And for a moment, sitting in the dark glow of the monitor, I was back there again.
The magic of the Portable version was its audacity. I could work on the site during computer lab at school (booting from the USB stick because the school PCs were locked down like prisons). I’d tweak the hover effect on the navigation buttons—that satisfying, chunky rollover that only a vml or a poorly sliced Photoshop image could provide. I’d use for the header and footer, a feature that felt like sorcery. Change it once, and the whole 12-page site updated. Sure, the generated HTML was a crime scene of proprietary <!--[if gte mso 9]> tags and meta name="ProgId" lines, but it worked . It displayed consistently in Internet Explorer 6, which, in 2006, was the universe.
But I loved it for its limitations.
The man behind the counter, whose name tag read “Terry” and whose glasses were held together with electrical tape, saw me looking. “That little gem?” he grunted. “Took me a week to make that. Stripped out the bloat, the registry calls, the activation nonsense. It runs entirely off a USB stick. 128 megabytes.” Microsoft Frontpage 2003 Portable
The town’s local roller rink, Skate-A-Rama , asked me to redesign their web presence. They had a static, one-page GeoCities relic. I pitched a full FrontPage 2003 masterpiece: a splash page with an animated construction worker GIF, a "Rink Cam" (a static JPEG updated manually every hour via FTP), and a schedule table with alternating lavender and periwinkle rows.
The challenge: the rink’s owner, "Crazy" Carl, only had a decrepit Windows 2000 machine in the back office. No CD-ROM drive. No admin password to install software. He looked at me, sweat beading on his brow. "Can you do it?"
The splash screen bloomed. The blue gradient. The compass rose. And for a moment, sitting in the dark
Of course, there were cracks in the facade. The Portable version was fragile. Open a .html file created in Dreamweaver, and FrontPage would "help" by rewriting all your clean <ul> tags into nested <p> monstrosities. Use too many dynamic effects (the infamous "hover buttons" that required Java applets), and the portable executable would crash with a silent, devastating Microsoft FrontPage has encountered a problem and needs to close. The undo history was shallow. And God help you if you accidentally used the "Themes" feature—your entire site would suddenly look like a 1998 CD-ROM encyclopedia.
I didn’t fix it. I didn’t export it. I just smiled, closed the program, and ejected the USB drive.
I opened an old project—a half-finished site for a skateboard brand that never existed. The shared borders were broken. The hover buttons were red X’s. The HTML was a mess of p.MsoNormal and xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" . The tab showed a jumbled approximation of a layout. I’d tweak the hover effect on the navigation
The year was 2006. The digital landscape was a wilder, more tactile place. Social media was a nascent murmur in college dorms (MySpace), and if you wanted a website for your small business, band, or quirky passion project, you didn’t “log into a builder”—you built it yourself. And for millions, the tool of choice was a beige, slightly bloated box called .
I pulled out my keychain. The translucent blue USB drive gleamed under the fluorescent lights. "Watch this."
Last week, I found that USB stick. Out of morbid curiosity, I plugged it into my modern Windows 11 machine. The OS recognized it instantly. I navigated to the folder, expecting nothing. I right-clicked FRONTPG.EXE , set compatibility to , and double-clicked.