Product Description

Microsoft Expression Suite promises new levels of power in creating rich dynamic user experiences on the web; Expression Web, one of the excellent programs within the suite, is a powerful web site creation tool that allows you to rapidly build up standards-compliant web pages, style them with CSS, add dynamic ASP.NET functionality to them, and publish them to the weball from the comfort of one program.

Foundations of Microsoft Expression Web: The Basics and Beyond is one of the first books available on the program. The authorexpert MS trainer and MVP Cheryl D. Wisestarts with the very basics, and then takes you to an advanced level through a series of practical real-world exercises. No prior knowledge of Microsoft Expression Suite is assumed, and the book is written with a highly professional tone. This makes it extremely useful whether youre a beginner or an advanced web developer or designer who wants to make use of the software.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #115229 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 392 pages

About the Author
Cheryl D. Wise, founder and director of WiserWays LLC, has been creating web sites since 1994. A member of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers and a Certified Professional Web Developer (World Organization of Webmasters), Cheryl first received the Most Valuable Professional Award from Microsoft for FrontPage in 2003 and has received the award every year since. She has been teaching others to create standards-complaint accessible web sites at Start to Web, and has been doing other online training since 2004.

Customer Reviews

If you need a practical guide to using Expression Web look no further
I strongly recommend this book for these reasons:

- it is practical, it covers what you need to know to implement an effective personal or business web site

- it emphasizes standards like CSS and cross browser support while letting you know about gotchas with some browser implementations

- it covers important topics like accessibility and legal issues

- there are real world examples and exercises

- lots of screenshots

- the writing is clear and concise

- it covers how to design an engaging web site, not just how to use the tools that EW offers

- there is an accompanying course by the author to complement the book at starttoweb.com

- the author has extensive real world experience implementing web sites

- the author is a Microsoft MVP for Expression (see microsoft.com/mvp) and has helped for many years in the FrontPage and Expression communities; this means that she knows the common issues that people face designing web sites and many of the more obscure ones too

It is not a comprehensive reference book. It is a practical book for those who want to get started with EW quickly but not end up with a poorly designed web site that is not cross browser friendly nor standards compliant.

Here is an overview of the chapters:

1 Before You Begin: Objectives / Attracting visitors / Choosing domain names and hosting / Installing EW

2 Taking Your First Steps: Create a local web site / EW menus

3 Starting Off Right: Configuring EW, Using the Tools General / Reports/ Optimze HTML / Management / Preferences /Site Menu / Remote Web site reports / Recalculate Hyperlinks/ Site Settings

4 Using Semantic, Structured HTML to Create Web Pages / Required Elements Structuring Your Web Page / Lists / Tables / Other HTML Elements from the Drop-Down List / Hyperlinks / The Importance of Hidden Elements

5 Essential CSS: What You Need to Know / What Is CSS? / Why Use Stylesheets? / Details of of essential CSS are covered

6 Using Expression Web to Create Basic CSS / Creating New Styles / Using the Block Category / Setting the Background / Creating a Border / Creating a Box / Creating Tables

7 CSS Positioning Using Expression Web Style Tools / Creating the Initial Page / Working with the Positioning Category / Working with the Layout Category / Lists / Building a Page Layout

8 Branding Your Website: Choosing a Color Scheme / Complementary Color Schemes / Analogous Color Schemes / Monochromatic Color Schemes / Choosing Images for Your Site Graphics / Photos / Stock Photos / Image Formats / Adding Images to Your Web Pages / Establishing Your Look and Feel / Maintaining Your Branding Throughout Your Site

9 Dynamic Web Templates: DWT Overview / What Does a DWT Do? / Creating the DWT / Adding Editable Regions / Attaching DWTs to Your Web Pages / Attaching a DWT to an Existing Page / Preparing an Existing Page for a DWT / Applying a DWT to a Page with Content / Moving Content Between Editable Regions After the Template Has Been Applied / Editing a DWT / Detaching a Page from a DWT / Changing the Attached DWT

10 Forms: Required Elements for a Form / Processing Forms / Setting Form Properties / ASP Send with CDO / PHP Send Mail / ASP.NET 2.0 Form Controls

11 Legal and Usability Issues: Legal Issues / Accessibility / Copyright / Privacy / Licensing / Usability / Usability Testing / Where Can You Find Testers? / Using Expression Reports / Hyperlink Reports / Site Reports

12 Master Pages: Creating a Master Page / Nesting Master Pages

13 Beyond the Basics in CSS and Scripting: Alternative Stylesheet Types / Applying Different Media Types / Print Stylesheets / Validating your Forms / ASP.NET Form Validation Controls / ASP.NET Validation Controls Tag Properties / HTML Forms Validation / Password Protecting a Folder / Creating a web.config File

APPENDIX: Extending Expression Web with Add-Ons / Adding PayPal Buttons / Adding Form Tools / Keyboard Shortcuts

Next edition needs new proof readers!
This book does a good job teaching newbies how to use Expression Web. If you go through the book slowly, following all examples, and doing all the training exercises, you'll learn how to work with Expression Web to build web pages. But what I also encountered with the book was so many typo's and errors, that it was sometimes difficult to know (for example) where there should be a space in a line of code and where there shouldn't or whether I should be using "box" or "border" which made the learning curve longer than it should have been. Since this book teaches a code language (html/xhtml) that must be written JUST SO, I find it difficult to accept that the authors would let so many errors slip by. Shame on their proof readers.

Disappointing product
Frankly, this is a disappointing product. It does have numerous typos, as other reviewers have noted (confusing a backslash with a "normal" slash on page 126, telling us to double-click an entry on page 117 when a single-click is required, are two typical examples). However, the biggest shortfalls are its lack of explaining the foundations clearly, and its important omissions. The book tends to "explain" by just showing us the underlying code, which only minimally helps us to understand. We are not told how to import an existing Web site, or how to handle frames, just two important topics not dealt with here. Jim Cheshire's "Using Microsoft Expression Web" is far better, both in its clarity of explanations, and in its completeness.