It’s been a few years since Microsoft released Expression Web, the replacement software for their first WSIWYG editor, FrontPage. And yet, since that time (2006?) many of our customers are still clinging to their FrontPage applications. It’s understandable that people want to retain the software they know (and love) and yet, it’s time to release the grip and move forward as there is a lot more to gain by moving over to Expression Web.

The most obvious reason to move forward is that Microsoft will never offer version upgrades to FrontPage – thus making it a deprecated program which is no longer supported. A more positive approach is to look at the perks of using Expression Web.

Expression offers features not available to FrontPage. Dynamic Web Templates (DWT’s) are a major perk. The master templates are kept separate from teh design so that you can make global changes to your site through the single source template files (i.e. template.dwt). Similar to working with Cascading Style Sheets, the DWT offers a single source to edit changes and those modification are rolled-out to all the pages of your site.

In the FrontPage world, we had only just started to enjoy the use of Include Pages (or Server Side Includes). If you were using these helpful Includes, you will appreciate how easy it became to update common elements and realize immediate updates vs. the previous approach of page-by-page edits. It was quite painful.

There are other important features to Expression Web but this is likely one of the more obvious – global site changes which allows for easy updates and easier site redesigns.

Let us know if you need help converting an existing FrontPage site to expression Web. Perhaps you just need a jump start to get the site moved over to the new format and we can help you do that!