Is Frontpage still usable for current web design?

[Walter R.]

I designed my website with FP 98 and 2003. (See signature below) It may be
somewhat out of date, functionally.

If I redesign my website from scratch, what would be the easiest program to
work with, instead of my old copy of Frontpage? I would also like to provide
some means for selling the book from my website.

Adobe Dream Weaver is too expensive for a one-shot design. Is MS Expression
Web suitable for transferring a lot of stuff from my current webpage? I
still use the MS Extensions. Are they still supported by main-stream web
designers? How a bout a simple program like Coffee Cup? Would that work?

Thanks for any ideas or suggestions. At my age (80) I am not going to design
a lot of web sites.

 

[Ronx]

FrontPage 2003 is the last version of FrontPage. It will continue to be
supported for critical updates by Microsoft until April 2011, but full
support stopped in April 2009.

FrontPage has been replaced by Expression Web and MS Office SharePoint
Designer. These are NOT upgrades (though Expression Web does have upgrade
pricing). Some knowledge of HTML and CSS are required to get the best out
of these programs.
Expression Web is aimed at standards compliant web sites, and has limited
support for FrontPage components. Expression Web supports PHP and asp.NET
2.

SharePoint Designer is aimed at SharePoint websites, but has more support
for FrontPage Components. Note that Expression Web does not have a
Navigation View if you use FrontPage navigation components - SharePoint
Designer does have Navigation View.
SharePoint Designer does not support PHP, whereas Expression Web (version 2)
does.

Neither program has any support for VML graphics as produced by FrontPage
and other Office applications (WordArt, ShapeArt, TextBoxes and objects
created using the Drawing toolbar)

A 30 day trial for Expression Web is available from
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Overview.aspx?key=web
IMPORTANT: Do not forget the product key obtainable from a link on the
download page.

Sharepoint Designer is a free download from
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/FX100487631033.aspx


The newsgroup for Expression Web is microsoft.public.expression.webdesigner
The link
news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.expression.webdesigner
should open the group in your news reader.

FYI, FrontPage extensions are only supported on Windows 2003/2008 servers -
other server types (Unix, Windows 2000) have no support for extensions other
than that given by hosts. There is a version of FP extensions available for
IIS7, used by Windows Server 2008 and Vista.

If redesigning from scratch, I would use Expression Web, since it is aimed
at compliant web sites. On the other hand, Sharepoint Designer is closer to
the FrontPage you are used to.

"Mainstream" web designers tend to avoid the FrontPage extensions since they
are proprietary, and not well supported by hosts - more hosts are dropping
the extensions from their web packages. asp.NET and PHP are being used to
handle server side functions such as forms processing. Both SharePoint
Designer and Expression Web still support the extensions.

--
Ron Symonds
Microsoft MVP (Expression)
http://www.rxs-enterprises.org/fp

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