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Microsoft FrontPage

Summary

Microsoft FrontPage was a desktop program for building and managing websites without writing code, with a WYSIWYG page editor, a site manager and server add-ons called the FrontPage Server Extensions. Vermeer Technologies released it in 1995, and Microsoft announced on January 16, 1996 that it was buying Vermeer. Microsoft said in April 2006 that FrontPage would be discontinued in late 2006, and support for the last version, FrontPage 2003, ended in April 2014.

Web Building Encyclopedia · Software and platforms · Last reviewed October 22, 2026 · 9 min read

What FrontPage was

Microsoft FrontPage was a desktop program for building and managing websites without writing code. It ran on Windows and, for a short time, on the Macintosh. It was created by Vermeer Technologies, a small company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which Microsoft agreed to buy in January 1996.1

FrontPage was a WYSIWYG editor. WYSIWYG stands for “what you see is what you get”: you place text, pictures and tables on the screen as they will look in a web browser, and the program writes the HTML code behind them. Microsoft’s announcement of the purchase said FrontPage let people create and manage websites without programming.1

It was more than a page editor. From its Vermeer days it came with a site manager, ready-made parts for features that usually needed a programmer, and server software called the FrontPage Server Extensions, which made those parts work on the web server.1 That last piece tied FrontPage to the companies that hosted its users’ sites, which shaped both how it spread and how it ended.

Microsoft sold FrontPage for about ten years. In April 2006 it said the program would be discontinued in late 2006, with new tools taking its place.2

Vermeer Technologies and the Microsoft purchase

Vermeer Technologies was started in April 1994, with Charles Ferguson as co-founder and chairman.3 Randy Forgaard was the other co-founder, and Ferguson later told the company’s story in a book, High Stakes, No Prisoners.4

Vermeer released the first version of FrontPage in 1995.51 In a 1998 press release Microsoft called it the first software for creating and managing websites when it was introduced, a claim made by the company that by then owned it.5

On January 16, 1996, Microsoft announced that it was acquiring Vermeer. Bill Gates, then Microsoft’s chairman and chief executive, said FrontPage filled the gap between simple HTML editors and high-end publishing systems.1 An Associated Press report that day described the same gap, between simple tools and Web publishing systems that cost thousands of dollars.3 Neither the announcement nor that report gave a price.13 Writing in 2017, the newsletter Tedium put it at $130 million, paid in Microsoft stock.4

Microsoft said Chris Peters, one of its vice presidents, would lead a new web authoring product unit and that the FrontPage team would move to Redmond, Washington. During the change, customers could still buy FrontPage straight from Vermeer.1 The announcement also promised a Macintosh version later in 1996.1

Later Microsoft accounts give a different year for the deal. A January 2001 Microsoft press release says the company acquired FrontPage from Vermeer in 1995, and a 2008 blog post by Robert McMurray, who had worked on Microsoft’s FrontPage support team, places the purchase in late 1995.67 The announcement itself is dated January 16, 1996.1

How FrontPage worked

The early versions came as two programs. FrontPage Editor edited single pages, and FrontPage Explorer was a graphical site manager for the whole site.1 Wizards and templates helped people start a site, and a To Do List tracked the work left to do.1

The ready-made parts, which Microsoft later called WebBot components, added site search, feedback forms, discussion groups and surveys without any code.18 The Server Extensions did the server side of that work. In 1996 they used CGI, the Common Gateway Interface, a standard way for a web server to run a separate program, and they ran on Windows 95, Windows NT and UNIX servers, including Netscape’s NetSite and Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS).1

FrontPage also shipped with Personal Web Server, a small web server that ran on the user’s own PC, so a site could be tested before it went live.1 FrontPage 97 came with a Bonus Pack holding Personal Web Server, the Web Publishing Wizard, Internet Explorer 3.0 and Microsoft Image Composer 1.0.9

The Server Extensions kept their own records about each site in hidden folders with names such as _vti_cnf and _vti_pvt. McMurray wrote that these “vti” folders go back to Vermeer’s FrontPage 1.0.107

Later versions added themes, matched sets of colors, fonts and graphics applied across a whole site. FrontPage 2000 added 10 business themes, for more than 60 in all, and let users make their own.11 It also merged Editor and Explorer into one program, let people build a site in a folder on their own computer without a personal web server, and could save form results to a database without programming.11

Versions and growth

Microsoft released FrontPage under its own name from 1996 to 2003. The table lists the versions whose dates appear in Microsoft’s own announcements and records.

