing around with FrontPage, I would find myself saving content on one page to an "extra" page because I wanted to make sure while I was editing that I didn't lose any of my work. I would later paste content from the "extra" page to the page I was working on. Big mistake. I mean, huge mistake.

Working this way, you can easily forget to delete that "extra" page. What happens when you publish? You've published duplicate content! This is a mortal sin to Google. They will punish. And if you created duplicate content with your home page, forget it. Say goodbye to SEO.

So, even though you should author your own pages, you should also know the basic and especially what not to do. Unfortunately, nobody tells you this stuff.

Beau Smith is an artist, writer, and webmaster. Through screen capture tutorials, Beau Smith's website, http://www.TutorialJoe.com, will teach you right now for free how to use FrontPage 2003.

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