Microsoft FrontPage 2003 [OLD VERSION] :: Education by Design Store

Customer Reviews

Easy to use for building websites, but two caveats (read on)

2006-11-21
Frontpage 2003 is a great, easy-to-use WYSIWYG web builder. Most hosting companies support Frontpage extensions, a set of web robots to help you build a dynamic site, similar to DHTML.

Two warnings, though:

1) This full version is too expensive; you may qualify to buy the half-priced Academic Version (search for "frontpage 2003 academic" on Amazon);

2) More important, though, Frontpage is being discontinued as a product altogether and will be replaced by Office SharePoint Designer (for businesses) and Expression Web (for everyone else). You can download the latter for free (for now, at least) on MSFT's website.

Frontpage is Great!!

2006-11-08
Frontpage 2003 is a more enhanced version than its previous editions, works well all Microsoft operating systems, and has hands free HTML..Great!!

Great product, fast shipping~

2006-11-06
Great product, great communication! Thank you! I love it! Great price!

I can't publish my site anywhere!

2006-09-27
I am not a 'professional,' but figured out how to build a website with this program, which I bought thinking that it was going to help me produce more professional-looking websites/pages, and I invested a bunch of other money in how-to books I'd ordered here, and lo and behold, the server with which I have a website I maintain for my city gov't does NOT support any sites made with this program, and then I find that NEITHER DOES YAHOO where I have my personal site and have been promoting to the city to move their official website to!!! I've apparently wasted a lot of money and had NO CLUE this would happen when I finally put a website together with this program. I never would have imagined Yahoo would not support the most current page builders, but it could be they want to force people to use their wizards. WHY would Microsoft not have a patch available or something to fix this problem so this program can be used for more than just my entertainment spending hours and hours trying to learn it and build something, then find out it was for NOTHING??? Of course, both the server with the city website and Yahoo work with versions up to 2002....but I can't invest another over-$100 for the old version now just for that. Yeah, it's great....made a pretty page, but only I can see it. If I could publish with it, I wouldn't have just given it one star here.

Photo support is horrible

2006-03-30
I gave this a 2nd star for a support call ms provided. If you do have a frontpage server, and have it set "on", it had some advantages over ftp.

I bought it for use on our family website which is mainly pictures. I've used 6-8 programs for creating galleries over the years. I think a perl script using Linux' mogrify worked best. This works worst! The free ones w/ the digital cameras beat it. Frontpage is missing the most fundamental piece to view photos- A next/previous button. You can choose from several thumbnail displays including a cool mosaic/colage type thing. Once you expand it, you must remember the shot you were on, back up, and then click on the next one! Unbelievable.

I know what I need for handling photos efficiently. Flicr has it- cross-tab indexing of the same photo. I think picassa is close and getting closer. This wasn't worth the cost of Picassa- FREE.

Microsoft Front Page software review

2008-05-24
Software is a big improvement on Frontpage 2000, and is more user friendly than the previous version. Easier to navigate through and create web pages from scratch.

Web Pages

2007-10-22
Web pages can not be easier to design without this program and book. An excellent resource.

What Happened to FrontPage?

2007-04-12
I have been using FrontPage since 1997. I am webmaster for three websites and have alway really thought this was a great program! BUT! I have only upgraded to FrontPage 2000 and find that with my XP computer, Win XP does not support FrontPage. Now, if I want to continue with my family Genealogy Site and a community Genealogical Society site, I will need to purchase and learn ANOTHER program. At age 70, I really don't feel like doing that!

Does anyone know if FP 2003 will work on Win XP? OR How can I get my FP 2000 to work on my WIN XP computer?

Embraced, Extended, Extinguished

2007-02-15
Compared to FP 2000 and earlier versions, it offered some major improvements, even letting one code in (gasp) PHP with live preview - it is highly configurable, and easily tied into SharePoint (well, I think that was the intent).

It was quite an evolution, moving beyond FP2000, with some fairly advanced features - while still retaining the "entry level, small business learnable" functionality (albeit cookie cutter designs) of previous versions.

I was surprised to find it even offered options to strip out all code that hinted this site was made with FrontPage (an odd change, knowing MS), but also offered other code functions, some on par with Dreamweaver - but do not mistake this for Dreamweaver, even the first MX version. It's still aimed at Microsoft only - you really have to dig and tweak to configure it for anything else (e.g, php, cold fusion) - but it does offer some major improvements for flexibility over previous versions. Mostly good, some horribly bad.

The good - being able to tweak it to dozens of standards' compliance, Sec. 508, XML'ish stuff, whatever. By default these things are not set up, so it does take some learning.

What annoyed (and freaked me out) was that while it easily allowed for desktop development with Access, to create database driven sites - the database had to remain in a public folder - ok, I suppose if you're using it only on an intranet.

I believe the point was to code with Access, then mod it slightly to interact with SQL server - but most folks probaby did not use it that way - knowing the history and "fire and forget" ease of use of FrontPage...

Anyhow, I'd call this a para-professional version. It has way more flexibility and functionality than any version of Frontpage, ever. It is also going bye-bye.

There will not be a FrontPage 2007, due to the switch to Expression Web (which retains some FP functionality, but the "friendly" and pesky "bots" are gone). No more email bots, whatever bots - gotta learn how to roll your own.

Front Page 2003

2007-01-05
I purchased this software mainly for Web Design. I am beginning in Web Design and found Microsoft Frontpage 200 easy to learn with a lot
of interesting features to design a web site. I would definitely recommend this product.