VersionDateNotes
FrontPage 1.01995Released by Vermeer.5
FrontPage 1.1Early 1996First Microsoft release. It brought an ISAPI version of the Server Extensions for Microsoft’s IIS web server.7
FrontPage 97Beta October 1996; release set for December 1996About $149 for new users; runs on Windows 95 and Windows NT.9
FrontPage 1.0 for MacintoshBeta January 7, 1997; in stores expected by the end of March 1997$149 suggested price; needed System 7.5 or later.8
FrontPage 98Late 1997Added support for CSS, Dynamic HTML and Java.5
FrontPage 2000Announced September 30, 1998; release planned for early 1999The fifth version; built to match Office 2000.11
Office FrontPage 2003Announced June 10, 2003; support began November 19, 2003Last version; part of the Microsoft Office System.1213

A FrontPage 2002 also existed between these two, and Microsoft’s documentation pairs it with FrontPage Server Extensions 2002.14

FrontPage grew quickly in its first Microsoft years. In October 1996 Microsoft said more than 230,000 people had downloaded the FrontPage 97 beta in its first three weeks.9 In February 1998 it said FrontPage 98 had sold more than 500,000 standalone licenses in its first three months and that all versions together had more than 1.5 million users.5

The same release cited the research firm PC Data: FrontPage took 81% of sales in the web creation and management category in December 1997 and 64% across the whole of 1997.5 It also cited a Zona Research study finding that 67% of Fortune 500 companies that used a web authoring tool used FrontPage.5 These are vendor-reported figures.

By January 2001, Microsoft said, more than 5 million people used FrontPage, an increase of over 40% since October 1999.6 One host quoted in that release, Advanced Internet Technologies, said as many as 60,000 of the domains it hosted had been made and managed with FrontPage.6

A small cousin of FrontPage also shipped with Microsoft’s browser. When Microsoft released Internet Explorer 4.0 on October 1, 1997, the full download included FrontPage Express, a program for making your own web pages.15

FrontPage Server Extensions and web hosts

The Server Extensions were optional in principle. Microsoft’s documentation said they were “not essential to host FrontPage Web sites” but added multi-user and remote authoring, search, forms processing and usage analysis.16 In practice, many FrontPage features only worked if the host had them installed.161

That made web hosting companies part of the product. By October 1996 Microsoft listed AT&T, BBN Planet, PSINet, UUNet, BEST Internet, EarthLink and NETCOM among providers offering FrontPage-based hosting, and said more than 100 internet service providers offered it.9 In 2001 it said thousands of hosting companies worldwide supported FrontPage, and one of them, IMC Online, said FrontPage users made up 90% of its customers.6

The extensions came in Windows and UNIX editions.16 McMurray wrote that the extensions were at first entirely CGI-based and that an ISAPI version, which runs inside Microsoft’s IIS server, arrived with FrontPage 1.1 in early 1996. Around the time of FrontPage 97 and 98, Microsoft stopped developing the UNIX version itself and hired a company called Ready-to-Run Software to port it.7

Microsoft’s documentation calls FrontPage Server Extensions 2002 the last version of the extensions.16 It was compatible with FrontPage 2002 and all earlier releases, and Microsoft’s SharePoint Team Services was built on it.14 Microsoft did not release new Server Extensions with FrontPage 2003. McMurray wrote that the team behind them had moved to SharePoint and dropped the extensions as a separate product.7

The extensions lived on for a while anyway. For Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, Microsoft’s IIS team again hired Ready-to-Run Software, this time to port the Windows version, while McMurray’s team also shipped new FTP and WebDAV publishing tools for Windows Server 2008. WebDAV is an extension of HTTP for editing files on a server. In 2008 McMurray wrote that the Server Extensions’ “days are numbered” and that they were being phased out in favor of SharePoint or technologies such as WebDAV and FTP.710

Hosting control panels followed. cPanel, a control panel used by many shared hosts, had already dropped FrontPage support from EasyApache, its tool for building the Apache HTTP Server, from version 3.24.1. Its version 11.44, scheduled for summer 2014, added an option to remove FrontPage from every account on a server, and version 11.46, slated for fall 2014, ended FrontPage support, with servers unable to upgrade until FrontPage was removed.17

Code quality and the browser wars

FrontPage grew up during the browser wars between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape’s Netscape Navigator, and its output was often judged against both browsers. Tedium summed up a common complaint: pages made in FrontPage often worked in Internet Explorer but broke in every other browser.4

