Help Articles

Our selection of articles covers all kinds of topics related to FrontPage - from Meta Tags to Disaster Recovery, we have tried to bring you a selection of useful items that will make your FrontPage experience easier and faster. Look through the topics at the left for our current selection. Because of it's popularity, we're placing our "When Disaster Strikes" article on this page.

I'd Rather Crash My Car Than My Hard Drive

• If you have a hard drive crash and lose your theme and template package, you can always restore it from a backup.  If you always plan on backing things up "tomorrow", you run the risk of losing your data.  So be sure to save your new template download file to a floppy disk or CD, label it, and keep it in a safe place.
• If you keep your webs in My Documents/My Webs, you can backup the entire "My Webs" to CD or to an external hard drive if you have one.  With CD Burners coming down in price, this is a great way to backup your data, email, etc.  If you don't have one, put it on your birthday or Christmas wish list.
• If you have published your web to your server space, you can always get your web back by publishing it to your hard drive.  The how-to info is in the FrontPage help files.  (yeah, I know.....Help files?  Who needs 'em?)

But I just hit one tiny button!  Where did it go?

Here's the scenario...you're rolling right along making changes to your template pages.  You save the page, get prompted with some message that you aren't quite sure about, then you hit either yes or no as the case may be, and WHAM....the top or bottom shared borders are gone.  You grab your monitor and yell "I'm sorry....I didn't mean to do that!"

Anther scenario....you decide to do a bit of house cleaning and accidentally delete the newpage.htm page.  Uh-oh! Now how do you make those 20 new pages you were planning on creating tomorrow?

You can perform your own disaster recovery simply by creating a new web using the template!  Give the new web a name so you will know it's just temporary and you can delete it later.  Then copy and paste from the new temporary web into your current web.  You can copy from the "normal" view or from the "html" view....or you can Import a page from the new web into the old web (to get your newpage.htm back into your site.)  Check out the FrontPage help files (sigh...I know, those again).

My live web was fine yesterday, but today there's no shared borders and no navigation!

This seems to be the most frequent question I get asked.  It is not a problem with either the theme or the template.  The problem is on your web server side.  Call your host and let them know the problem.  Chances are you will find out that they did a bit of "maintenance" on your server and/or fiddled with the FrontPage server extensions.  (Note: Unix servers seem to be more temperamental than others.)  Ask that your server extensions be repaired or reinstalled.

While this will fix your server extension problems, it probably won't repair your web.  Here's what to do:

• Open your local web in FrontPage.  Make sure that your navigation view is in place.  Double-check all of your pages and be sure to go to File > Preview in Browser.  If everything looks fine, go to Tools > Recalculate Hyperlinks!  This is an important step that you should do each and every time before you publish your web.

• Now republish your web and select to publish every page (not just changed pages).  This will rewrite all files on the server.

• When your web has been republished, be sure to delete your temporary internet files in the browser so you won't be seeing a cached copy of your site.  If you still see the "old" web, hit Control + F5 to force a refresh from the server.

• If this still doesn't fix your site, you can do the same procedures working live.

  • Open the live FrontPage web by going to File > Open Web.  Type in the full URL to your site.

  • Once open, go to Tools > Recalculate Hyperlinks

  • Check to see that the pages are in place within the navigation view.

  • Reapply the theme (if necessary)

  • Reapply the shared borders (if necessary)

Special Notes:

• Some FrontPage files are normally hidden.  To see these files, go to Tools > Web Settings.  Click on the Advanced Tab and put a check mark in the box next to "Show Hidden Files and Folders.  Click Yes or OK when asked if you want to refresh your web.
• Be sure you are using the Publish feature of FrontPage and not using FTP to upload your site.  (Note that you can FTP your site, but it's always wise to pick one method - either Publish or FTP - and stick with it.)
• If you continually have problems with your live site, seriously consider switching web hosts.  FrontPage web sites run smooth as silk if the web host knows what he's doing.  If your host's tech support team tells you that every little problem you are having is "normal" with FrontPage, definitely change hosts.
• While inexpensive web hosting is nice, sometimes it comes down to what means more to you: your time or your money.  If you are spending more time fixing problems, it may be worth it to pay a bit more for hosting and spend more time doing what you enjoy doing rather than tracking down problems.  End of sermon. <grin>