Is There a Replacement for FrontPage's old "Navigation View"?

February 26, 2013 6:18 PM

When I was in college, and first learning to build websites, I began by using Microsoft FrontPage. It definately had it's shortcomings and I'm glad it has been retired. I've long since moved on to better tools and methods myself, but there's one feature I did enjoy called "Navigation View". This was a way to view your site as a tree-map, but it was also a way to build out a large and somewhat complex web of pages. I found it to be a useful outlining tool, for later building complex sites. Is there anything like that now? For those of you who might not be familiar with the feature, try a google image search for frontpage navigation view I tried looking on another forum for an answer, but the conversation there was not helpful to me at all.
posted by dylan_k to technology (4 answers total)

It's been like a decade since I've had a copy but Visio appears to still have a similar feature: Google image search for visio website map.
posted by XMLicious at 6:48 PM on February 26

a way to build out a large and somewhat complex web of pages

Nowadays, you use a CMS to do that. I would strongly caution you against doing it as a folder hierarchy of HTML files. That is—flatly—obsolete.
posted by bricoleur at 8:07 PM on February 26 [1 favorite]

I'm less interested in the back-end (which indeed should not be a folder of HTML files) than I am in a visualization of the connections between/among the pages. Visio can be used to map a group of pages that already exist, right? But I want to create a map of pages, and then the pages, using that map. Is this possible?
posted by dylan_k at 7:33 AM on March 1

I think I vaguely recall laying out a site with it as well as using the web-crawling build-a-sitemap feature, but that was long long ago before it was a Microsoft property; maybe someone who has a copy now or has used it more recently will see this and can comment on more recent versions. Or, it looks like MS was giving out 60-day trials of Visio 2010 which was only superseded by Visio 2013 a couple of months ago, so with any luck that program's still in place?
posted by XMLicious at 9:39 AM on March 1