Microsoft Frontpage is awesome for simple sites

[Ziggy]

Hey guys, new here, not new to the net though. I've had a web page for a while made in HTML and I wanted to just share that I made it in Microsoft Frontpage! This isn't an ad I swear I've just had a few people in the past ask me how I made the site and I always say Frontpage because I love this software. Microsoft abandoned it in 2007 so it's fairly old. You literally just drag and drop pictures, draw textboxes and type what you want and boom there's your website. There's of course options for image maps and navigation bars and making your own marquees and layers and the majority of what you'd expect in a barebones HTML site. I believe there's also CSS and Javascript but I'm so lazy to learn more that I just stick with the basic stuff.

You can download Frontpage here off an old copy that was licensed to Kean University. No crazy cracks or keygens or whatever.
https://archive.org/details/front-page-2003

Anyway, hope this helps someone. 

[ValyceNegative]

Frontpage was my toy as a kid! Others would play with Paint or Solitaire, I was all about making fake websites and projects over and over. I agree it is very intuitive and while now I very much prefer coding by hand, I do remember the drag and drop, very "Microsoft Word" styled page making taught me a lot about HTML. Even then, there's def an option in Frontpage to just write code and see it in live preview, so what's not to love xP As far as I remember (wait nah, read this as "as far as I could do at the time"!) it only supported inline CSS, but that might also be restricted to the older versions: refusing to believe something from the mid 2000s wouldn't be able to support or write external CSS files!

The most popular way to build simple HTML pages now is undoubtly's Neocities online tools, but I'd love to see a "What you see is what you get" version pop up too, just like Frontpage.

[Dan Q]

I always preferred Dreamweaver (Macromedia, pre-Adobe acquisition, i.e. 1.0 through MX 2004). Just as visual, but much easier to "dip into" the HTML it produces to make tweaks... or to see how it's done, which is great when you're learning! The History Of The Web blog (which is excellent, BTW) has an article about its impact on the world.

(Fun fact: back in the day, when I was more of a troublemaker, I was the first to release a original crack for Dreamweaver 1.2. So if you, ahm... pirated a copy of it, you probably used code I wrote to "unlock" it. Obviously I'm sure you paid for a copy eventually...)

[TheFrugalGamer]

Frontpage was my toy as a kid! Others would play with Paint or Solitaire, I was all about making fake websites and projects over and over. I agree it is very intuitive and while now I very much prefer coding by hand, I do remember the drag and drop, very "Microsoft Word" styled page making taught me a lot about HTML.

Oh man, this reminds me that most office software actually still does support saving to HTML files. I'm sure the code it generates is atrocious, but it's cool that there's still an option to type everything up in something like Libre Office Writer and then export it to the web!