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First Impressions: Microsoft Expression Web Designer
By HHI Golf Guy | July 28, 2006
When I first learned to design web sites I used MS FrontPage. But while FP may be OK for hobby sites and novices, it leaves a lot to be desired as a professional web design tool. I tried Dreamweaver, but it was buggy and ran very, very slow. After that, I began the practice of coding all sites by hand using good old Notepad.
But a few months ago I read that Microsoft had a Beta version of Microsoft Expression Web Designer available for trial. I decided to download it and see what it’s all about.
The first thing that you need to know is that this beta version is buggy. Don’t get too ticked off if it crashes or something occasionally doesn’t work as expected. It’s a beta version - live with it.
I don’t use any drag and drop features, and use the Code View to enter my scripts and HTML. But I will go to the design view to see how things look or to change properties of my tables. What I like about EWD is that it uses CSS for control and layout. For example, when you edit the background color or style of a table, EWD automatically formats your changes using CSS (it enters the tags in the HEAD section of the document).
While that may not be great if you like using only external CSS files because you have to transfer the auto-generated CSS to your external file. What I do is keep my sitewide CSS elements in an external file and any page specific elements are in the HEAD tag.
When you have the visual aids turned on you can see the layout and borders of all of your DIV tags and element tags. Another item of not is when you enter a tag that uses quotes (i.e. style=) EWD automatically enters “” after you hit the equal sign. Of course, it took a while for me to get used to this and I kept doubling up quotes. I suppose I should have just turned that option off.
Another key feature of EWD is HTML validation. For example, if your DOCTYPE is XHTML and you enter code or omit a tag or element that would cause the page not to validate, EWD automatically highlights that part of your document (in code view).
There’s a lot more to EWD than I can fit in a single blog post, so go ahead and download it and take it for a test drive. If Microsoft can get all of the bugs worked out by its release date in mid 2007 I think they will have one great web design application.
Topics: Miscellaneous Ramblings |
2 Responses to “First Impressions: Microsoft Expression Web Designer”
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August 16th, 2006 at 2:21 pm
I’m using Dreamweaver MX for a couple of years now and just love it. How long ago did you look at it last time? I wish I could upgrade it to newer version, but it is a little bit too expensive for me
I looked at the first video presentation of MS EWD and noticed that it doesn not have an option to create PHP pages - does it support PHP at all?
August 16th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
I have a few PHP sites and it renders those pages just fine in the design view. One of the save options is to save as “Web Pages”. You can select this type and add the PHP extension to the file name.