Most of my business comes from woirking with Small businesses wanting websites they can drive easily once I set thm up. FP did the trick for most of them - especially with the server extensions.

I love FrontPage and made over a dozen sites with it, since it came out in 1997. FrontPage 2003 also was more accessible than Dreamweaver 8 for my work. One client's corporate team opted for Dreamweaver and Captivate, but after a few months, using FP Express was easier.

But, I wonder about Microsoft's decisions on Expression and Sharepoint Designer. I played with a beta last year and based on your post, thought I'd check it out.

A brief glance suggests its a return to the bloatware (202 Mb download) and proprietary tendencies. Not that many of my clients are into SharePoint and its high cost developer overload.

Having to download a whole new set of .NET thingies just so it will run. I don't think so.

For small business websites, I think the way ahead is to go modular with open source products like WordPress, MODx and Joomla. My clients love them and they scale very nicely for their requirements.

For web page composition, I'm happy to sit with FP 2003 and check the CSS with an editor like TopStyle.

I have used FP since the mid nineties for my very large and complex websites, http://www.birdlist.org (first) and http://www.adopt-a-ranger.org (recent) and others, like http://www.ilwis.org, www.nature-worldwide.info, www.nationalparks-worldwide.info, etc.

For me it easy wysiwyg page management and particularly web structure management is essential. I can't be bothered with coding and tricks to get my pages done. until now (2008) I have used FP 2008. But now my site is on an Apache server that does not support some of the FP features and I have to change.

I am looking at NetObjects Fusion which facilitates Wysiwyg page structure management..

Still scary to change to something new with thousands of pages.

Dr. Daan Vreugdenhil