Faster Smarter Microsoft Office System -- 2003 Edition

The most obvious answer to this question is, of course, create a Web site . But perhaps the bigger question ”and the one you ll need to spend some time considering before you start work ”is, What do you want to do with your Web site?

In its relatively short life span, the World Wide Web has grown from a fairly ugly, primarily text-based medium to a high-energy, moving, colorful communications channel that offers text, graphics, video, and sound. Once the domain of engineers and data architects , the Web now belongs to everybody ”from governments to companies, from grandparents to schoolteachers. And today we re finding more uses for the Web as well. Instead of simply using Web pages as a way to provide information to those who are looking for it, we can buy and sell almost anything, and store, share, and work with our information on the Web in new and exciting ways.

So, what will you do with a Web site you create in FrontPage? Here are just a few possibilities:

• Create a professional Web site for your company, complete with an About Us page, a corporate directory, a customer-service page, and a page describing your products and services.

• Publish your college coursework to the Web, so that your distant students can follow along with the presentations you give in class.

  See Also

  Chapter 21, Publishing Your Pages, walks you through the steps involved in actually getting your pages on the Web.

• Make the annual reports of your nonprofit organization available online, so that potential donors can find out more about you and what you do.

• Create an e-commerce site for your small business that enables you to sell items from an online catalog (see the section on Microsoft bCentral later in this chapter).

• Design a team site your employees can create and use collaboratively, using Microsoft SharePoint Team Services.