Microsoft Expression Studio 4 Web Professional

The biggest and most powerful app isn't always the one that works best for you?and the app that proves that point for me is Microsoft's Expression Studio 4 Web Professional?($149 direct; upgrade $79). In the small field of website editors, Adobe's Dreamweaver continues to hold the lead in its range of features and power, and Dreamweaver CS6 ($399.99; upgrade $199.00, direct, 4 stars) is the first Web editor that's fully at home in a world where cutting-edge designers need to build sites for phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. But, for me, Expression Web is still the app I choose for editing websites.

Laptop Friendly
I don't design enterprise-level sites, the kind that Dreamweaver is ideal for?and that Expression Web can also build?but I want a flexible and straightforward set of tools for working with current Web technologies, and Expression Web offers exactly that. With all its strengths, Dreamweaver sometimes seems sprawling and muscle-bound, and it works well only when you give it more screen space than you have on a laptop. Expression Web feels at home on both a desktop monitor and a cramped laptop. I also like the fact that Expression Web costs less than half the price of Dreamweaver.

Expression Web 4 is one of three components in a package called Expression Studio 4 Web Professional , which also includes Expression Encoder (also available as a free download), a limited tool for encoding AVI and QuickTime video into Windows Media format, and Expression Design, a vector-graphics program that can import Photoshop assets. This review covers Expression Web 4 only.

Features
I sometimes think Expression Web is Microsoft's best-kept secret. Its feature set is smaller than Dreamweaver's, but everything is easy to find and intuitively easy to use. The main editing screen, as in Dreamweaver, can display a code view or editable WYSIWYG view of your page, or it can split to show both views side by side. A separate, uneditable "snapshot" view displays the current page as it will appear in a browser. A terrific fine-tuning feature is the SuperPreview window that lets you preview your site in multiple browsers at once, including any browsers on your disk and multiple browser versions hosted at Microsoft. SuperPreview includes an optional tree-style view of the elements in your page, so you can navigate through the page elements to find the one that causes layout problems in specific browsers. This feature outclasses the similar BrowserLab in Dreamweaver.

Like Dreamweaver, Expression Web surrounds the main editing window with tabbed controls for selecting files, applying CSS styles, inserting tags and form controls, and other features. All these panels make clever use of limited screen space?for example, the Folder List tab displays a tiny thumbnail of the selected image file, making it easy to select the right asset to insert on a page. Expression Web's menu system is mostly spare and easily navigable, compared with the cascade of choices in Dreamweaver, which has 35 items on its View menu.

The first release of Expression Web 4 came out two years ago, but both Service Pack 1 and the recent Service Pack 2 add enough features and conveniences that Microsoft would have been justified in promoting each one as a new release. The latest version (like Dreamweaver) includes surprisingly flexible and intuitive IntelliSense support for jQuery scripts, making it easy to create custom-styled lightbox-style images and other modern design features.

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