Expression Web ![[Registration never required for free content]](/images/free.gif)
By: Heidi Bautista on Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Reader Level: 
Microsoft is seriously pursuing web designers these days, not just web developers. They already provide some pretty great authoring tools for developers. Visual Studio has been around forever but many designers find the design surface too ... minimal, shall we say. Visual Web Developer (VWD) Express Edition, the lighter-weight authoring tool introduced in 2005 is free, which is nice, but it's also targeted towards the developer audience.
Recently Microsoft launched a new initiative aimed at capturing the designer audience. Introducing Expression Studio: a suite of four products expressly designed for the web designer.
- Expression Web - web authoring design tool
- Expression Blend - user interface design tool that can incorporate multiple media types (vector and pixel art, video, audio, etc.)
- Expression Design - illustration and graphic design tool
- Expression Media - asset management tool, visually catalogues and organizes dozens of different media formats, based on the iView MediaPro product acquired by Microsoft in June, 2006.
This article reviews Expression Web - the web authoring tool included in Expression Studio.
