Web Hosting Reviews & Ratings

September 21, 2009

Expression Web vs. FrontPage Hosting

Although FrontPage hosting lives on, the actual FrontPage client program has been phased out by Microsoft’s new web design software, Expression Web.  Despite all the improvements Expression Web has to offer, some of the FrontPage loyalists are reluctant to move on.  Many users are concerned about compatibility as well as the problems this and all the changes will bring forth.  As most of us know, every software product has a lifecycle and FrontPage has seemingly run its course as it is no longer officially supported by Microsoft.  For this reason, if you are still using FrontPage, you might not be getting the most out of your web design projects.

Notable Improvements

Instead of making several much need changes and introducing another version of FrontPage, the Expression Web software was built from the ground up, making it an entirely different product.  And while there are many similarities between the two clients, beneath the surface you will find that these programs are quite distinct.  Expression Web is more of a professional web design tool, doing away with all the bloated code that resulted in FrontPage being heavily criticized by a sizable portion of its user base.  The web bots responsible for writing code to specifically support Internet Explorer are long gone as full support for other major browsers is now offered.  Not only does Expression Web’s default functionality allow you to write valid XHTML, but it also helps you become familiar with the language by highlighting it in comprehensive code view errors, thus making it a very effective learning tool.

Key Differences

Below are some more examples of how FrontPage and Expression Web are vastly different:

Components – Several of the old components found in FrontPage have been eliminated and are not present in Expression Web.  For example, you will not find components for themes, the navigation view, guest book forms or Word Art to name a few.

Validation Tools – Just because you use Web Expression as your design tool, you should not automatically expect that your code will be clean and valid.  However, unlike FrontPage, this software has a few built in tools to help you check on your code and supports the validation tools provided by the W3C.

Compatibility – The Expression Web software is purposely designed to function with backwards compatibility.  What this essentially means is that sites created with the FrontPage client can be imported into the Expression Web environment and work just as fine.  Keep in mind that it does not support the adding of new content to older FrontPage components.

The web hosting market is slowly but surely giving up FrontPage support in favor of Expression Web.  As a webmaster or designer, you should consider doing so as well.  The software is designed to satisfy the latest web standards having cleaner code and being well tested in a number of widely used browsers.   FrontPage hosting still has better support on the market than Expression Web, but that could all change very soon and when it does, your favorite design tool may no longer be an option.

Tags: FrontPage client,  Expression Web,  web design tool,  web bots,  Microsoft,  Internet Explorer,  FrontPage Hosting,  XHTML