Microsoft Expression Web is the successor of Microsoft's popular Frontpage range of software that has been redesigned in line with Microsoft's new Office interface. The software is also part of the Express Studio family which includes Expression Design, Expression Media and Expression Blend which seems to have been redesigned to compete with Adobe's Dreamweaver with its capabilities and appearance which is extremely popular in the design industry.

Whereas Frontpage was designed for a variety level of computer users and graphic designers, the current incarnation of Expression Web definitely targets the more proficient web designer, although the program still contains basic templates which can easily be modified. The software also comes with a comprehensive DVD training video which covers the majority of functionality of Express Web from basic to intermediate users which is ideal for the inexperienced user or those who have been away from the new range of Office products.  

The installation of Express Web was a breeze and it simply autoinstalled on our Windows Vista test machine and after a few minutes, the software was successfully installed and validated. It should also be noted that minimum system requirements for Express Web is Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1, however Microsoft's .NET Framework 2 is also a prerequisite.

At a glance, the software looks like a hybrid version of Frontpage meets Dreamweaver with its two pane view, allowing for easy access to both WYSIWYG and coding. Whatever coding changes you make, Express Web will automatically update the WYSIWYG view in real-time.  

The designers have ensured that Express Web is standards based which ensures that all your coding will meet the guidelines of web design, especially in the coding department. The improved access to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) has been professionally implemented into Expression Web that are extremely easy to both implement and manage.

Needless to say, Expression Web is probably the easiest CSS editor available on the market today with its straight forward approach to this popular standard. Best of all, Expression Web ensures that your coding is "almost" free from errors with its ability to detect syntax errors and improves your overall performance and design capabilities. This syntax error also relates to W3C guidelines, ensuring that your code reaches a certain level before it is published into the wider community.  

You can even use RSS feeds on your site by importing the XML file with the feed and allows the user to partially edit the feed appearance which is great that Microsoft is supporting this popular internet format.  

As Expression Web supports the .NET Framework, users who are acquainted to ASP.Net will be pleased to know that this is an innate feature of the software package and also includes a variety of wizards to assist in the process.

Browser compatibility issues is still a problem today and end-users have a variety of choices from Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Opera to name a few of the browsing programs available and Express Web will allow you to preview your page with any browser that is installed on your system.

The downside of Express Web is that there is no true support of PHP which is still an extremely popular coding language that is used extensively on the internet. Hopefully additional versions of Expression Web will support PHP, however it could also be said that with the implementation of XHTML, ASP.Net and CSS, there is a push to use these aspects rather than PHP.

At the end of the day, Expression Web is a very powerful web development tool that we could easily recommend to those developers who wish to adhere to industry standards, especially on Windows based machines at a rather affordable price.