Most of my business comes from woirking with Small businesses wanting websites they can drive easily once I set thm up. FP did the trick for most of them - especially with the server extensions.

I love FrontPage and made over a dozen sites with it, since it came out in 1997. FrontPage 2003 also was more accessible than Dreamweaver 8 for my work. One client's corporate team opted for Dreamweaver and Captivate, but after a few months, using FP Express was easier.

But, I wonder about Microsoft's decisions on Expression and Sharepoint Designer. I played with a beta last year and based on your post, thought I'd check it out.

A brief glance suggests its a return to the bloatware (202 Mb download) and proprietary tendencies. Not that many of my clients are into SharePoint and its high cost developer overload.

Having to download a whole new set of .NET thingies just so it will run. I don't think so.

For small business websites, I think the way ahead is to go modular with open source products like WordPress, MODx and Joomla. My clients love them and they scale very nicely for their requirements.

For web page composition, I'm happy to sit with FP 2003 and check the CSS with an editor like TopStyle.

I have used FP since the mid nineties for my very large and complex websites, http://www.birdlist.org (first) and http://www.adopt-a-ranger.org (recent) and others, like http://www.ilwis.org, www.nature-worldwide.info, www.nationalparks-worldwide.info, etc.

For me it easy wysiwyg page management and particularly web structure management is essential. I can't be bothered with coding and tricks to get my pages done. until now (2008) I have used FP 2008. But now my site is on an Apache server that does not support some of the FP features and I have to change.

I am looking at NetObjects Fusion which facilitates Wysiwyg page structure management..

Still scary to change to something new with thousands of pages.

Dr. Daan Vreugdenhil

It's pretty easy to change a fp bots web to a standards compliant site in expression web. There is a 50% off upgrade to ew2 at the ms store till jan 29th 2009. Page Includes can still be used in ew and are compliant. If you use fp03 you know about DWTs (dynamic web templates) using page includes for menus and dwts with css for the formatting making sure your dwt validates before you use it... can cut your maintainance in half or more. Allowing more time for content etc. There are easy techniques to clean code and there are easy replacements for the bots... to be honest you can do all that in frontpage right now and always could... just a few more tools in ew.

hth Tina

I am currently using fp2003 thru a server in another state.  We continue to have some extension server problems and the IT tech is no longer with the company so no one knows anything about fp.  IT is wanting to change over to a new server and a different program than frontpage because they say it is outdated.  Is there anyone I can contact to have tap into our system and see if they can fix the current problems or what system do i look at changing over to that I can transfer all my fp files and documents.  I love fp and have used it for years, however IT wants to move to something else.  What is avialable that is easy to use like fp that I do not have to learn all the code?  Would appreciate any advice you can share.

I assume that your above comments mean Front Page 2003 can be safely integrated into Sharepoint 2007, which is what I have. Is that correct?