Microsoft Expression Designer Surprises

Many designers won’t give Microsoft’s new (and FrontPage replacement) Web designer application a look because of the biases that come with FrontPage. But I tell ya… Microsoft totally started from scratch and created a strong application that designers will respect.

The only drawback is that non-designers won’t have an easy time with it nor Dreamweaver. But at least we won’t see bloated code as much (it’ll continue for a while as FrontPage users continue to rely on it and not give it up until an advance operating system refuses to recognize it or browsers won’t work with its outdated code).

A reader emailed me asking the difference between Microsoft Expression Web Designer and SharePoint Web Designer. The latter is for SharePoint developers - something I’m not familiar with. Here’s what Microsoft said on its Web site:

Why is Microsoft offering two separate products to meet these Web design needs?

Richards: While both products are partially based on Microsoft Office FrontPage technologies, they are tailored to very different usage scenarios. We have built SharePoint Designer 2007 expressly for information workers in an enterprise who are creating and customizing Microsoft SharePoint Web sites and building workflow-enabled applications on SharePoint Products and Technologies. It provides these workers with versatile tools to produce more interactive Web pages that incorporate data from a wide variety of sources, as well as enable business processes and create powerful reporting tools on the SharePoint platform. SharePoint Designer 2007 also allows the IT department to closely manage all of these activities so that employees ultimately can more productively build and customize SharePoint sites and applications.

Expression Web Designer is focused on the needs of professional Web designers seeking to build high-quality, standards-based Web sites for companies. It provides exceptional support for integrating XML, CSS, ASP.NET 2.0, XHTML and other standard Web technologies into sites to make them more dynamic, interactive and accessible. Teams of designers using Expression Web Designer and developers using Microsoft Visual Studio will benefit from numerous integrated features that allow them to collaborate on the design and development of content and applications.

You can download Expression Web Designer for free. Microsoft also offers Interactive and Graphic Designers for free. It’s not clear how the company plans to offer these products in the future when they come out of beta. Perhaps Web Designer will become part of Microsoft Office.

[tags]microsoft,software,web+design,html+editor[/tags]