About Web Site Management

What is a Web site?

A Web site is the collection of Web documents (HTML, pictures, and so forth) that you yourself maintain for people to look at over the Internet.

What is Web site management?

To put it simply, as soon as you make more than one Web page you probably find that there are certain things your pages need to have in common in order to make your readers' navigation easy, and to make their experience pleasant and consistent.

Perhaps you want all your pages to have a certain similar look, with the same logo at the top of each one. Perhaps you want clean navigation between pages, with nice "Next" and "Previous" links to guide your reader through your work. Perhaps you want to show an outline of your entire site, with links to all the different pages, as a kind of live table of contents.

Implementation of these and similar features is exactly the sort of chore which, while tedious for a human being, is easily automated by a computer. You're using a computer to write your individual pages already; why not let your computer do the work of tying them all together for you as well?

What Frontier does about it

The way Frontier implements Web site management is by storing all the pages of the site internally, in a database. Whenever you like, you can ask Frontier to publish -- or, as it is sometimes termed, "render" -- the actual HTML pages for your site. The idea is that if something changes, you can generate a new version of some or all of the HTML pages without effort.

Even if this meant you had to render every single page of your site, and even if there were a very large number of pages, the cost to you would be only time waiting; the expenditure in effort would be virtually zero.

Suppose, for example, that after your whole site has been up on the Web for a while, you decide that a certain logo should appear at the top of every one of your pages. Without a site management tool, you would have to open every single page and insert an <img> tag for that logo.

With Frontier, you insert the <img> tag once, in one place, and then tell Frontier to generate all your pages anew. Frontier sees to it that the <img> tag appears in each page; now you just upload the pages in place of those already on the Web (actually, Frontier can do this for you as well if you like), and presto, the change is made.

Clearly, having a Web site management tool like Frontier is going to make you more creative on the Web. Without such a tool, a simple change like adding a logo to every page would have made you groan at the thought of the tedious effort involved. With it, it's a snap, and now you're free to think what else you'd like to do to your Web site.

Frontier lets your Web site grow and change as easily and swiftly as your ideas do. This is important, since experience shows that when a concept seems like a lot of trouble to implement, people don't make their Web sites as powerful, useful, and attractive as they want them to be.