Microsoft Frontpage

Sorry, I can't find the list of compatible programs, doe's Microsoft Frontpage work with 10?

I just asked a friend if he was going for W10 and he was concerned that the website that he administers would still work, I assume that Frontpage is something to do with that.

Yes, FrontPage 2003 works in Windows 10. I still use it for a personal website and have only had one real problem. I recently had to reinstall Windows 10 and my themes. I thought I put them in the correct location, however, when I use FrontPage, none of them show up, especially the one I really need to use to update my website.

Anyone have any ideas or suggestions? I have already looked on another computer and got the location where to put them. I also could not find any related registry entries for the theme names.

I sure would appreciate some insight on this. Thanks!

FrontPage definitely works on W10 and is definetely ancient to use for any website now.

@swarfega and Microsoft Expression Studio is also outdated and discontinued. So don't use it either.

I switched all my web design to Microsoft's Visual Studio Code. It's a widely used IDE for coding web based stuff and has a ton of extensions to add functionality to it. The only thing that I am truly missing from Front Page is that dual view when you have an HTML and a Design view so that clicking on some design view element will highlight the HTML for it, and vice versa. That was a very handy feature. Now in VS Code the recommended way is to install some Chrome plug-in that will update it upon any change in HTML. It kinda works, but is still not the same thing. And IDK why no other IDE can implement that Design view functionality. If one did, I would definitely switch to it in a heartbeat.

I started with FrontPage many years ago. At the time it seemed like the best way to make reasonable looking websites with only a little more effort than required to make a nice looking Word document. Back then HTML was fairly simple - sort of like WordStar (if anyone remembers that), but it also used special code that ran on the web servers called FrontPage Extensions. This code was required for any of the "fancy" FrontPage features like menus etc.

Over time the ISP's got tired of updating and supporting the FrontPage Extensions, and they squawked at Microsoft about this. Also, HTML became much more complex with additions like CSS, JAVA scripts, and all sorts of other doo-dads. It became clear the FrontPage was rapidly becoming unsupportable.

So Microsoft developed Expression Web to replace FrontPage. This happened at about the same time the FrontPage extensions became obsolete and unsupported. Expression Web had many of the same features as FrontPage, but also had facility for supporting CSS and some other HTML enhancements. Over time there were 3 (I think) versions of Expression Web, but it suffered the same fate as FrontPage: the "under the covers" part of web pages became even more complex, and Microsoft apparently decided to not enhance Expression Web to cope with them.

Microsoft eventually ended development on Expression Web and froze it's final version. But it also made it available for free to anyone who wanted to use it. On the surface Expression Web seems nice, but it is very easy to get lost in the weeds if you try to use it to do anything fancy. It also generates voluminous amounts of HTML which is difficult to optimize.

After working with Expression Web for a while I needed to make a fairly extensive addition to my website, and I just didn't want to continue the struggle with Expression Web. So I opted for WordPress, which is a free web page generator that uses a more-or-less straightforward front end. I've been using that for several years now with little trouble.

My website is Home if you want to see what the results of FrontPage, Expression Web, and WordPress look like. The entire site started with FrontPage, and then transitioned to Expression Web. The only part that is done by WordPress is the 3D Printing part.

For anyone still using FrontPage - the web pages it generates will work fine as long as you don't use any of the functions that require the FrontPage extensions. The reason for this is, of course, no web servers currently run the FrontPage extensions.