website design software

You are currently browsing articles tagged website design software.

Microsoft Expression Web 2.0 upgrade installation problems…

April 29, 2009 in Software, Website Design | No comments

MORE COMPUTER PROBLEMS!!!  All I do is google for solutions to my computer problems.

This latest problem started innocently enough.  I bought the upgrade to MS Expression Web, version 2, because it had PHP support, which I really needed. I had been using PHP Designer, but I decided to give Expression Web 2.0 a try.

But Expression Web 2.0 would not install, no matter what I did.  It seems Expression Web becomes a part of the MS Office suite when installed, and somehow, I have no IDEA how, my install of MS Office 2007 got corrupted. As a play on the the old saying “A fool and his money are soon parted”, my husband jokes that “A computer and Vivian and lots of software are soon together”.  So yeah, I put a lot of software on my computers.  I admit it. But Office had been working fine…

SO anyhow, after getting calling the Microsoft help line, and exchaning several emails with them, the solution was to do these steps below IN THE EXACT ORDER LISTED:

1) completely uninstall Expression Web 1.0.

2) uninstall MS Office 2007.  But, to completely uninstall MS Office 2007 correctly, I had to use a special tool from MS, even more secret than the Windows Clean Up Utility.  This was emailed to me by MS support.  It’s called Offscrub07.zip. Don’t use this tool unless you are sure you need to.

3) Install Expression Web 2.0.

4) Install MS Office 2007 again.

Good luck if you are having this problem.  This caused me days of frustration. ;-)

Making your website work for you

June 10, 2008 in Website Design | No comments

I am guest blogging today on Wet Noodle Posse’s blog. The article is all about how to get the most out of your website: how to design it right the first time, get more traffic, keep visitors coming back, and use statistics to monitor your site.

Expression Web Review update

August 30, 2007 in Software, Website Design | No comments

Well, after using Microsoft Expression Web for a while, I am changing my opinion somewhat… This program has a few significant bugs that need to be fixed before it will be useful at all.

1) Undo function:

Undo does not take you back one step in operations, it takes you all the way back to the state of the file when you opened the file, as if it were a ‘revert’ function, not an ‘undo’ function. Other people have seen this problem and some fixes are mentioned here, but I haven’t tried them yet:

http://blog.by-expression.com/index.php/undo-goes-to-far-in-expression-web/

2) Expression web inserts these characters: 

When EW saves a file that is PHP or CSS, it changes the encoding to  UTF-8 (BOM) from UTF-8….and there is no way to choose the encoding when you save…and this causes those 3 little characters to appear all over your website wherever the PHP pages are…

Thankfully, frontpagewebmaster.com found a solution.

I am pretty upset because I just wasted about 4 hours on these bugs, and I won’t be using Epression Web again for a while.

Competition for Dreamweaver?

July 29, 2007 in Website Design | No comments

Microsoft has finally come out with totally new website design program that allows you to design compliant sites!!!

Expression Web lets you do website design with CSS-based layouts, and has a new, awesome rendering engine that lets you truly see how your code will look in the browser as you are working on it.

I have just downloaded and installed Expression Web on my computer, and I will write a more detailed review of the program after I have had time to play with it.

UPDATE: I have just finished using this program for a little over an hour and a half, AND I LOVE IT!!!

If you have resisted learning Dreamweaver because you thought it was just too complicated or difficult to use, give Expression Web a try. Those of us who are used to the Microsoft interface for programs like MS Word and Excel will feel at home right away.

Expression Web highlights  non-compliant code in yellow, like Dreamweaver, and tells you what’s wrong. It lets you edit PHP pages within the design-view window. Also, if you hightlight a section of the page you are working on in the design-view window, it shows all the CSS styles associated with that class or ID, and you can change these styles on the fly….

For those of you who have ever used Frontpage, one of the biggest improvements of Expression Web over Frontpage is the ‘add hyperlink’ interface: when you highlight text to add a hyperlink in Expression Web, YOU CAN FINALLY PASTE THE LINK URL into the pop-up hyperlink dialog box!!! This alone makes it worth upgrading to Expression Web if you currently use Frontpage.

Also, if you are used to Frontpage, the learning curve for Expression Web will not be very steep.

If you code websites, try the demo version of this program and see how you like it.

 


 

home | about | services | portfolio | contact | blog | XHTML | CSS | RTPLinks.com

Copyright ©2004-2010, Electric Webs, Cary, NC.  All rights reserved. 

website design for Cary, NC, the Triangle, and the world...