Microsoft’s own release notes show what it worked on. For FrontPage 2000 it promised that existing HTML and scripts could be edited without the program changing tag order, comments, capitalization or white space. Andy Schulert, general manager of the FrontPage unit, described “a unique combination of WYSIWYG and raw HTML editing.”11 Schulert had been one of Vermeer’s early technical staff.4

The 2003 release leaned further toward people who read code. It added a split view showing code and design at once, tag tools, sitewide find and replace down to single tags and attributes, and IntelliSense code completion borrowed from Visual Studio. Microsoft stressed clean, industry-standard code.12

FrontPage 2003 could also build pages that pulled live data from XML files, web services and databases through XSLT data views. Microsoft described it as the first commercially available WYSIWYG XSLT editor that worked with live data.12 XSLT is a language for turning XML data into other formats, such as HTML.

Discontinuation and successors

In April 2006 Microsoft said in a statement on its website that FrontPage would be discontinued in late 2006.2 Three products would take over its users:

  • Office SharePoint Designer 2007, for staff in companies that run SharePoint.2
  • Expression Web Designer, later sold as Expression Web, for professional web designers.218
  • Visual Studio 2005, for web developers.2

Microsoft said the two new design tools were partly based on FrontPage technologies.2 Expression Web began shipping in early December 2006 at $299, with an upgrade for qualifying FrontPage users at $99, and Microsoft said it was meant to help people build standards-based websites.18 Microsoft’s web tools team announced the release of Expression Web 1.0 on December 11, 2006, and said it compared well, feature by feature, with Adobe’s Dreamweaver, without listing the features.19

Expression Web went through four versions. Microsoft described Expression Web 4 as combining FrontPage and Visual Studio technologies for building sites with HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, XSLT, PHP and ASP.NET 4.20 Expression 4 support began on August 26, 2010.21

In December 2012 Microsoft stopped developing Expression Web and made Expression Web 4 a free, unsupported download, pointing web designers to Visual Studio instead.22 Microsoft’s lifecycle records show extended support for Expression 4 ending in July 2020.21

Support for FrontPage itself ran out earlier. For Office FrontPage 2003, Microsoft lists mainstream support ending in April 2009 and extended support, the period of security fixes, ending in April 2014.13

The SharePoint branch lasted longest. SharePoint Designer 2013, the version on Microsoft’s lifecycle site, reached the end of extended support in July 2026, and Microsoft points users of its classic workflows toward Power Automate.23

Timeline

  1. Extended support ends for SharePoint Designer 201323
  2. Extended support ends for Expression 4, including Expression Web 421
  3. cPanel ends FrontPage support in version 11.46, planned for fall 201417
  4. Extended support ends for Office FrontPage 200313
  5. Microsoft discontinues Expression Web and makes version 4 a free download22
  6. Expression Web ships, with a $99 upgrade for FrontPage users18
  7. Microsoft says FrontPage will be discontinued in late 20062
  8. Microsoft announces Office FrontPage 2003, the last version12
  9. Microsoft announces FrontPage 2000, which merges Editor and Explorer11
  10. Microsoft says FrontPage 98 sold over 500,000 copies in three months5
  11. Internet Explorer 4.0 ships, with FrontPage Express in its full download15
  12. Microsoft releases a beta of FrontPage 1.0 for Macintosh8
  13. Microsoft says the FrontPage 97 beta passed 230,000 downloads in three weeks9
  14. Microsoft announces it is acquiring Vermeer Technologies, maker of FrontPage1
  15. Vermeer Technologies releases FrontPage 1.05

What it means for your website

FrontPage has been out of support since April 2014, but pages built with it can still be online years later.13 If your site was made with FrontPage, or by a designer who used it, these are the points to check.

  • Look for _vti folders. Folders such as _vti_cnf and _vti_pvt on your server are FrontPage Server Extensions records.10 Their presence tells you the site was managed with FrontPage.
  • Test every form and search box. These FrontPage parts depended on the Server Extensions on the host.161 cPanel, a common hosting control panel, ended FrontPage support with version 11.46, planned for fall 2014, so on hosts that use current cPanel they no longer run.17 Replace them with a form service, your builder’s own forms or, on WordPress, a form plugin.
  • Back up before you delete anything. McMurray’s notes on removing FrontPage records keep folders such as _private and fpdb in place along with the site’s pages, so do not delete them blindly.10 Make a full copy of the site first; our guide to website backups covers how.
  • Do not count on the old tools. Expression Web, FrontPage’s successor, became a free but unsupported download in 2012, and its support records end in July 2020.2221 An old copy of FrontPage gets no security fixes.13
  • Expect layout work. FrontPage 2003 offered layout tables for pixel-precise pages and targeting for set screen resolutions.12 Pages built that way are usually not responsive, meaning they do not reflow to fit a phone screen.

