Expression Web 2, Full Edition (PC)

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Editorial reviews

Product Description
Microsoft Expression Web gives you all the tools you'll need to produce high-quality, standards-based Web sites the way you want them. Take advantage of the best of dynamic Web site design, enabling you to design, develop, and maintain exceptional standards-based Web sites. Unleash your creativity and bring your Web sites to life with sophisticated CSS design features including visual designers, specialized task panes, and tool bars that give you precise control of page layout and formatting. Reduce complexity and ease integration of data by using powerful task panes and design tools, which allow quick incorporation of XML data. Seamlessly integrate Web design and development teams with Expression Web and Microsoft Visual Studio, by taking advantage of superior support for XML, ASP.NET and XHTML. Create dynamic, interactive pages and sites that leverage the power of the Web to deliver compelling user experiences. Easily design to standards and optimize your sites for accessibility and cross-browser compatibility with built-in support and validation for Web standards.

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Customer reviews

review by: dannybgoode date: 2008-08-18 rating:
Great web design software
I don't understand why Expression Web has grown in popularity. Microsoft really have come up trumps for once. Its a small install, way smaller than Dreamweaver, intuaitive and incredibly effective. Its also massivley cheaper than Adobe's baby.

I have used Dreamweaver for sometime and it now seems to have gone the way of most Microsoft offerings. Its bloated, too complicated and annoyingly produces messy propriety code. It also has restritive licensing and poor upgrade routes.

Expression Web just churns out fully XHTML compliant code and doesn't even add anything in the meta data to say its produced it (very unusual these days). It links well with ASP pages and has enough .net snippets in there for those who want the power of asp pages but don't want to learn and has good design attributes. It also integrates nicely with Visual Studio.

It also has a number of useful tools. For example it will highlight non-compliant code, just hover over it and it will tell you what the issue is. If you have a legacy page, just right click on it and select XML formatting and it will update the code to XHTML compliance - brilliantly simle and it doesn't break anything in the process

Where it really shines though is the CSS creator. Its just so powerful and easy to use. Click on an item and open the css modifier and all the avaiable properties and attributes are there for you to play with. It will then neatly add them all into an external style sheet in full css 2 complaint code. This is a trick that Dreamweaver has been struggling with for a while now.

The main downside is lack of support for other activie scripting languages but now it does support PHP (although this is a bit fiddly to get going). This also supports Intellisnse and code snippets. This makes it a very viable alternative to Dreamweaver - particularly those who don't have such a web package (although if you are a DW user see my note about upgrade routes).

Other than that, if pure XHTML with ASP or PHP and fanatstic CSS support is all you need then by this. Its streets ahead of Dremweaver in these areas.

Just as a final note, if you own Office (any version), Dreamweaver, Go Live, Flash or Director (any version) or Front Page then you qualify for the upgrade version which is only £99.


review by: dannybgoode date: 2008-08-17 rating:
Interesting upgrade routes
I will save a full prodcut review for the main product as more people who haven't used Expression Web before are likely to look there but I thought I'd comment on Microsoft's choice of upgrade paths which are generous to say the least (unlike Adobe's attempt at daylight robbery with Dreamweaver).

You qualify to use the upgrade license if you have any of the following:

* Expression Web 1 or Expression Studio 1

*Any of the following Adobe packages (any version) - Creative Suite, Dreamweaver, Flash, Director, Go Live

* Microsoft Office (any version)

* Front Page (any version)

This is about the broadest upgrade route I have ever seen and must be welcomed in today's world of complicated EULA's (please note the above is straight of the box - I have a copy).

It also shows how serious Microsoft is about broadening the appeal of Expression Web which is a good thing because it really is an excellent package.

Not sure and own any of the above software. Then download the trial and see what you think (you won't be disappointed). If you like it you can legally buy this upgrade version for just £99. Great value!

Danny B

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