Using FrontPage 98
FrontPage Components

1. Counters make your pages take longer to download. Each time a page containing a counter is accessed, a program has to run to increment the counter and generate the appropriate number image. Is the extra download time worth it to your visitors, who probably don't care how many people see your site? Usually not.
2. Counters don't provide a good estimate of how many people are visiting your pages. Unless you have many visitors, most of the hits will be from you.
3. Unless you get many, many visitors, the thing most people are likely to take away from your counter number is that your page isn't very popular. While you can artificially inflate your counter number, why bother putting one on at all if you're going lie about it?

If you still feel you must have a counter on your page, FrontPage provides a Counter component for this purpose. To add a counter:

• Choose "FrontPage Component" from the Insert menu.
• Select "Hit Counter".

Choose one of the image styles provided, or type the path to an image containing a number strip (more on this in a moment). After you've chosen an image style, click OK. Your counter will not appear as a number in the FrontPage Editor window, but rather as follows: [Hit Counter]. I've inserted one of FrontPage's standard counter's here so you can see how it looks to visitors.

Number Strip Images
To get other looks for your counter, save a number strip image (a GIF image containing the numbers 0-9 evenly spaced apart) to your FrontPage web. (You can save the strip to a local drive by right-clicking it in your browser and choosing "Save Image as" or "Save Picture as". Then import it to your web through the FrontPage Explorer.)
     In the Hit Counter Properties window, click the Custom Image button and type the path to your image strip in the field provided. If it is not in the same folder as the page you're working with, you will have to do some variation of ../images/name.gif or image/name.gif to reference it.
     I've made a sample page with examples of both the regular FrontPage counters and some using number strips. You can copy the number strips directly from this page, or visit the Digit Mania site for others.

Comment

Use this when you want to put some comments into your web page that will be visible to you when you edit it, but not visible to people who are browsing your pages (unless they view your HTML source).

Include Page

If you have many pages that need to have the same information in them, and don't want to open and edit each page when that information changes, you can put that shared information into its own page, then use the "Include Page" component to insert the contents of that file into each page which contains the component.

Insert HTML

If you want FrontPage to ignore some HTML you specify, paste it into this component window. FrontPage won't touch the HTML, but you won't be able to edit it through using the "Normal" view in the Editor, either; you'll have to edit the HTML directly.

For more information on any of these components, use the Help menu in the FrontPage Editor to read about them.