Client: Microsoft Press Project: The Official Microsoft FrontPage 2000 Book

Yeah, it's wordy title, I know.

How did a guy like me get to write four books anyway?

In 1996 I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. I was doing some contract work at Microsoft, in the pre-MSN days. We were working on a proprietary online environment that would allow for the dynamic display of various types of media. It was similar to what AOL was doing at the time. You could've, for example, have had a magazine automatically generate content and page through it using the tools and interfaces we were creating.

Well, after about two years of development (just over one for me), Microsoft discovered the internet. Everything changed.

Two things happened around that time: 1. They quickly dropped the project (code named Blackbird if anyone is curious), and 2. Microsoft bought Vermeer, the company that created FrontPage.

I actually saw a copy of the original FrontPage sitting on someone's office desk once, but when I was asked if I'd ever used it, I quickly answered yes. A friend of mine and I were already planning on proposing a book on the Blackbird software, and when someone suggested they needed a FrontPage book, we immediately became experts. We switched gears, and already knowing a few people at MSPress, we spent one night with the program and wrote out an entire outline and proposal for a book on FrontPage. That original outline stayed pretty much the same for the first two books. Remember though, at that time we didn’t know anything about the program.

That first book, called Introducing Microsoft FrontPage, was over 400 pages and had a full-color insert. I not only co-wrote the book, I also did the entire layout, created the interior style guide, and designed the insert. All of this, from initial proposal through final manuscript, to print-ready PageMaker files was completed in just over 13 weeks. Oh, and did I mention that I'd never written anything at that time, and didn’t even really know how to type? We had a blast.

It was the first book ever written on FrontPage, and if I remember correctly, that first book sold over 100,000 copies. I know, I know, these days FrontPage doesn’t exactly have the best reputation. In 1996 though, this was the first of a kind...a total WYSIWYG HTML editor...and a little piece of internet history. Now, you can get it on Amazon for about $0.12 or so.

The Forward was written by Randy Forgaard the co-founder of Vermeer, and you can find it online. Check it out, it's a quick and interesting read.

The book was translated into many different languages. A couple of the differet covers
are shown below.