Last week, I attempted to of how the once-mighty WordPerfect became a gibbering wreak of its former self. Today, the spotlight turns to another fallen hero – Microsoft FrontPage. Here’s the sad tale of how the World’s most popular Web publishing tool vanished into obscurity within just a few years. The rise to fame Believe it or not, FrontPage wasn’t always a Microsoft product. It was actually first developed by Vermeer Technologies Incorporated, who in November 1995 released Vermeer FrontPage 1.0, one of the first ever distributed Web content authoring tools. Seeing that this kind of product might have a future, Microsoft snapped up Vermeer shortly after the launch of FrontPage 1.0, for $133 million. The Redmond company released FrontPage 97 in June 1996, when it was also bundled with the Microsoft Office suite.
A stripped-down version, FrontPage Express was bundled for free in Internet Explorer from 1997, then came a Macintosh version, followed by four more versions between 1998 and 2003. At the height of the program’s success, Microsoft announced that FrontPage was. Why people liked it The reason why people took to FrontPage in the first place, was that there was no product quite like it on the market. The Web was a completely new concept and most people didn’t have the first clue about how to create pages for it. FrontPage’s WYSIWYG approach made it simple for ordinary folk to put things onto the Web without having to fanny around with a text editor, or learn HTML. Templates were one of the most important elements within the application, allowing people to choose from a series of preset page layouts without having to design their own from scratch.
This guide goes over alternatives to using Frontpage by Microsoft, since extensions are no longer supported. As of December 18, 2010, Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE) 2002 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 RTM is supported by Ready-to-Run Softwar.
FrontPage also had great interoperability with the rest of the Office range, so Excel sheets, Word documents and Access databases were easy to integrate into Web pages. The program also came with a simple built-in image editor called Image Composer, which would let you see how your graphics looked in different combinations of browsers and a different screen resolutions. Perhaps the overriding reason why FrontPage did well was the fact its workflow was so similar to other Microsoft products that the average user was used to. If you were proficient at editing a document in Word, you could pick up FrontPage and lay out a page without having to learn an entirely new interface from scratch. What’s more, pages would render exactly as they were displayed in FrontPage when viewed in Internet Explorer.