Microsoft FrontPage. The mere mention of that name is making most (if not all) of you seasoned web devs groan. “FrontPage was utter rubbish from dark ages of GeoCities” you say. “Everything it touched was ruined with horrific output and proprietary nonsense!” And yes, it was.
But…FrontPage as a concept. As a dream of what could have been, and a window into what was. Letting the typical home user at the time create websites, express creativity, and conquer the world by storm, all without being forced to learn HTML or CSS or JavaScript…In that regard, FrontPage couldn’t be beat.
Let’s talk about why Microsoft FrontPage was for a brief period of time the ultimate content creation tool of the Internet, and why it later fell from grace.
FrontPage: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
I got my start in tech teaching Microsoft Office, HTML, Photoshop (version 6!), and FrontPage (what must have been version 1.1 or FrontPage 98) at a New Horizons franchise in South Florida. It was a bizarre experience in the middle of a bizarre time in my life. I had just graduated from the University of Arizona. In the last few months of my time in Tucson, I had been excommunicated from the church around which I had centered my life for the previous four years. I moved to South Florida and set about trying to find employment. I didn’t have a plan except to get married. My (now ex) wife and I settled in Sunrise. I got a job teaching drums at a worse-for-wear music school for kids and briefly as an interim worship leader at a Baptist church. I was fired from the latter after three months—that’s a different blog post.
I didn’t even lay eyes on the ocean for the first six months I lived in Florida.
Then I stumbled into the job at New Horizons. Turnover at that franchise—and I would assume most franchises—was intense. That made getting a job there pretty easy. Keeping the job, on the other hand, was not. Onboarding was: there was a small room in the back with a few folding tables with computers on them. I was shown to that room and given a coursebook (the same book students received) and told to learn it that day. I was to teach that course the following day. It was probably Microsoft Word. Maybe Excel.
We had to wear a suit every day. Besides the classrooms where the actual training occurred, there was another room full of cubicles where the inside salespeople cold-called all day long. I assume that their onboarding experience was even bleaker than mine. It was classic Glengarry Glen Ross style sales management.
There were three basic skills required: learn fast, be good in front of a room full of people, and think fast on one’s feet. Fortunately, I had those skills. I didn’t know I had them going in, but looking back I can see that I did. And I was right at the front of that Dunning–Kruger effect curve, so I didn’t know how little I knew about the actual subjects I was teaching.
I took to the graphic design and web stuff. If you could learn it, you got to teach it, especially if it was a little bit harder material like Photoshop and FrontPage. This was 1998, and most people barely used the web, let alone understood how it worked.
But as that article explains, FrontPage actually made it make sense. I took my new skills and began creating web pages for myself. I hosted them on GeoCities, as one did, or on the free hosting provided by my ISP at the time. I eventually graduated to writing HTML and CSS by hand using the HTML editor HTML-Kit. I only ended up spending about three months at New Horizons. I was offered a real tech job, where I learned Visual Basic and some C++. Later I learned ColdFusion and PHP…then C#, Java, ActionScript, JavaScript, Ruby…