This is the Safari online edition of the printed book.

In just 24 sessions of one hour or less, you’ll learn how to build flexible, easy-to-maintain, standards-based websites with Microsoft Expression Web 2. Using this book’s straightforward, step-by-step approach, you’ll master the entire process–from concept and design through delivery! Each lesson builds on what you’ve already learned, giving you a strong real-world foundation for success, no matter what kind of site you’re building!

Step-by-step instructions carefully walk you through the most common Expression Web 2 tasks.

Quizzes and Exercises at the end of each chapter help you test your knowledge.

By the Way notes present interesting information related to the discussion.

Did You Know? tips offer advice or show you easier ways to perform tasks.

Watch Out! cautions alert you to possible problems and give you advice on how to avoid them

Learn how to…

·        Build your first Expression website in just five minutes!

·        Import text from Microsoft Word and other software

·        Make the most of Expression Web 2’s advanced image-editing features

·        Create hyperlinks that simplify navigation, perform actions, and send commands

·        Write error-free code quickly and easily with Code View and IntelliSense

·        Use CSS to control your site’s appearance, create standards-based, cross-browser content, and simplify redesigns

·        Design site layouts that communicate more effectively

·        Use Dynamic Web Templates to consistently format (or reformat) hundreds of pages

·        Implement state-of-the-art interactivity with Behaviors

·        Add Silverlight, Flash, and other multimedia content

·        Build a web-based email form with FrontPage Server Extensions and PHP

·        Integrate web application code written in ASP.NET or PHP

Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a web designer, developer, programmer, and digital media expert based in Burnaby, B.C., Canada. He has operated Pink and Yellow Media since 2002, creating web and design solutions for small businesses and individuals. For his work with Expression Web, he was invited as a Canadian VIP to the MIX08 conference in Las Vegas and asked to present on Building Compelling Websites on the Microsoft Platform at Microsoft’s Innovation Briefing. He blogs on Expression Web at http://blog.pinkandyellow.com/.

Category: Web Development

Covers: Microsoft Expression Web 2

User Level: Beginning—Intermediate

$29.99 USA / $32.99 CAN / £18.99 Net UK

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 9 Ratings

Not for Everyone - 2009-03-11
Reviewer Rating:
Since the book has received some five-star reviews, it is obviously serving the needs of some readers. I would like to mention several things that may limit its value to others.

First, the book is clearly more of an extended tutorial than a reference work. You have to want to take the time to work through each exercise (24 one-hour exercises in all), working on the author's whimsical little website called MyKipple.com. Beginners will probably find this a good way to learn, at least for the easier exercises earlier in the book. Users with previous web design experience might prefer to have the workings of the program more simply stated, without having to learn them by working on the same couple of pages over and over again. All users will have to be able to abstract the design principles from the details of the "do this, now do this, now do this...." It isn't always easy to distinguish the general procedures to follow in constructing your own site from the instructions that apply only to the practice site. I would have liked a better explanation of the material first, and then the practice exercise applying it to MyKipple.com for those who want it.

When the book gets to some of the more powerful design tools, such as prepackaged layouts and cascading style sheets, the fact that the tutorial has already led you to create pages with specific content creates a little confusion. The early exercises tell you to do something in a primitive way, and then the later exercises tell you to revise it in order to take advantage of the tool that in real life you should have used in the first place! For example, when you design your own site, you probably want to select a layout with places for a heading, navigation menu, etc., and then create the content to fill it. But when this book comes to layouts, it has you take the page you've already created and rework its content and styling to fit it into the new layout. In your own web design, you will probably want to proceed in almost the opposite order of these tutorials, working with the general organizational tools before you add the specific content. I realize that any book has to cover things in steps, but I would have appreciated a general putting-it-all-together chapter that forgets the practice site and suggests a logical way to proceed when you are trying to organize your own site. This book seems to get bogged down in the details of MyKipple.com and lose sight of the bigger picture from the reader's perspective.

The practice exercises sometimes lead the author to cover one thing in the context of another thing, instead of making it a topic in its own right. The important topic of how to create a simple navigation menu is buried on pp. 238-9 in the context of how to adapt existing content to a new layout. Not only does it make the discussion unnecessarily confusing, but it makes it hard to find the section again, since the index doesn't reference it under the heading of either "menu" or "navigation" (the latter term isn't an index heading at all). The menu heading in the index refers you primarily to the chapter on how to create advanced drop-down menus using layers or CSS.

