Microsoft Sharepoint Designer Overview

Sharepoint Designer is an HTML editor and web design freeware for creating/editing Microsoft Sharepoint sites and web pages. It belongs to the Sharepoint products family.

When I worked with Sharepoint 2003 we were using Microsoft Front Page for editing Sharepoint sites and pages. Since the release of MOSS 2007, Front Page had its successor in Sharepoint Designer. This editor has a design view, split view (design and code), code view and preview page view

The list of designers that Sharepoint had since Sharepoint 2003

• Microsoft Front Page 2003
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007
• Sharepoint Designer 2010
• Sharepoint Designer 2013

Sharepoint Designer Usage can be disabled by farm administrators from Central Administration (since the release of Sharepoint 2010)

Trivia:

• The Front Page 2003 was designed specifically for editing WSS 2.0.There are some SPS 2003 features that cannot be edited with Front Page.
• While installing SPS2003 we had to uninstall Front Page extension server to complete the set up successfully.
• To disable users from editing Sharepoint sites using Front Page Editor/, add the wdfopensite value to the DisableWebDesignFeatures attribute in the Onet.xml file of each SharePoint Portal Server 2003 site template. The DisableWebDesignFeatures attribute is located in the Project Title tag in the Onet.xml file.Site templates are located in the following folder on the serverDrive:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\Template\LangID\SPS*\XML

Related Post Disabling Sharepoint Designer 2007/Front Page 2003