[Mike Feury]

Hi All,

I just read Allen's review of FP2000. Having used FP98 a fair bit, I agree with most of Allen's comments. However, I think the review leaves out too much and thereby ends up being unfairly critical of the product.

The basic problem is that Allen has reviewed FP2000 from the viewpoint of a web design professional - from which view I have no argument. Why this is a problem is that FP has never been marketed as a tool for professionals. It has been marketed mainly on ease of use, and therefore the review should have paid more attention to this aspect.

When we decided to develop our commercial website nearly 3 years ago, we were both website novices - had done a few free-host sites, messed around with learning basic HTML with EditPlus, that sort of thing.

Our basic need was to get our site operational quickly. Thus we passed up our first choice of HomeSite and went with FP98. We got our site up and operational very quickly, leaving us with sufficient time to deal with all the other issues of a small start-up.

Last year I spent some time with HomeSite. It's a really nice program - but I confirmed that our original FP decision was correct. We were too much novices to have been able to use HomeSite effectively back at the start.

Since then we've upgraded to DreamWeaver and converted our site to a DreamWeaver site - painless conversion, although we still need to clean out FP remnants sometime. Perhaps later this year we'll be able to upgrade further to CSS & DHTML.

Bottom line - Front Page did exactly what it was supposed to do. Provided us novices with the easiest possible path into getting a decent enough commercial site up and running quickly.

For what it's advertised to do, in my opinion Front Page deserves a score of 90+%.