Microsoft FrontPage

The web editor that built a generation of home pages, bought from Vermeer in 1996 and retired in 2006

Replaced
19902026

Microsoft FrontPage was a WYSIWYG web page editor and site manager, created by Vermeer Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1995 and bought by Microsoft in January 1996. Sold on its own and in Office from FrontPage 97 to FrontPage 2003, with FrontPage Server Extensions on the hosting side, it was the way millions of small sites were built. Microsoft announced its end in April 2006 and replaced it with Expression Web and SharePoint Designer in December 2006.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 1995
  2. November 1995 Launch
    Vermeer FrontPage 1.0

    $695; editor, site manager and server extensions.

  3. 1996
  4. 16 January 1996 Acquisition
    Microsoft buys Vermeer

    About $133 million.

  5. November 1996 Version
    FrontPage 97

    The first Microsoft release, $149.

  6. 1999
  7. June 1999 Version
    FrontPage 2000 in Office

    The peak years for FrontPage sites.

  8. 2003
  9. 21 October 2003 Version
    FrontPage 2003

    The last version; better HTML, split view.

  10. 2006
  11. 11 April 2006 Shutdown announced
    FrontPage to be discontinued

    Expression Web and SharePoint Designer to replace it.

  12. 4 December 2006 Shutdown
    Expression Web ships; FrontPage retired

    SharePoint Designer follows with Office 2007.

The site through time

Browse microsoft.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2006 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Vermeer Technologies 1995–1996 Founded Founded 1994 by Charles Ferguson and Randy Forgaard
Microsoft 1996–2006 Acquisition About $133 million in stock; FrontPage becomes part of Office

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Microsoft said in April 2006 that FrontPage would be discontinued at the end of the year and split into two products: Expression Web for designers, released on 4 December 2006, and SharePoint Designer for SharePoint sites, released with Office 2007. FrontPage 2003 was the last version. Its server extensions, the piece that made "publish" work on a hosting account, had already fallen out of favour and were dropped from Windows Server 2008.

Our analysis: FrontPage was the tool for people who wanted a website without learning HTML, and for a decade that was most people with a website. It lost on two fronts at once: professionals had moved to Dreamweaver and hand-coded CSS, which FrontPage generated badly, and everyone else had moved to blogs and hosted services that made a desktop editor unnecessary. Microsoft could keep the code and the customers, but not the name; "FrontPage" had come to mean bad HTML.

History [edit]

Vermeer

Charles Ferguson and Randy Forgaard founded Vermeer Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1994 to build a program that would let non-programmers make and publish websites: an editor that looked like a word processor, a site view that showed all your pages and links, wizards for forms and discussion boards, and server extensions that made the "publish" button work on the web host. FrontPage 1.0 shipped in November 1995 at $695, and on 16 January 1996 Microsoft bought the company for about $133 million in stock, one of the first big acquisitions of the browser war. Ferguson later wrote a book about it, High Stakes, No Prisoners.

Microsoft cut the price to $149, shipped FrontPage 97 in November 1996, put a cut-down FrontPage Express into Internet Explorer 4 and Windows 98, and made FrontPage 98, 2000, 2002 and 2003 part of the Office family. It was, for years, how most small businesses, schools, churches, clubs and families got online: themes, hover buttons, hit counters, marquees, and the FrontPage Server Extensions that hosts advertised as a feature. Professionals used Macromedia Dreamweaver and looked down on FrontPage's HTML; everyone else did not care.

Split in two

By the mid-2000s the web had moved to CSS layouts, standards-compliant markup and content management systems, and FrontPage 2003, released in October 2003 with much better code and a split view, was still carrying the name. In September 2005 Microsoft previewed a new Expression line of design tools, and on 11 April 2006 it confirmed FrontPage would be discontinued at the end of the year. Expression Web, its designer successor, shipped on 4 December 2006; SharePoint Designer 2007, for editing SharePoint sites, followed with Office 2007 in January. Support for FrontPage 2003 ran until 2014, and the server extensions were dropped from Windows Server 2008, ending the publish button for good. Expression Web itself was discontinued in 2012 and given away free.

The domain today

microsoft.com keeps a few support documents that mention FrontPage; the product pages are gone.

Similar projects

Microsoft Bob A cartoon house instead of a desktop, sold for one year in 1995 1995–1996 Google Desktop Google search for your own hard drive, plus a sidebar of gadgets, retired when the cloud made it pointless 2004–2011 Windows Live Writer The blog editor bloggers loved, from Onfolio to Windows Essentials 2012, abandoned by Microsoft and rescued as open source 2006–2017 Aperture Apple's professional photo manager, the first of its kind, dropped for Photos and finally unable to launch 2005–2015 Microsoft Works The cheap office suite that came with the PC, from a 1986 Macintosh program to Works 9, replaced by Office Starter 1986–2010 Microsoft Money Microsoft's personal finance program, eighteen years against Quicken, ended when the banks went online 1991–2009

Sources [edit]

  1. Microsoft buys software maker The New York Times 17 January 1996
  2. Microsoft acquires Vermeer Technologies Inc. Microsoft 16 January 1996 [archived]
  3. Enhancements to Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 Microsoft (MSDN) 1 October 2003 [archived]
  4. Extra, extra: FrontPage is dead Redmond Magazine 11 April 2006 [archived]
  5. The future of FrontPage Microsoft 11 April 2006 [archived]

Last verified: 16 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).