Expression Studio 4 Web Professional

• Expression Studio 4 Web Professional combines Expression Web 4, Expression Encoder 4, and Expression Design 4
• Sophisticated tools give you precise control over layout and formatting
• Supports both standard and HD video encoding with easy-to-use presets, or set your own encoding options
• Imports and exports a wide variety of standard file formats, including PSD, XAML, and PNG
• Professional code editor makes your editing and debugging quicker and easier

My background is straight HTML/CSS development as well as FrontPage 2003 development. I was tasked with the objective of converting a problematic 5000 line FP website to something easy to use and compatible with my website provider. (Since FP has lost support from MS the provider also is withdrawing support.) Unfortunately, MS offers no conversion path. (Incredibly short sighted!!!!!!) I was on my own to get rid of any code that used "FP extensions" as well as various syntax problems from FP. (For example, uppercase FP HTML tokens are non-standard.)

Once all of the non-standard FP code was deleted or modified, I was able to import the website into one of the standard Expression Web CSS templates. From there everything worked very smoothly. Code validation is built-in with many ways of reporting status or errors. Pages can be previewed in 3 ways: a) Directly in the EW4 designer; b) Hitting a function to call Internet Explorer; or c) using their SP or SuperPreview mode. This last options allows side by side comparison of your page with two browsers (IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, etc.) as well as on any resolution screen.

A really nice feature is that you can move or delete most of the windows and then later click "Panels, Reset Workspace Layout" to get things back to normal. Another feature is its HTML format command.

Publishing can be done through FTP and the website provider no longer needs FP Extensions installed. EW4 produces code that can be run anywhere. It integrates with PHP (available free from 3rd party), and you can test PHP code by launching Internet Explorer.

Minor criticisms: you have to save your edited source before launching IE. By comparison, the old Macromedia HTML development editor would transparently make a temporary copy and then launch IE. So if you want to "fool around" safely, you must manually make a copy to "play" with and leave the original alone. Another item is that there is no HTML tag editor. Intellisense is nice but it would also be nice to be able to see all of the options of say the tag, or have the editor determine the size of an image.

It's an excellent product and I would recommend it.

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I use this product mostly to modify complex CSS layouts. I've found it to be a nice, intuitive tool.

This is a great alternative to Dreamweaver. Expression Web is $250 cheaper than Dreamweaver and at least as good for what I do. I'm glad Microsoft has provided me an alternative to Adobe's overpriced cash cow.

I'm not a full-time web designer who uses this 40 hours a week, so I can't speak to how it compares to Dreamweaver in that arena.

I haven't noticed a problem with slow start time (how many times do you restart it during a day, anyway?) I have also not noticed any instability. I'm running it in Windows 7.

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We used FrontPage since last century and it was basically fine for straight forward web pages. Keeping things simple for the average person fluent in the basic type programs, Office, Photoshop etc. we created an in-house front for our business, without much headache.

Since our service providers were generating problems with serving FP, they recommended to change to ExpressionWeb, also from Microsoft.

We downloaded a trial copy from Microsoft and tried it out and with a relatively short learning curve, straightened out some simple issues and used it for the two month trial period. And it worked ok although a little buggy we could live with it. A bit cumbersome and more complicated than I would like it to be. But usable.

Then we purchased the program itself [Expression studio 4 Web professional] and figured all was dandy. But were surprised to come up against a lot of incomprehensible new problems, bizarre issues that completely messes up half of our pages -that number in the hundreds.

Table widths, column widths, fonts, all got seriously messed up in the transition from the trial program to the purchased version. Now if we were doing nothing but screw around with ExpressionWeb all day, I'd probably buy a how-to book and figure it out within a few weeks. But I have other work to do and this monster is trying to swallow me whole. It has been several days fighting it and I am clueless as to how to repair the problems it creates for me.

Ome example is our table widths getting out of whack. What normally is previously figured as an 800px width table becomes much much wider. Dragging the borders manually, typing in the numbers in the dialogue boxes, checking them in the html... its no good and the program has something in it that just messes up its own parameters. Another is that the purchased version is so slow with typing that there has to be something seriously wrong. Another problem, both in the demo and purchased versions is that Ctrl-Z may step backwards from the moment you opened the program! Not just one step backward but the entire changes you made for that session. So be careful to save all the time because you may by old habit press ctrl-Z and lose your entire session.

I think this program has been made way to complicated and I am sure if, as I say, you become a novice it works great, but in the current version is just to cumbersome and lacks simplicity and simple easy to use logic in the interface. If I type the table width to be "800" and the columns spaced equally, it should just do that. And not do something else.

I have this opinion that a today's web page program should be as simple as an easy to use word processing document, but this program is just giving me a hard time and no sir, I don't like it.

1. I don't like that the demo was better than the version we spent money on.

2. I feel that Microsoft should have an "import from Frontpage" option where the program cleans out the Frontpage incompatibility issues.

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When Microsoft replaced FrontPage with Expression Web, it represented a major step forward in web development. EW 1 maintained the familiar Frontpage interface, but was a complete departure from its predecessor. Rather than loading excess code into sites to make IE 6 behave like its leaner competitors, EW was standards compliant and a model of lean code generation. EW2 added support for PHP and improved support for CSS, which was already outstandimg.

Then came EW3, and things began to fall apart. EW3 no longer supported plug-ins, like Eric Meyers' CSS Sculptor, and it sported a hard-to-read black and white interface that, unlike its predecessors, could not be customized. It was clearly not ready for prime time, and Microsoft promised EW3 owners a free upgrade to EW4.

EW4 is now out, and it represents another step backwards. The program will not load under certain antivirus programs, and one can spend hours trying to tinker with it to get it to boot, to no avail. Support is absent. Microsoft promises fixes are on the way, and maybe so. But until they arrive, I'd avoid this unstable (and, in my case, unusable) product. As with many of its software products, Microsoft appears to be upgrading for the sake of getting more dollars from its users, and functionality is sacrificed in the process.

EW2 remains on my Windows 7 machine and works quite well, thank you. It's a great product.

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I own this product, but find myself going back to EW2 most of the time because EW2 loads much faster. I maintain a website that is updated several times a day, and waiting for EW4 to load just takes too much time.