Microsoft Expression Web is a solid product.

It's $100 to upgrade from any version of FrontPage. I don't know if it checks upon installation for FrontPage. I had an old Office 2003 CD in the other disk drive, but either it found it automatically or didn't bother prompting me. Few people still have FrontPage installed, I'd bet.

(free) Training

At Lynda.com, Joe Marini, a MS PM, offers online video training. For $25 a month, you get unlimited access to their mostly design-oriented video training courses. You can order the training on CD.

What I like to do is watch the movies, then copy the cached .mov files from the "Temporary Internet Files" folder and watch them using the QuickTime player. I paid $30 to upgrade to QuickTime Pro, so I can double-click a .MOV file to open it and press Ctrl-F to watch it fullscreen.

There are free sample movies. The first are rudimentary reviews of HTML and Javascript and XML, but check out the sample videos about the user interface (3 minutes) or setting tag properties (4 minutes) to get a sense of what's covered in the videos.

There's also training videos from TotalTraining.com. You get some of their videos as a free sample with the Expression Web upgrade. I bought the training disks ($100) because I do a lot of Web page design. I figured I can save time watching someone familiar with a program rather than use brute force.

The problem with us users is we tend to do things by experimenting and the first way that works is the only way we do it from then on.

Some features:

• You can apply styles and formatting to your text or graphics using the Word-like formatting toolbar, and the program will automatically write the CSS styles for you.



• You can drop an XML file onto the page, and it will be displayed as an HTML table. You can format the table to sort the rows, choose which columns to display, and specify the text for table headers (instead of just the default XML element names), and the program automatically writes an associated XSL file that does that formatting for you.



• You can adjust margins and spacings of a paragrah, image, table cell, etc. visually by dragging a visible boundary to the desired location (Expression writes and attaches the CSS styling for your adjustment).

Joe Marini (lynda.com) shows how this works and along the way, you'll see a lot of the little conveniences Microsoft built into XWeb (that's what I think it should be called informally).

He also offers information on how XWeb works with ASP.NET. The answer seems to be seamlessly.  ¶ 12:14 PM