A brief introduction of Jim Cheshire and this month's Expression Web blog.
It’s a great time to be a web designer. Web sites are no longer comprised of static text with a sprinkling of graphics. Today’s sites are interactive applications in their own right. Audio and video have brought life to web pages. Server-side programming technologies have made it possible for e-commerce and other online applications to thrive. