Project Management

Microsoft Expression Web: The Right Tool for the Job?

By // July 17, 2007, 12:27 AM PST // justin_m_james

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  • 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."

  • Expression Web prompt

    Expression Web offers to become your default HTML editor.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Properties sheet

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

  • 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).

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • CSS themes

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

  • Support for frames

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

  • CSS editor

    The Expression Web CSS editor is functional and similar to most other CSS editors. It has some nice highlighting capabilities, and the CSS it produces is clean and standard compliant.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Application settings

    The settings page for the application is comprehensive, and as you can see here, contains options for ensuring that your text files properly transfer via FTP when you use Expression Web's publishing features.

  • 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.

  • CSS control

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

  • Code formatting options

    Expression Web’s 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.

  • Page and code control

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

  • HTML optimizer

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Working with layers

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

  • 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.

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."

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By Justin James

Justin James is an OutSystems MVP, architect, and developer with expertise in SaaS applications and enterprise applications.