Introduction
Developing a Website is more complex than simply using a HTML export
filter from a desktop publishing package or word processor. Website professionals
must take on board a whole raft of techniques, standards and legislation
and still produce a product which meets the creative aspirations of both
the client and the design team.
One only has to use analysis tools on websites revealed using a Google
search to realise that there are many websites in use which do not meet
the latest standards. Many sites don't just fail to comply with basic page
formatting standards, such as HTML, XHTML or CSS, but they fail to meet
accessibility criteria. We are not just talking about client websites; we
are talking about the home pages of some website design companies. One cannot
really defend this, however, some of the problems are caused by a reliance
on development tools which do not work well with the latest standards and
techniques. This could be due to a lack of support (e.g. FrontPage®
2003) or it could be by virtue of the overly complex and non-intuitive nature
of configuration for the tools themselves.
This tutorial requires the participant to have a good knowledge of XHTML,
CSS and Website Accessibility standards. It also assumes that you can work
with XHTML and CSS code in a text editing environment. The aim is to demonstrate
that high-end visual tools can be used to develop standards based accessible
websites with minimal recourse to use of the text-based code view.
Microsoft® Expression® Web Designer
There are many WYSIWYG Web page/site editing tools, the market leader
being Adobe® Dreamweaver®. However, the majority (including
Dreamweaver®) carry a lot of legacy support baggage and as a
result provide an overly complex interface and toolset. Microsoft®
Expression® Web Designer (EWD) has been built specifically to
work with current standards and its toolset is optimised to work with the
latest techniques and practices.
A 60 day trial version of the software is available for download from
Microsoft's website (as of January 2007). Student licenses are also available
as well as competitively priced upgrades from FrontPage.
This tutorial will explore the features of
EWD that make it suitable
for the development of websites based on sound engineering principles and
current practice.