Ivan O'Donoghue - Expression Web Interview

Name: Ivan O'Donoghue
Country: Ireland
WebSite: https://iseek.ie/spiralli-business-solutions-ltd/
Focus: Web development, Content management systems

Expression Web Interview with Ivan O'Donoghue

Q 1. What do you use Expression Web for and which version do you use?

A. I use expression Web Studio 3 to design templates/websites from a sliced Photoshop file.

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

A. For those who work in the code view, the auto-complete feature is rather clever and context sensitive. It will save you time.

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

A. I'd like to see better support for the PHP language, with code reference and autocomplete/intellisense.

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

A. It might be nice to see some more developer specific tools - I'm thinking debugger integration/E-R and UML tools/language references, etc. Some of this could be achieved via an open API, similar to what is done with HTML-Kit.

Q 5. Have you found a feature within EW that you can't do without?

A. I'm growing quite fond of the Super Preview application, and overlaying screenshots from different browsers in a quest for pixel perfect accuracy can be addictive.

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

A. Dynamic web templates can be invaluable to ensure consistency of design, especially when large teams are working on design and page creation for the same project.

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

A .
a/ https://www.w3schools.com/
b/ https://code.tutsplus.com/
c/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/
d/ https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/
e/ https://www.webappers.com/

Q 8. What is the worst thing about Expression Web for you?

A. Understandably, it focuses on complementary Microsoft technologies. Regrettably, this means less of a focus on other open source technologies. For example the PHP features only scratch the surface.

Q 9. If you used FrontPage before using Expression Web did you find the migration easy? If you didn't use fp beforehand how did you start using Expression Web to begin with?

A. I received a license key through the spark initiative, and never used FrontPage.

Q 10. Do you have any general feedback about Expression Web that you would like to share?

A. I know that being used other tools; I naturally find it difficult to find the same features through the EW interface. Going beyond the issue of familiarity however, I do feel that certain features are nested too deep in menus, and the right click context menu could contain more useful features.