When designers say Adobe others will say Photoshop or Illustrator. When website designers say Macromedia (acquired by Adobe in 2005) we’ll say Dreamweaver or Flash. If you said Microsoft to a clerk or an accountant, they’ll say Word, Excel or Powerpoint. But what happens when Microsoft decides to become like Photoshop or Macromedia?
You get the Microsoft Expression applications aimed at graphic designers, interactive designers, website designers and yes, I said de-sign-ers. The introduction of these new applications aimed at professionals might be the replacements of Frontpage and Paint. You also may download the free trial availabe for either one at their website.
I downloaded the 204MB file recently today and poked around the programme to get a feel of what the new Frontpage might be. After all, we’re talking about support for web-based standards, ‘sophisticated’ CSS layouts, extensive CSS formating, rich data presentation (load RSS feeds to your website) and lastly, build ASP.NET applications.
Now to be honest, when I first used Frontpage several years ago it was a delightful experience. Things weren’t difficult to find and it was easy coming up with a website. After installing Expression for Website Designers, I noticed that the programme utilized a 3-column layout to house all the options you’ll want to play with when editing your website.
While I was dabbling in the programme with one of my older projects, I noticed something very unsatisfying. Expression for Website Designers has more powerful tools but a very big problem with their User Interface. Note: The image is 1280 pixels wide.
There were a lot of buttons on the top bar. More than what you’ll find in Word. The ability to apply pre-made styles with the written CSS may be too easy. If you’re on a piece of content that you’ve assigned a class already and selected one of the other pre-made classes, you’ll end up with two styles.
Anyone who’ll be using Expression for Website Designers later might need to take the tutorial or spend a day fiddling around the programme to get used to item placements and finding needed tools.
But one of the best things about Expression for Website Designers is the ability to render pages in Standard or Quirks mode depending on the doctype setting of the page for maximum browser compatibility. This would really come in handy but I hope that it won’t be necessary when Internet Explorer 7 rolls out soon.
Overall, Expression for Website Designers is looking to become a very powerful tool and it’ll be a battle of the big boys later. In this day of usability factors, the most powerful or latest application for website designers won’t necessarily mean the most friendly program.
If there’s one thing that’ll win any website designer or design firm’s vote, the value for money price of the product. :)