Microsoft Frontpage

[dantodan]

I have been happy to use MS Frontpage for the last 8 yrs. Frontpage came as part of my old MS Office CD, which I have now lost the box including the product key/serial number. I have created 2 large websites and would like to go on using Frontpage with these sites. BUT!!! I bought a new pc running windows 7 and cannot install Office from my CD as I now have no serial number. MS now longer sell Frontpage. I have browsed Amazon and Ebay but only Office 2003 there and I think 2003 doesn't work with W7

Can any help me out with this

[-pops-]

MS Office should work on Windows 7 - even if only in compatibility mode.

Regarding the Product Key, assuming you have your original installation of MS Office, you should be able to obtain it by running SIW http://www.gtopala.com/ This is a free download (be careful you do not download any of the paid for on the site).

Window Forum cannot offer any information on password hacking or bypassing.

[dantodan]

Thanks POP

I have found this site: http://www.bmsoftware.co.uk/microsoftfrontpage97.htm which offers early Frontpage cds for sale. I could buy

Microsoft FrontPage 97 with bonus pack from them for £19.95. My question is will it work with windows 7. Obviously I would like a later version if anyone knows of a site that has one at a good price

[-pops-]

Rather than spend money on obsolete software, why not come up-to-date with the successor to Frontpage that is MS Expression.

Expensive, yes but, if you have a child or student (not necessarily your own) you could qualify for student discounts from Software4Students - this is a genuine company in partnership with Microsoft selling heavily discounted MS (and other) software.

MS Expression (all versions) is detailed here: http://www.software4students.co.uk/Microsoft_Expression_Web_Design-software.aspx

[dantodan]

Rather than spend money on obsolete software, why not come up-to-date with the successor to Frontpage that is MS Expression.

Expensive, yes but, if you have a child or student (not necessarily your own) you could qualify for student discounts from Software4Students - this is a genuine company in partnership with Microsoft selling heavily discounted MS (and other) software.

MS Expression (all versions) is detailed here: http://www.software4students.co.uk/Microsoft_Expression_Web_Design-software.aspx

Thanks Pops. Looks like I have 3 main options:

1. To stay within my comfort zone which is Frontpage and try and buy an obsoleted cd

2. To buy MS Expression and hope that I can deal with my old frontpage websites within MS Expression

3. To begin work with the free download I now have of MS Sharepoint but first i need to transfer all of my webpages and images etc from my old PC to this one I am now using.

Incidently you may find my two Frontpage Websites interesting. www.defunctspeedway.co.uk and www.newcastlespeedwayhistory.co.uk They are well received amonst Motor Cycle Speedway fraternity.

Got to log off now Pops but please stick with this thread. I am sure I will be back to the forum

Dan

[MANEMAN]

Hi, Just to give you some idea of what you may be up against I'll give you a transcript of a post from a good friend who is a website designer on another forum. :(

Sometimes it is better to pull the site down, and start again, or leave the site up and give links to a new website built, having not used Frontpage.

You are absolutely correct ******. The customer had built a site within a site (I am not sure if they did that on purpose or if Frontpage did it for them). The big problem came with subdomain naming. Frontpage wants to name any/all subdomains "www2". That totally screws up most programming tools and subdomain naming scripts.

So Frontpage being the mess that it is decides to copy all the button gifs twice (once for each instance on each page on each domain name) and give them unique file names. It does this within all the hidden directories we know as Frontpage extensions. These extensions seem to be nothing more than a hidden directory structure that lets the inner workings of Frontpage publish sites. It can't use simple FTP - instead it uses multiple copies of multiple files and eats up disk space like you've never seen before. Keep in mind this is all because they used a Gif-based menu structure for the website in the subdomain. Frontpage tries to offer you all the Gifs to pick from when hyperlinking the menu gifs on each page but there are so many versions of the Gifs there is no way any normal person can keep track of them.

So I punted. Deleted all Gifs, deleted all files in the hidden directories and renamed the directories, and started over with a non-image based navigation menu that does the same thing and looks virtually identical. No images to copy. Just copy and paste the DIV from page to page.

The two sites are now fixed and all the links work. The pages aren't all that great but I didn't design them nor am I about to redesign them in Frontpage. If they want a nicer site, I do it my way or not at all.

The only way I will ever take another Frontpage designed web hosting client is if they can convince me they make all the changes to the code themselves or have Frontpage talent available to them. Frontpage sucks.

[konan bob]

it is the basic Websites Designer tools