For most FrontPage sites, the practical answer is a rebuild on a current platform rather than a repair. Our redesign hub helps you decide between updating and rebuilding, and our guide to moving your website covers keeping your addresses and search rankings during the switch. We build on WordPress every week, and our WordPress review covers what running it involves.

See also

References

  1. Microsoft Acquires Vermeer Technologies Inc.. Microsoft. 1996-01-16. accessed October 22, 2026.
  2. Extra, Extra: FrontPage Is Dead. Stuart J. Johnston, Redmond Magazine. 2006-04-11. accessed October 22, 2026.
  3. Microsoft Buys Maker Of Web-Page Software: Acquisition To Bolster Prowess On Internet. Evan Ramstad, Associated Press, via The Seattle Times. 1996-01-16. accessed October 22, 2026.
  4. Your Code Is Junky (Microsoft FrontPage History: WYSIWYG for the Web). Ernie Smith, Tedium. 2017-03-02. accessed October 22, 2026.
  5. Shipments of Microsoft FrontPage 98 Top 500,000 Units in Three Months. Microsoft. 1998-02-17. accessed October 22, 2026.
  6. Microsoft FrontPage Surpasses 5 Million Users. Microsoft. 2001-01-23. accessed October 22, 2026.
  7. Life after FPSE (Part 1). Robert McMurray, IIS.NET Community Blogs, Microsoft. 2008-04-17. accessed October 22, 2026.
  8. Microsoft FrontPage 1.0 for Macintosh Delivers Award-Winning Web Publishing Tool to Macintosh Users. Microsoft. 1997-01-07. accessed October 22, 2026.
  9. Microsoft FrontPage 97 Beta Exceeds 230,000 Downloads in First Three Weeks of Availability. Microsoft. 1996-10-29. accessed October 22, 2026.
  10. Life after FPSE (Part 2). Robert McMurray, IIS.NET Community Blogs, Microsoft. 2008-04-23. accessed October 22, 2026.
  11. Microsoft Unveils New FrontPage 2000: Broad New Feature Set Delivers A Breakthrough in Ease of Use. Microsoft. 1998-09-30. accessed October 22, 2026.
  12. Microsoft Reinvents FrontPage, Tapping Into the Power of XML To Build Live Data-Driven Web Sites. Microsoft. 2003-06-10. accessed October 22, 2026.
  13. Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003. Microsoft Lifecycle, Microsoft Learn. accessed October 22, 2026.
  14. FrontPage Server Extensions 2002 from Microsoft for Windows-based Web Servers. Microsoft Learn (archived Office XP developer documentation). accessed October 22, 2026.
  15. Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 Now Available; Delivers "The Web the Way You Want It" to Users Worldwide. Microsoft. 1997-10-01. accessed October 22, 2026.
  16. Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions Overview. Microsoft Learn (archived Office 2000 developer documentation). accessed October 22, 2026.
  17. End of the Road for FrontPage Installations: What to Expect. cPanel Newsroom. accessed October 22, 2026.
  18. Microsoft Begins Rolling Out Expression Tools. Stuart J. Johnston, Redmond Magazine. 2006-12-05. accessed October 22, 2026.
  19. Expression Web 1.0 Released: Perfect Companion to Visual Studio. Web Development Tools team, .NET Blog, Microsoft. 2006-12-11. accessed October 22, 2026.
  20. Expression Web FAQ. Microsoft Learn (archived). accessed October 22, 2026.
  21. Expression 4. Microsoft Lifecycle, Microsoft Learn. accessed October 22, 2026.
  22. Microsoft scraps Expression Web and Design, blends Blend with Visual Studio. Tim Anderson, IT Writing. 2012-12-21. accessed October 22, 2026.
  23. SharePoint Designer 2013. Microsoft Lifecycle, Microsoft Learn. accessed October 22, 2026.

Web Building Encyclopedia. First published October 22, 2026. Last reviewed October 22, 2026. Every fact on this page is linked to a source we opened. Spotted an error? Write to [email protected].