It is still looks attractive almost 20 years since Microsoft abandoned its development. This is an amazing longevity. Almost twenty years without any support from Microsoft and the product still refuses to die. The quality of FrontPage interface is close to the quality to Excel interface and that means that it is superior to other Microsoft products and is far above most competitors.
Tremendous amount of insight went into designing of this interface and it shows, although unfortunately some features you discover only after several years of use documentation is not that good and does not emphasize innovative features present as well as optimal ways of using them; especially the latter. Frontpage can be installed and used on Windows 7, 8 and Windows There are some nuances on Windows 10 and some functionality is lost -- see FrontPage on Windows Many people view FrontPage as a tool for beginners.
That's a completely incorrect view. While FrontPage is definitely "beginner friendly" it is a very powerful professional tool. Much like Office It has very rich functionality and after almost twenty years since of usage I still discover new possibilities and shortcuts almost each month. Microsoft FrontPage has come a long way since it was first introduced in Each version up to and including Frontpage was a significant step forward. Dreamweaver is definitely weaker in many but not all areas and less user friendly; it is also more expensive.
For example I never got used to the crippled way Dreamweaver supports bookmarks. FrontPage support is more logical and more transparent. Like several other top Microsoft products it is now abandonware. Looks like in any aging tech company Microsoft brass degenerated quicker then middle level managers and programmers, which create products ;-. That's why such decisions are made. It can be installed on Windows 7 without problems. Or, more correctly, with minor problems -- selection of a group of files in Folder List does not work as well as in XP.
But it can be still done in folder View. Frontpage and Microsoft Expression Web also can be used on Microsoft Windows 8 or 10 tablets such as Microsoft Surface Pro by modern standards this is very small and fast application. It also was included in some books and training courses Amazon. In this case it is unclear whether you can get a reg key there are some key generation sites, for example Microsoft FrontPage Serial free serial number key download.
In any case, while I, and may be other people, like Frontpage it makes little sense to buy it for such a price when you can still get Microsoft Expression Web 4. The latter, while disappeared from Microsoft site is still can be found on the web. People who starting using Frontpage long ago like myself usually have plenty of licenses and it is unclear to me why a newcomer should pay such a price for the product.
You can always extract the key from the old computer with Frontpage installed. It was founded in by Charles H. Vermeer was acquired by Microsoft in January and most of the development that led to creation of FrontPage was done under Microsoft umbrella. The difference with early versions is so great that we can legitimately call FrontPage a genuine Microsoft product. Andrew Schulert was the brilliant technical mind and architect of all version of FrontPage up to and including FrontPage He managed significantly enhance and polish the product during rather brief seven years period of FrontPage development in Microsoft.
See FrontPage history. The most important versions of original line of software products were Frontpage , Frontpage , Frontpage and Frontpage Frontpage was the last release of the original line of this software. There is no FrontPage -- in a misguided attempt to catch up with Dreamweaver Microsoft replaced it with Microsoft Expression Web as of Dec 20, also abandonware adding people from Dreamweaver team which move the development in a new direction, the direction that I don't appreciate.
ISO of Frontpage and all earlier versions of this product are downloadable from Internet Archive. Actually the statement that there is no FrontPage is not completely true as Microsoft SharePoint Designer can generally be viewed as semi-debugged Frontpage Microsoft SharePoint Designer a free version of a very close derivative of FrontPage , kind of beta version of Frontpage that was never released. While it can't be downloaded from Microsoft, it is downloadable from Internet Archive.
Actually for any OS in existence. No other free editor even comes close. Here is some info from Wikipedia:. It is a part of Microsoft SharePoint family of products. For instance, it only includes SharePoint-specific site templates. It retains more FrontPage features than Expression Web , such as web components, database, marquee, hit counter, navigation bars, map insert, etc.
The whole product a little bit smells with outsourcing Some annoying for me I am a longtime FrontPage user, your mileage might vary :. Another alternative is now free Expression Web 4. Initially it was available from Microsoft site the link was Expression Web 4. But as of March the link disappeared. You can still download it from majorgeeks. Download Microsoft Expression Web 4. Expression Web was a product that replaced Frontpage and which was developed without much success from till ten years, longer then Frontpage development.
It is more suitable for Win10 the Frontpage Expression Web development lasted till end of the last released version was version 4 and now it also became abandonware. The design direction taken was questionable and it is not free from problems.
I used it only occasionally so in no way I am expert in this product. The most serious issue is that there is no feel that the same talent that produced previous versions of FrontPage up to and that Expression Web developers were substantially weaker in architectural thinking then the previous team.
They also did not have a clear vision of what product should be and it shows. For example, despite four versions released there was no noticeable improvements of the HTML editor. Those suckers were even unable to change definitely broken regex engine ;-.
