Planning your move away from FrontPage

Many years ago, Microsoft’s “FrontPage” Web design software was a popular choice for creating small Web sites. However, Microsoft discontinued FrontPage in 2006, and you can’t buy the FrontPage program any more.

Quite a few of our customers are still using FrontPage to design and upload their Web sites, though. We’re starting to see more and more problems from customers who have upgraded to a new computer running Windows Vista or Windows 7 but can no longer run FrontPage. (Sometimes their old computer just suddenly crashes and can’t be recovered.) Their old computer probably had a copy of FrontPage installed by the manufacturer, but their new computer doesn’t.

It can be difficult or impossible to get FrontPage running on a new PC if you can’t find the original installation CDs, or you aren’t licensed to use FrontPage on the new PC. In some cases, the old FrontPage software doesn’t install or work well on the latest versions of Windows. In these situations, you can’t even open the old FrontPage files on the new computer.

If you are still using FrontPage, you should start planning for when you are going to move to a different program. You might want to move to Microsoft’s newer program, Expression Web. Or you might want to join the large number of people using Dreamweaver. If you’re looking for a free program, you might want to try Nvu. The popular (and free!) WordPress can be a good choice, too — it’s commonly known as a “blog program”, but you can also use it to create a Web site with normal pages.

We strongly encourage existing FrontPage users to start planning their move to a different program. If you don’t plan the move yourself on your own schedule, you may find yourself stuck in a situation where you’re no longer able to edit your site using the old FrontPage software.