I've been promoting the benefits of Microsoft FrontPage - and now it's replacement Microsoft Expression Web. Expression Web is the best way to create your own website: it's simple enough for complete web amateurs to use, and powerful enough for web professionals - especially with it's new CSS and standards support.
One concern is migrating from FrontPage to Expression Web. If you're not using any special features of FrontPage you can do it with no preparation or training - but of course that doesn't mean you'll be taking advantage of new features in Expression Web or building standards-compliant websites.
Fortunately, training is available online for free from several sites and of course Amazon.com has several excellent books. And a nice training disc also comes with Expression Web.
A complication is a handful of features that were dropped: all old, obscure, and to a degree proprietary or far from meeting standards. The one you are likely to run into is that FrontPage has built-in a photo gallery tool which Expression Web no longer has. The galleries will run in Expression Web-generated sites (they just reply on Javascript), but you cannot edit the old ones or create new ones. So the question becomes, what to use as a replacement? There are several choices... none of which integrate with Expression Web. The next best choice would be an external tool which imports your photos from your disk and creates all of the HTML and associated scripts/CSS/etc to display the images in an orderly way. I surveyed several of these tools that are on the market and found several interesting variants. I settled on Microsoft Expression Media. Expression Media is used to manage directories of images, has annotation tools that can work on one or many images at once, and has an HTML-generating gallery tool. The gallery tool creates a directory or files that can be easily dropped into Expression Web and uploaded to your site. And the code it creates is not proprietary - it's browser and server independent.
A screen shot is shown below. Several themes are available (and yes they are indeed customizable, fortuantely!), which align thumbnails on various places on the HTML page. One particularly nice feature is the option on the second tab to have a watermark put on each image (tremendously useful to me because I post dozens of images at a time and they would all have to be editted otherwise). Several other options are available to help you customize the resulting pages.
Note that while I'm using beta code of the next version, the current version has the same functionality in this regards. My next step in the never-ending revisioning of my own sites will be to remove all vestiges of the FrontPage photogalleries. That'll be the last of the FrontPage-specific code left on my sites.
An example of a simple photogallery created with Expression Media can be found here: Example - Solstice Club Drive. There are lots more options for me to try, although in this case I left it simple because the gallery includes 233 images and I wanted my readers to be able to scroll thru them very quickly.
