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Project Management

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

By justin james July 16, 2007, 1:27 AM PDT

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Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

Expression Web integration with Office

Expression Web integration with Office

One notable item missing from Microsoft Office 2007 is the venerable FrontPage HTML editor and Web site design tool. Over the years, FrontPage developed a reputation for allowing non-programmers to crank out somewhat nice looking, somewhat dynamic Web sites — at the expense of industry standards and ugly HTML code.

Microsoft recently released Expression Web, which replaces FrontPage. Expression Web falls into the Expression family, aimed at Web designers and positioned between Office and Visual Studio. Expression Web can handle HTML, CSS, and ASP.NET pages, although its ASP.NET capabilities are rather limited. Although Expression Web has come a long way from its FrontPage roots, it still maintains much of the ease of use that allowed FrontPage to be used by so many new Web content creators.

As you can see from the installation options shown here, Expression Web integrates itself with Microsoft Office, showing that it’s a replacement for FrontPage.

This gallery is also available as a PDF download. For a quick rundown of key facts, see “10 things you should know about Microsoft Expression Web.”

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

Expression Web prompt

Expression Web prompt

Expression Web offers to become your default HTML editor.

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

Privacy options

Privacy options

Microsoft has made great efforts over the last few years to address the privacy concerns over the “call home” functionality of its products. This installation dialog is a great example of some of things it’s doing to make this functionality as open and configurable as possible.

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

Starting Expression Web

Starting Expression Web

This is the default, blank screen that you see the first time you start Expression Web. It looks like a cross between FrontPage and Visual Studio.

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

Site settings

Site settings

The Site Settings dialog contain a good number of options. The FrontPage heritage is evidenced by the concepts in the settings, particularly the idea of a “Web” that uses metadata files to give hints to the software, as opposed to a simple collection of files. Expression Web is much less intrusive and dominating of your files than FrontPage was.

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

Properties sheet

Properties sheet

Expression Web shares the same workgroup and workflow features as Microsoft Office.

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

CSS style editor

CSS style editor

The CSS style editor in Expression Web is identical to the one found in Visual Studio 2005. Like Visual Studio 2005, Expression Web generates high quality CSS styles that meet standards and puts the industry standards in front of Microsoft-specific standards (although the option exists to make styles IE-centric).

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

Updating or attaching a style sheet

Updating or attaching a style sheet

Expression Web makes it easy to update or attach a style sheet to a single page or the current page. The Import feature allows you to have the style sheet copied into a page, instead of referring to an external style sheet.

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

Starting a new page

Starting a new page

Expression Web has a wide variety of templates for starting a new page. It is also capable of handling HTML, ASP.NET, CSS, JavaScript, XML, and text files, which covers all of the file formats that most people will need while performing Web design, outside of a good graphics editor.

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

CSS style sheets

CSS style sheets

Expression Web comes with a number of high quality, predefined CSS style sheets. These sheets cover all of the common layouts and are 100 percent standard compliant and cross-browser usable.

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

CSS themes

CSS themes

Expression Web also has CSS themes, although none of them is particularly inspiring.

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

Support for frames

Support for frames

Expression Web can create a framed site as well, if you want it to.

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

Basic design view

Basic design view

This is the basic design view of an HTML file. While on the surface it looks standard, it does some nice things to make it easy to work with the layout and access the metadata within the HTML. Expression Web leans quite heavily toward CSS positioning for layout, as opposed to table-based layouts.

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

Split view

Split view

This is the split view of working with a file, which many Web designers will prefer. Highlighting a tag in one view highlights it in the other. The code section also has IntelliSense, like Visual Studio.

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

Page Editor Options dialog box

Page Editor Options dialog box

The page editor options are quite extensive. I would have preferred it to use Strict HTML as a default, but it defaults to W3C standards first and Microsoft Standards second.

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

CSS control

CSS control

The options page gives the user extremely granular control over the CSS that Expression Web generates.

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

Code formatting options

Code formatting options

Expression Webu00e2u20acu2122s in-depth code formatting options let you format the code the way you like. You can later run the HTML optimizer to reformat so that it’s suitable for posting online.

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

Page and code control

Page and code control

The editor settings provide ultra-granular control over the page and the code.

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

HTML optimizer

HTML optimizer

The HTML optimizer is a welcome feature, providing power and control at the same time.

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

Displaying margins and padding

Displaying margins and padding

You can see in this screenshot what happens when you enable the showing of margins and padding. Expression Web makes it easy to understand why your block elements are behaving the way they do. This feature is quite handy.

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

Viewing different resolutions

Viewing different resolutions

Expression Web also allows you to work on the page as if you were using a different screen resolution. This functionality is well thought out; it uses the true dimensions of a page within a maximized browser window at that resolution, not merely a display confined to that absolute resolution.

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

Working with layers

Working with layers

Expression Web also does a good job at working with layers in CSS.

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

Flaky spell checker

Flaky spell checker

One pain point was the spell checker. If you change a word and it becomes a typo after it was written, the spell checker does not detect it as a misspelling.

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By justin james
I am an all purpose IT person. If there's a generic job title in IT, I've probably had it, most likely more than once. Programmer, systems administrator, DBA, PC tech/repair, Help Desk, webmaster, web designer, web developer, applications developer,
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