Finally, I noticed a lot of minor errors in the book that reflect poor editing, especially in chapter 1, where the numbers and titles of figures don't correspond very well with the text. Some material seems to be missing at the end of p. 99. The book is printed in fairly small type; some of the figures are very hard to read; and the index is not very thorough. For example, there's no listing for "float," a vital technique for creating multi-column layouts.

After becoming frustrated with this book, I bought David McFarland's CSS: The Missing Manual. That book isn't specific to Expression Web alone, but it provides a much, much clearer introduction to programming with cascading style sheets, a large part of what Expression Web is all about. It is beautifully written, with a great balance between general principles and exercises. Unless you are already very good at CSS, that book is the much better place to start.

In general, I think all readers can learn something from Sam's Teach Yourself MEW2, and readers with the patience of Job will learn a lot, but I think the book makes it harder than it has to be.

Average at best - 2009-02-24
Reviewer Rating:
Not a particularly bad book. It does give the beginner (like me) a fairly good intro to Expression Web 2.

However, it could have been a better book. The weakness?? It's that the author lacks the ability to teach well. Over and over again, he fails to make his point in a manner that is simple, detailed, unambiguous, and coherent.

Also, he makes the mistake of believing that what is obvious to him (and therefore not in need of explanation) will likewise be obvious to the reader, and this is one of the most fundamental mistakes a teacher can make (I know this! I am a teacher!!)

Most of the lesson material is of the "Do this...Then do this...Then do this" variety and never follows up with what we are supposed to be accomplishing, why it is done the way it is, and where else the particular point can be applied.

Overall, its worth going through once. Doing so will give the beginner a general idea of what Expression Web 2 has to offer. But it cannot be considered a reference book that one will return to later. It simply lacks the required substance for that.

Bri

EXCELLENT BOOK!!!! - 2009-09-27
Reviewer Rating:
Great, Great book for the non tech geek. All I wanted to learn was how to tweak my website and make it smoother, faster, learn a little about why things are the way they are and this book did exactly that!

It dealt with standards issues and the best part was the Q and A which answered common questions that the other books just don't. Some complaints from others about it being too simple, but I'm not a web programmer, I want it slow! I'm not sure that I would want this book if I was going to be a full-time code writer, but for running a small business and making a few sites this is THE BOOK. EXCELLENT.

Not What I was Needing! - 2009-09-11
Reviewer Rating:
This book would be great if you wanted to design a web page just exactly like the example in the book. But I don't want a web page that looks like [...]. I needed a book that would help me design my own web page. If what you want varies from his design he gives you very little help getting to where you want to be. Useful information is included but there are BIG holes in what is presented. I was very disappointed in this book. I have used other Sam books and been happy. And yes the first 10 chapters you can get through in an hour or less but don't expect it from the other chapters. Some directions just don't work and you are forced to mess around trying to get to where you need to be to go on to the next step. The directions are not always clear.

I've found this book very valuable - 2009-08-20
Reviewer Rating:
I bought 3 books on EW2 and this is the one I chose to keep. The one from Microsoft was in large font an many less pages than this one and seemed to basic. This one has been just right. I've worked through most of the book by now and I've learned a lot.

I was looking for a 'tutorial' type book and this one is just that. It's also organized in such a way that I feel I will be able to use it to refer back too when I go to create my own website.

I've built websites before with FrontPage 2000 and Expression Web 2 is a much more advanced tool and is 'standards based' as best as I can tell. A few hours of the book are dedicated teaching you CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and the tools to create them in EW2 which is great because I haven't used them before.

All of the lessons files can be downloaded from the authors website and the site he has you build is very relevent to what he is teaching. Each chapter's files are set up in the files you download as 'start from here on this chapter' and 'here's the final files for this chapter' so review will be easy and he starts you fresh in each hour so that if you haven't done things exactly his way he has a way of saying 'start from here.'

The only drawback to the book is the number of typos, mis-labeled screenshots, etc. However, I've been able to recognize these errors easily and move forward. These are why this book gets 4 stars instead of 5. That said, you will learn EW2 with this book.

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