Why Microsoft's FrontPage is STILL a Great Web-Building Software for Newbies

I built my first website somewhere around 2001. Every since then, I've been hooked. Not necessarily on building sites, but in maintaining them.

Let me explain.

I first contracted to get a website for business, Inkwell Editorial, in 1999. At the time, the company was an editorial staffing agency (It's now a information portal for creative freelancers). Employers and job seekers alike pushed me to get one well before I was ready to. How?

By asking questions like, "Can we download the contract from your website? Are all your open positions posted on your website? Etc." At that time, not having a website made my company appear unprofessional and behind the times. So, I knew the time had come to get one.

I consulted with a web designer to build the site. After two designers, a few thousand dollars, several false starts and a still unfinished site, my partner at the time and I decided to do it ourselves.

Coming from a publishing background where we dealt with coding (eg, SGML), we knew it was something we could figure out. Lo and behold, we discovered FrontPage, a Microsoft product.

Not only did you not have to know coding, it had templates that allowed you to just plug in your site's information. I felt like I had hit the lottery!

NOTE: In 2006, Microsoft announced that they would discontinue FrontPage. This caused me great sadness, because I love the software and continue to use it. FYI, if you're only creating standard, not dynamic, web pages, you can still use FrontPage with no problem at all.

Following are the reasons I like FrontPage, and in spite of all the more advanced web-building software on the market, why I continue to use it:

1. WYSIWYG: This stands for "what you see is what you get." If you're a newbie, you want to use this kind of software because there's no guesswork. If you plop a picture into the upper left corner, and have text to the side and underneath it, that's what it's going to look like.

FrontPage has a preview feature that allows you to see what your page is going to look like before it's published. It simply can't get any easier to design a page.