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I have transitioned into a new role. For the latest on Expression, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/expression
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Microsoft Expression Web is now available for purchase (as of Dec 4th, 2006) for $299 US. Microsoft FrontPage customers can upgrade for US $99. For full pricing, availability, and new information about the product, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/expression which has recently been updated.
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New Expression Web Designer demo/training videos are now available on http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/web_designer/demos.mspx?v=wd_layout
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Great article by Marius Bancila
Getting Acquainted With The Microsoft Expression Family
CodeGuru - 6/9/2006
See an overview presentation on the three tools from the Microsoft Expression family: Expression Graphic Designer, Expression Interactive Designer, and Expression Web Designer.
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We are pleased to present the very first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Expression Web Designer.
- To use ASP.NET-based features in Expression Web Designer CTP1, you need to download the Microsoft .NET Framework (see link below).
- To uninstall Expression Web Designer CTP1, use the Control Panel (Start | Control Panel) instead of running the setup again.
Expression Web Designer CTP1 contains a known issue that causes the Help viewer to prevent you from downloading the latest version of Help.
CTP Resources
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Microsoft has posted videos from all sessions at Mix06. These include demos of Expression Web Designer among other cool demonstrations and keynotes.
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After nearly a decade of innovations, FrontPage will be discontinued in late 2006. But we won’t stop supporting the product. Nor are we ignoring the needs of our existing FrontPage customers. Four new products will meet their diverse needs as well as those of professional web designers and developers.
- Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Designer 2007
- Microsoft® Expression™ Web Designer
- Microsoft® Visual Studio 2005
- Microsoft® Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition
Which tool is right for you?
· Use Office SharePoint® Designer 2007 if you are a solution creator using SharePoint technologies.
· Use Expression™ Web Designer if you are a professional Web Designer building standards based, broad reach CSS/XHTML Web sites.
· Use Visual Studio 2005 if you are a Web developer who wants to build high performance, robust, and enterprise ready Web applications with ASP.NET 2.0.
· Hobbyists and enthusiasts can also get Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition which is a new, easy to use, and easy to learn development for building Web sites.
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Rich versus Reach – We know that the richer a website, the poorer its reach. The Holy Grail for all websites of course is attaining the max value for (Rich) x (Reach) i.e. Maximum richness combined with maximum reach.
For the sake of discussion, let’s call the product of Richness x Reach of a website the RicRe value of a website.
Today,
- Web sites built with Windows Presentation Foundation will have the maximum richness but the poorest reach.
- Web sites built with Macromedia Flash will have very high richness plus impressive reach
- Web sites built with AJAX will have impressive richness with extremely high reach
It’s hard to determine which of the above three options will have the highest RicRe value.
What is the RicRe value for your website?
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How should we measure the richness of a website?
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How should we measure the reach of a website?
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One key facet of designing a great user experience on a website is paying attention to the website's 'conversion rates'. Conversion rate is the rate at which users on a website perform a desired action. Reading Jesse James Garret’s book on User Experience last night, I started thinking about the conversion rates for different kinds of websites.
For a retail site like Amazon.com, the conversion rate measures how many visitors actually purchase a product.
For a news and information site like cnn.com, conversion rate measures how many people sign up to receive email newsletters and become a part of the CNN news community.
For a customer support site like support.dell.com, the conversion rate measures how many people actually found the answer they were looking for.
As you design your websites, make sure you know what your conversion rate will measure, the target conversion rates, the actual conversion rates etc. Make sure you build features into your website to effectively measure and report progress on the conversion rate. This can help you design an effective user experience.
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I am compiling a list of schools that teach User Interface design. Can you please send me the name of a school that offers courses in User Interface design at the Bachelors and Master's level?
thanks
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I think most of us are convinced that conformance to web standards is a good thing. Professional designers will learn about web standards on the job but students have to be taught about web standards by their respective schools. To efficiently teach all students, it becomes imperative that we educate web design teachers in the usage of web standards. How should we go about educating educators about web standards?
I have a few suggestions:
- Create a ‘Continued Professional Education’ type examination for web design teachers. The Web Standards Projects’ Education Task Force could administer these exams. In fact a ‘Web Standards’ based exam will be useful for all design professionals.
- Encourage companies like Microsoft, Adobe and others to host sessions for web design teachers at their design conferences.
- Work with web design schools to change their curriculum, making it mandatory for teachers to teach web standards.
Other ideas?
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Last week we unveiled plans for two new products – Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 and Microsoft Expression Web Designer. Expression Web Designer is focused on the needs of professional Web designers seeking to build high-quality, standards-based Web sites for companies. It provides exceptional support for integrating XML, CSS, ASP.NET 2.0, XHTML and other standard Web technologies into sites to make them more dynamic, interactive and accessible. SharePoint Designer 2007 is for information workers in an enterprise who are creating and customizing Microsoft SharePoint Web sites and building workflow-enabled applications on SharePoint Products and Technologies.
For more information:
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The first Community Technology Preview for Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer is now available online. This release is accompanied by the fourth preview of Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer. Designers can now save graphics as XAML code for integration with Visual Studio and Expression Interactive Designer.
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Brian Goldfarb, my colleague on the ASP.NET team recently attended a web design conference. One of the things that stood out in his report was the following data:
· Response time limits:
· 0.1 seconds. Limit for having a user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously.
· 1.0 seconds. Limit for user's flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay.
· 10 seconds. Limit for keeping the user's attention focused on the dialog. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback indicating when the computer expects to be done.
Web Designers may want to start paying close attention to this kind of data. Client side applications have long provided instant feedback when the user interacts with any UI element. Broadband access and AJAX now enables web designers to provide a similar experience. After clicking on an image hot spot in a web page, users will no longer have to guess -- "Did I click that or not?"
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The W3Schools site reports that more computers are using a display resolution of 1024x768 pixels or higher. 53% users had 1024x768 in Jan 2005 but the number rose to 55% by July 2005. As a web designer, what resolution do you use as the target to optimize your designs?