After all those years as an HTML editor it is still not much better then FrontPage and contains mostly the same errors.
I might be wrong, but key deficiencies that I have found in Frontpage are still present in Microsoft Expression Web but macros are gone. The same semi-debugged and idiosyncratic regular expression engine. Again, those suckers were even unable to change definitely broken regex engine ;-. Only one annoying problem with FrontPage was fixed in Expression Web -- the inability to apply styles from the attached stylesheets.
Version 4 relies for extension on. Net add-ons and that idea looks even worse that an old way in a sense that it make the number of developers capable of extending FrontPage even smaller. You then can open several projects and cut and paste folders and files between them.
You can also drag and drop or copy and paste content from one page to another and from IE or Firefox to Frontpage IT exports way too much markup and is annoying in this regard. Firefox has a good mechanism for export of small HTML fragments into your documents, but when exporting the link to the page from the navigation bar it does not substitute title. In case you change the name of the file linked to other pages on your web site all references will be changed automatically.
This is an excellent very attractive feature of Frontpage. Unfortunately FrontPage does not support SSI : you can use them but if you move page, you need to correct path manually, unless you use absolute path. For external stylesheets and internal links and images FrontPage corrects links for you which is a big help.
Truth be told sometimes Frontpage tries to be a little bit too helpful: when you paste fragment of Web page from IE, FrontPage paste the stylesheet used automatically for your complete pleasure In most cases this is an overkill and to delete this crap is an annoying repetitive task. One serious problem with Frontpage as HTML editor is that it does not understand external CCS it render page according to them, but they are not preset in styles menu.
At the same time it works really well with "inline" styles. So you can use internal styles while developing page and automatically replace them with the link to external style sheet when you deploy the page.
Although many professional Web builders dismiss FrontPage in favor Dreamweaver, and Dreamweaver is somewhat better for working with CCS FrontPage is pretty competitive and during its brie period of existence as a commercial product it remained one of the most popular solution for editing websites.
People who value simplicity in Web design still are attracted to it even now. Also there is a widespread misunderstanding that if you use FrontPage you need to use FrontPage extensions on the server I actually never used them. What is funny is that Dreamweaver product manager Wayne Smith, came around and try to mold FrontPage in Dreamweaver fashion.
He definitely succeeded in the area of CSS support which would be done by the team anyway, but the value of other changes and level of real progress is unclear: as of EW 4 I would say the product suffer from the lack of vision and lack of attention to HTML writers needs. To really get the most out of FrontPage, though, you have to know how to use some of its not-quite-intuitive features. Among them:. Initial attempt to introduce macro facilities into Frontpage was a failure. What they implemented was difficult to use and barely better then nothing.
These macro facilities existed in almost unchanged form till Expression Web 4. They are not very well documented and very difficult to use. See Frontpage Macro Programming for more information. New macro facilities, introduced in Expression Web 4. Here is one a telling response in the thread And what I do with vba macros in Expression Web 4. New system has me playing around with too many files and too many settings. VB macros was easier. There should be a guided editor system for creating them.
And screw the XML. Editors make xml, i shouldn't have to mess with xml and manifest files. The vb macro editor took me 5 mins to figure out and to write my first macro, but the new way has me hunting for solutions because the lack of integration. There is an add-in builder that was written by one of the guys on the product group for Web 4. It makes it really easy to create a manifest without looking at XML. As someone who has programmed macros and add-ins for FrontPage and Expression Web for almost 15 years, I can tell you that the new extensibility model is far easier than the old API.
If you're truly interested in extending the product, I encourage you to seriously check out the new model. Based on your comments, I can't believe you've given it much of a look.
I'm not at all a professional developer. I am a hobbyist developer, and I have to say, not a very good one at that! Programming is not my talent. A Web developer absolutely must know JavaScript to design a modern site.
These are the exact same skills necessary to develop add-ins for Expression Web 4. When Expression Web 3 moved away from the Office code, macros were no longer available.
However, if you're still interested in extending Expression Web using Visual Basic, you can certainly still do that using Visual Studio. That object model is still available to you. The built-in macro language VBA is powerful, but extremely obscure to the level of un-usability Macro Programming capabilities.
They are very difficult to use and this probably the most grave design blunder which Frontpage developers committed. They also failed to include Macro Recorder, but they do have value. Even simple macros can dramatically improve what you can do with Frontpage, especially if you know Perl. For example a simple macro like. Not that it is easy to write :- , but you need to do it once. This macro is available from Microsoft Examples and can be used immediately.
See Frontpage Macro Programming. I would like to stress it again: I am using FrontPage from on daily basis and so far learned only tiny fraction of its capabilities. And in no way I would be able to support such a huge website with other tools. Select the first option for customizing the list. Click Add. Type a Keyword and Description to help you know what the code snippet is for, then type the code snippet into the bottom box.
The new code snippet appears in the list of available snippets on the Code Snippets tab in the Page Options dialog box, and you can insert the code snippet into your files by using the keyword "css1". If you often work in Code view, you may want to turn on the Code View toolbar, which includes access to all code snippets. To display the toolbar, on the View menu, click Toolbars , and select Code View. To use the toolbar, position your insertion point where you want to insert the code, and then click the List Code Snippets icon on the Code View toolbar and double-click the code snippet that you want to insert.
Frontpage uses a set of special file which constitute Frontpage database. This directory contain Frontpage database with one file per file contained in web directory, for example for file. Data base record contain all links of the current page to other pages on the web site. If extensions are installed on the remote website the meta data there will be updated during the publish process - again the files themselves are not transferred.
You can even move folders from one subtree to another and all links will be automatically corrected. The presence of those file on your local machine also allow Frontpage track the changes to your site, so it knows what files are new, changed and so on so it can determine which files actually need to be published. They are also useful so you can see in design time the features such as shared borders and include pages working on the spot, instead of having to publish the page to the web like you would if using standard Server Side Includes.
The other big part of special files is implementing Frontpage extensions. I advise you not to mess with them. They contain script, images for buttons and background, styles, etc which provides a uniform and eye pleasing web of you web site.
But both scalability and reliability is a problem, especially when you web site grows beyond, say, pages. Due to presence of Frontpage database there are some errors that are often manifest themselves with the message The server "" timed out. The current request did not complete successfully. Asked by: pgithens. I've been working on the same website with FP for nearly a year with no problems. The website has grown but is not huge. Two days ago I went to open it and make a couple of changes and I suddenly get the dreaded server "" timed out message.
I've searched the web and there appear to be a variety of different causes for this, none of which seem to apply. I'd made no change to the theme or anything else of significance in recent weeks. To be sure, I deleted the folder that had my last updates in it. That didn't solve anything. I've since put it back. Hi - I have just found the question I posted last year - there are lots of good posts on there - if anyone could let me know if there are any updates on those answers with extra tutorials etc I would be most greatful and will probably be coming on the forum for extra help as I go on, regards, JacquieCC.
What question? What posts? Find it again and post a link to it here so that we can see it. The Dalai Lama walks into a pizza shop and asks the guy behind the counter, "Can you make me one with everything?
As Bill said nobody knows what post you are referring to but if you mean in terms of a "magic button" - no there are no changes. There is a SP 2 for EW but that doesn't have anything in it to help migrate an antique site to current web standards.
Wednesday, October 19, AM. Is it worth upgrading to Expressionweb 4? Members Current visitors. Log in Register. Search titles only. Search Advanced search…. New posts. Search forums. Log in. Install the app. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding. You are using an out of date browser.
You can clean up images you no longer use in one of two ways. Use the unlinked files reports OR use the hyperlinks tab from Site View. I prefer using the hyperlinks tab. Open the image folder and go down each file in the folder to check and see if it is linked to a page. If not, right click and mark Exclude from Publishing. NOTE : Images used within scripts will show as unlinked as well as images that may be stored on the site for use elsewhere.
You will need to make a note of these images. Once you have completed checking all the images, you can move them to another folder for storage or delete them. Next do the same thing with pages on your site. Are there pages that are no longer being used or copies of pages that you have revised and saved?
Go through each of your pages and make sure they are still linked and provide relevant content for your site visitor. Check especially any page marked Exclude from Publishing. You can then delete the pages or move them to a new folder for storage. NOTE : For any pages you delete, that have already been indexed, you will need to create a redirect so your site visitor will not get page not found if they happen to click on a search link.
How can you tell if you are using a Theme? FrontPage - Open your website in FrontPage You should receive a warning that any pages with an individual them will NOT be modified. How can you tell if you are using the Shared Borders feature? The two meta tags refer to the name of the theme, which in this case is called "aftrnoon " and the shared borders you have enabled. In this case: top, left, right, and bottom.
The 'Find and Replace' dialog box will appear with the code you highlighted in the 'Find what' pane. On the 'Replace with' pane make sure that it is empty of any text or code. Make sure 'Find in source code' is selected under the Advanced section on the right hand side. Then click the 'Replace All' button. Rather than use any of the graphics associated with the canned themes, you might want to create your own background images for your new updated website.
You can now delete the folders associated with both the themes and shared borders. If you have created any images for use with your theme, you may want to save them to an images folder within your website.
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