People Are Still Using FrontPage

Jan 25, 2007

And not only the non-professionals. I asked my client whether it would be alright if he could give me his FTP login information so that I could upload his altered files. His reply was that since he uses FP (FrontPage) and not FTP, he could give me the FP information. After explaining to him that FP and FTP are two different things and the FTP information would be the same no matter what one uses to upload the files, I just, out of curiosity, asked him why he used FP to work on his website?

He said the company that designed/developed his website did it in FP. No wonder his website is full of junk code! I didn’t say anything to him, but I was quite amazed that a professional web designing company uses FP to design websites. And he is quite a “computer savvy” person, my client.

I particularly dislike FP because it gives its users a false sense of accomplishment. Back when I used to design websites (I still do it occasionally and I’m going to revive my web designing website soon), I lost many clients just because they had FP running on their computers and they didn’t see sense in my hand-coding all the pages. And not only the clients, all those web designing shops on every corner heavily used FP to create extremely cheap websites very quickly.

After the constant flack Microsoft faced (for many years) for cursing web designers with FP, it has now introduced Microsoft Expression and you can read the review at Vitamin. I used the beta version for a few hours but wasn’t quite impressed. But certainly it was a big improvement.

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