FrontPage Express

My wife has a number of friends who are relatively new to the internet. These friends wanted to create web sites, but did not have the money to purchase Microsoft FrontPage (a good entry level HTML editor), and they did not have the experience to tough it out with Dreamweaver (a better product with a much steeper learning curve). 

My wife and I wanted to help these ladies learn all about how to create web pages, but did not really want to spend a large amount of time teaching them the basics. The young ladies had used Microsoft Word in the past, which was why my wife and I left a WYSIWYG editor such as FrontPage would be best.

At first I looked through the freeware offerings for HTML editors and found a few right away. These were easy enough for me but they all had one serious drawback that made them more or less unsuitable for our purposes - they required a solid knowledge of HTML. 

I thought for a while, a little frustrated, then remembered back a number of years. Didn't Microsoft distribute a free HTML editor a few years ago? I remembered it came with Internet Explorer. I had never spent much time with the product, having advanced way beyond long before, but I thought it might be good for this purpose.

The product was called FrontPage Express. Basically, it's a stripped down version of Microsoft FrontPage. For whatever reason it was shipped with Internet Explorer up through IE5.0 - and then Microsoft stopped supporting the product for their own reasons.

I found a copy of FrontPage Express on an old Office 2000 CD set in the IE folder. I just searched for a file called FPESETUP.CAB. This is a special compressed format file used to install operating system type files, and it is understood by the newer versions of WinZIP. (You should be able to find this file on any IE5.0 or IE4.0 distributions).

A quick double-click on the file invoked WinZIP and opened the compressed library. I extracted the contents to my hard drive and double-clicked on fpxpress.exe - and the program just started right up.

How refreshing - a Microsoft program which did not need an incredibly complex installation script, did not modify any system folders or the registry and did not require any kind of licensing key. Ah, those were the days.

There are two limitations with this version of FrontPage Express. First, the File->New command does not work. To get around this, open an existing HTML file, change it as desired, then save it to a new filename. Second, the help files are not provided. This is not really a huge problem, however, as the help was pretty lame anyway, and the features are fairly obvious.

I'm sure there are better simple HTML editors available, but FrontPage Express served our needs perfectly. Our friends were able to get their web pages created quickly and easily, without a huge learning curve and without spending a ton of money.

Simple WYSIWYG interface - The editing is extremely simple. In fact, it's perfect for any beginning webmaster.

Not bloated with useless junk - Unlike the newer versions of FrontPage, this small program is clean and simple. There are very few bells and whistles, which is very nice for newer webmasters.

Small - FrontPage Express in CAB format is less than 2mb, which makes it perfect for downloading.

Few, if any, conflicts - Since nothing is installed at all (files are just copied to any old folder) there is little chance of messing up a system.

Works on just about any Windows - I believe FrontPage Express will work on Windows 9x, Windows NT and Windows 2000 at least.