I began using FrontPage many years ago, when it was a free add-on to Internet Explorer called FrontPage Express (if there was a paid version available at time I didn't know about it). One day I remember receiving a copy of Microsoft Office with a demonstration disk for FrontPage 97. It sounded interesting so I tried it out.

The product was very nice, and even that early in HTML editor game it was in many ways superior to what we have on market today. However, on downside, FrontPage 97 crashed a little more often that I would have liked (but hey, it's a Microsoft product, so I was used to this and didn't really think much of it at all) and it had this annoying habit of thinking it knew better that I did.

The entire Office suite has this problem: products try very hard to prevent you from doing something that is not "correct". In FrontPage, for example, there are times when it will not allow you to resize a table for no apparent reason. The program simply seems to think it's a dumb idea and will not let you do it.

FrontPage 98 was a vast improvement over previous version, and I quickly upgraded. By now, however, I was learning a bit more and had discarded many of features that product offered. First to go was templates - these are a great idea but implementation, quite frankly, sucks. Not only is style of any FrontPage site created from templates so recognizable that it screams "amateur" to everyone, they simply do not buy you very much in way of ease of web site creation. Templates seem designed to limit a person into a specific, Microsoft approved style of web site design, and that design is, well, stupid.

Next to get thrown out was automatic upload feature. You see, FrontPage has a wonderful feature (well, it would be wonderful except ...) which will upload all of your changes (and only your changes) to your web site. Unfortunately, implementation is completely lame. FrontPage will not transfer CGI and perl routines in ASCII, and thus upload feature cannot be used on a web site which uses CGI. To top that off, upload feature is so awesomely slow that it's possible to believe design specification required slowness to be built into product. It's so slow that it's hard to believe this could have happened by accident.

After a while, I decided it would be better to maintain this set of documents on an intranet instead of as printed manuals. Why? Well, I was so fast at writing and changing text that documents were out-of-date as soon as I printed them. I thought it would be good to store them as a local web site, thus allowing anyone accessing them to always get most recent version.

I looked around briefly for a product which would allow me to create this intranet without too much bother. I rejected most products right away because they required me to learn HTML: I wanted to write documentation, not learn some obscure coding language (I already had learned too many of those and I knew exactly how long and difficult it can be).

Somehow I managed to stumble upon a nice, new (at time) product called FrontPage. I liked program right away, simply because it had a great WYSIWYG editor which made it extremely simple to create web pages. I especially liked way that FrontPage implemented creation and editing of tables.

Understand, I looked at a lot of programs and I've continued looking since that time. Virtually all of programs that I've seen didn't have a well defined way to create tables. FrontPage was different - tables were (and are) very well implemented.