We have been fortunate enough to have been given a copy of MS Expression Web design software for a trial basis. The intention is to create some of our personal sites using this tool and see how it compares against the likes of Dreamweaver, NVU (which has been blogged about by staff in the past) and the truly wonderful Bluefish editor (again, discussed elsewhere).

Before we begin though, there is the need to “declare” a couple issues which point to a definite bias.

First off, our preferred OS is Linux although we do have Windows machines to use (and regularly use them). Also, nearly all the website construction tasks we perform are on Dreamweaver and Bluefish - which we love.

Also, critically, nearly all the sites we develop use PHP as the server side language and Expression Web does not support this. To make the testing “fair” we will endevour to create ASP, ASP.NET and plain HTML sites and we will be as objective as possible with our conclusions.

That said, unless MS does something significant to change the way Expression works it is very unlikely we will adopt it to develop CompuSkills websites (as almost 95% are PHP driven).

Tags: Expression Web, Dreamweaver, Microsoft, NVU, Bluefish, Software, Web Design Software, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET