Important FrontPage® Notes

We fully support all versions of Microsoft FrontPage; in fact, most of our customers use FrontPage with our services every day. All accounts have FrontPage support installed by default, so there is nothing that needs to be setup to get started. We have developed this notes page primarily because FrontPage can be very difficult to get working initially and tends to provide error messages that are not helpful in identifying the problem.

1. Before FrontPage can publish a website, the domain must be actively pointing to the new web server. This is because FrontPage publishes to the server that the domain name goes to. Although it is possible to get around this by publishing using FTP (File Transfer Protocol), FrontPage special features (extensions) do not operate when published using FTP. All domains becomes active 24 hours after having registered a new domain or changing the name servers on an existing domain name. You can verify if the domain is active and pointing to our servers by entering it in the web browser. If the domain is actively pointing to our servers, the Mecca Hosting Welcome page would appear. This is the most common reason for FrontPage publishing problems that we encounter.

2. FrontPage extensions can only be installed under one web address. For this reason, one must publish to http://www.yourdomain.com; rather than http://yourdomain.com. To FrontPage, these are two different websites; we install FrontPage under www.yourdomain.com, as this is the most common address used. If one were to publish to http://yourdomain.com without the www, FrontPage would not recognize the account and the login would fail. This is the second most common reason for publishing problems.

3. FrontPage remembers all logins entered and will not retry failed logins. This is a defect in FrontPage that is the cause of many problems. If the wrong login is entered, FrontPage will remember it and not try to login again; even if the correct login is entered. The only way to force FrontPage to retry a new login username and password is to exit the program and restart it. Always be sure to save the login in FrontPage so that it will always remember the correct login.

4. FrontPage extensions can become corrupted when publishing using FTP, as this is not the normal way that FrontPage websites are published. Generally, once all the above problems have been ruled out, this is the last possible problem. The corruption of extensions is rare, but has been known to happen on occasion. There is a link in the Account Manager to re-install FrontPage extensions; this can be used when all else has failed.