Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Expression Web 2 in 24 Hours (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: manage styles, tag properties, page properties, Expression Web, Server Extensions, Quick Tag Selector (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

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

About the Author

Morten Rand-Hendriksen is the owner and creative director of Pink & Yellow Media, a design company that provides digital media creations for small businesses and television. Through the years he has had many different titles: photographer, studio musician, composer, politician, writer, jeweler, philosopher, artist, and university senate member. But it is in the role of a designer he feels truly at home (at least for the moment).

 

Morten started designing websites back in 1997, but it wasn’t until he moved to Canada in 2002 that he really started to focus on web design as a possible career (surprisingly there were few job listings for Norwegian philosophy majors in Vancouver at the time). Over the years he has worked with many different technologies, but after being introduced to Expression Web 2 he has shifted the focus of the web part of his business almost exclusively to the art of CSS and blog design. Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Expression Web 2 in 24 Hours is his first published book. You can also find his tutorials and other design-related musings on his blog at http://blog.pinkandyellow.com and in many different forums and newsgroups throughout the Web. If you have any questions relating to the book, you can contact Morten by writing to [e-mail].

 

 

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Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Sams; 1 edition (October 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0672330296
• ISBN-13: 978-0672330292
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #350,350 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Just the book I needed!, January 13, 2009

By	R. Pennoyer - See all my reviews

Starting out in Expression Web can be intimidating - certainly it was for me. I had very little experience in HTML, a fresh copy of the program on my screen, and a major project to accomplish. Rand-Hendriksen's text turned out to be just what I needed. The first chapter ("hour 1") provides the reader with a helpful orientation to the program's workspace. But starting with chapter 2 the real strength of the text comes through as the author leads the student through the development an actual practice website (and a few related side projects). I found this "learning by doing" to be very helpful. I worked through most of the chapters/hours, only skipping one or two of the most advanced that I knew were not applicable to my project. Throughout the author proves himself to be a good teacher using both descriptive text and relevant illustrations, and only in a few places do I wish he had added further explanation. After finishing the text I was able to build a 22 page web site, featuring CSS and drop down menus.

As good as it is, the text could be strengthened in a few ways. First, it probably should include an annotated bibliography. Since the text is not a reference work, students should use it in tandem with a book of that type like Elizabeth Castro's HTML, XHTML, and CSS which I found helpful. Nor is it a book on web artistry, for which I can appreciate (but not emulate) Jason Beaird in his The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. Second, I would add a few pages at the end of the book that would function almost as checklist to help the student start out on their own project. That would make the transition seamless from practice to the real thing. Finally, with a book of this detail there are naturally some typos which I hope will be corrected in a new edition.

The book was designed to help novice web designers really get off the ground. It succeeds admirably.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not for Everyone, March 11, 2009

By	Edward J. Steffes (Salisbury, MD USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars 5 BIG STARS!!!, February 8, 2009

By	Emmett Moore (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I tried all of previous Web Expression 2 books. This is the best...dont even waste your time with the others. This is the only one that takes you from start to finish on a brand spanking new website. If you have no idea about websites or code, then this book will do the trick.

5 big stars!