I downloaded the Community Technical Preview of Microsoft Expression Web Designer. Expressions is a suite of applications for designers with three distinct flavours: Graphic Design (codenamed "Acrylic"), Interactive Design ("Sparkle") and Web Design ("Quartz").



So what's it like?

The web design app seems very much like a sequel to Frontpage - and considering there was no Frontpage in the Beta of Office 2007 I downloaded, I'm assuming that's exactly what it is.

A lot of the dialogue boxes are actually identical and the menus seem very similar.
So if you have used Frontpage, you will feel at home in Expression Web Designer very quickly.

To me, this seems like Frontpage but with a much bigger emphasis on web standards and a push towards using CSS for design. When you create a document, it inserts a valid Doctype (which you can easily switch to another). You can also choose from a selection of CSS page layouts such as 2 and 3 column pages with headers and footers.

Another immediately noticeable improvement is that if you used Frontpage and broke your page up using server side parts like "Includes" or .Net User Controls, when you were in Design mode you couldn't see what the page actually looked like. In Expressions, the Design view compiles the various components of the page so you can see what it looks like, even if the content is split between several includes or user controls. Of course, because Expression fully supports .net 2.0, you can work with Master pages and also see them fully compiled with content units in the Design view.

Expression Web Designer seems like a pretty decent application which I'd happily recommend to friends they try out. If you've been meaning to make the switch to CSS designs, this certainly makes it easy with the layouts available to you. I'll probably carry on using it in place of Frontpage and seeing what other features it has, and look forward to the final release.

"But who seriously uses Frontpage anyway?"

I know that Frontpage has a bad reputation amongst serious website builders and you'd probably get laughed for using it. Personally speaking though, I find it pretty simple to use and effective - I mainly use it as a nicer version of notepad which colorizes my code to make it more readable and lets me quickly switch to a Design view to see how it looks. It's also handy for getting all the attributes right when inserting .net controls thanks to Intellisense. I don't use any real Frontpage specific features and make sure it doesn't give me any code bloat.

What other Web Dev options are there?

There is another option which I am starting to use increasingly and that is Visual Web Developer from Microsoft. It's a really cool lite version of Visual Studio which is great for .net 2.0 development. I might revisit that subject with a detailed review later. I'll only really touch it if I am doing a really code heavy project.

I also downloaded Nvu a little while ago and wanted to love it but we just didn't really get along.

Way back when I was starting out, I tried Dreamweaver. It was kind of OK, but it filled the code with its own stuff and relied upon its own DLL file for the most basic stuff like pulling data from a database. At the time, it seemed cool but it's become a hassle to keep. My web host made some change to their security policy and all my sites using the Dreamweaevr DLL were inaccessible. So I have a heap of code I need to revisit and redo sans Dreamweaver's influence.

I was chatting to some Mac guy the other day and he was telling me how brilliant this product called iWeb is and how that is the future. Is it? What do you use for web dev? Use the comments form to let me know!