Frontpage

I used to use Microsoft FrontPage several years ago to design and publish my websites. I used that and almost did not use anything else for website design. But then they upgraded to what I think is now called Expression web, with a significantly large price tag to upgrade from FrontPage. Needless to say, I now neither use FrontPage nor Expression for website design. I now mainly use what is called Weebly for most or all of my websites. It now seems so much easier to me to utilize "cloud-based" software for website design rather than things that has to be downloaded and installed on my local computer. What do you think and does anyone still even use FrontPage for website design?

 

You can use notepad to put together a website if you know what you are doing; however for those who have limited knowledge with CSS, HTML or PHP; you can find tutorials on-line and learn.

 

I've only used Weebly once before and it was to set up a squeeze page. I admit it's very easy to use, specially if you are not a designer (which happens to be my case) but there's a drawback too and it is that you are limited to the options of their web designer.

I prefer coding my own sites on a text editor. Notepad can do the work just like Michael James Swan said, but I prefer using Sublime Text 2. It's just a matter of taste

 

That kind of makes me really sad. I loved front page -- it was super customization and efficient -- especially considering I have only minor html knowledge and certainly not enough to code a whole site. Hopefully they will put out a free software that is comparable.

 

I used to be a lot like most of you. I had very little knowledge, but I would strongly advise that you try to learn HTML, CSS, and PHP; purely because it will make your lives a lot easier in the long run and will allow you to make some wonderful websites.

 

I don't use Frontpage. Our company programmers/web designers use a smattering of Dreamweaver, Squarespace or Blurgroup. But these are usually for hardcore web designers. I also recommend using Wix or Weebly, which you're already using, for start-up web designing or web creation.

 

I usually use frontpage...but most of time Dreamweaver.....

 

FrontPage is a really outdated web development application. It was a pretty good program for it's time, but it also required you to be hosted on a web host that supported FrontPage Extensions to fully utilize all of its features. It's heyday was also just before PHP took off as the language of choice for server side scripting, and the era of content management systems and blog platforms.

FrontPage, like Dreamweaver, was more of a full featured site management tool that helped you manage large web sites of static pages from your computer. You could build templates in it, and shared assets, and re-use them across hundreds or thousands of pages, for example. It took care of FTPing everything to your server, and syncing newly updated pages and assets vs doing it all manually in a standalone FTP client.

These days, all of that is replaced by working with a content management system or a blog platform, and themes or theme frameworks. Your web site content is stored in a database and there is a more clear separation between content and layout/appearance. Wordpress is by far the prominent platform of choice, and whenever you need to add more dynamic functionality to your site, most of that can be handled via Wordpress plugins, vs. installing scripts manually as you had to do in the past.

If you liked the hands on approach of FrontPage, I would suggest using Wordpress, along with a theme framework such as Pagelines or Headway, which give you that drag and drop control.

For what it's worth, Microsoft made ExpressionWeb free several years ago when they stopped supporting it. You can still download it I believe. But in my experience with it, it wasn't really as user friendly for the web novice and was perhaps more geared towards coders.

 

Heh, Weebly. Designing a website with that was the IT final test for my last year of middle school. It was many years back, but I remember it was really easy. Good stuff if you don't mind using others' templates, and the more advanced users can tweak stuff to their liking if I remember it right.
...And is it bad if I haven't heard of FrontPage?

 

Hah, considering Weebly has been around since about 2008, which you claim you were in middle school during that time, it's perfectly understandable that you aren't familiar with Frontpage. Actually, even before FrontPage had come out, Adobe released Adobe Pagemill in the late 1990's that generated some of the most atrocious and bloated code that I really think it was *the* program that gave WYSIWYG editors such a notorious bad rap. Frontpage had it's own issues, namely it used a lot of proprietary code that only worked in IE and would break in competitor's browsers. But as the years went on Microsoft gradually caved and started making Frontpage more web standards friendly, before finally discontinuing it.

The other problem back then was you needed a lot of hacks to get your site to look consistent in all the leading browsers, which resulted in some sloppy code as well, even if you were hand coding everything.