Anna Ullrich - Expression Web Interview

Name: Anna Ullrich
Country: United States
WebSite: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/anna/
Focus: Education and experimentation

Q 1. Do you own and maintain your own Expression Web resource(s)?

A. Yes, my blog at Anna's Blog, and I help facilitate the team blog at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/xweb/

Q 2. Do you have a special tip for Expression Web you can share with our readers?

A . You can control how Expression Web formats your markup, including CSS. For example, by default, Expression Web inserts a line break after the opening curly brace { in a style declaration, and so the property/value pairs appear on the next line. This happens if you type a curly brace { in Code view and also when the program generates CSS for you if you're working in Design view. But you can change this behavior to suit the formatting that you prefer. Go to Tools > Page Editor Options. In the Page Editor Options dialog box, click the Code Formatting tab. In the CSS section in the lower part of the dialog, select opening brace and change the "Lines after" value to what you want and click OK. New style sheets will use that formatting. To apply your Code Formatting preferences to existing pages, right click in Code view and select Reformat HTML.

Q 3. What feature would you most like to see available within the next version of Expression Web and why?

A . I would like to click a button that makes all of my pages display the same no matter what browser, browser version, and o/s the page is viewed on. :)

Q 4. What Expression Web Add-on would you most like to see available and why?

A. A photo gallery generator that embeds a Silverlight photogallery widget in the page, or some kind of photo gallery feature. Also a CSS-based menu generator.

Q 5. As a Microsoft Moderator you participate online and answer many questions on Expression Web. What started you down this road and why?

A. I have a lot of empathy for software users and anyone who has reached a road block and is feeling frustrated. Plus it's fun troubleshooting markup and CSS problems. It's really satisfying to figure out a fix for someone and see them rejoicing about it.

Q 6. What Expression Web or Web design good practices do you recommend our readers follow?

A. While Expression Web will help ensure your markup is good and standards-based, the program can't ensure your website is designed well...meaning in terms of things like aesthetics, usability, etc. So read up on graphic design and keep up with websites that showcase well-designed websites to help inspire you.

Q 7. What five sites do you recommend should be in our readers web design arsenal?

A .
a/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/
b/ https://webdesignerwall.com/
c/ https://www.456bereastreet.com/
d/ https://snook.ca/
e/ https://alistapart.com/

Q 8. Do you have any luminaries within Expression Web and the Web Design industry in general and who do you model your practices after?

A. Yes, Steve, Erik, Tyler, Andrew, Boris, Sayuri, Alex, Priya, Michael, Vinny, Tomas, Paul, Tom, David, Ken, Matt, Greg, Amol, Luis, Pam, John, Cagri, Soban, Vijay and Eric

Q 9. What advice would you give to readers who are used to using the wizards and bots of FrontPage and want to move to Expression Web and a more user friendly site?

A. Depending on how you constructed your website, you may find it much more efficient to rebuild your websites from scratch with Expression Web rather than try to take existing pages that you created with FrontPage and upgrade their markup with Expression Web.

Q 10. Can you tell our readers of any upcoming Expression Web activities or just launched projects you have planned?

A. The entire Expression Web team is actively blogging now at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/xweb/ . Also, I'm currently leading an initiative to have a subsite that's a part of Microsoft Expression that will be dedicated solely to support FrontPage users transitioning from FrontPage to Expression Web.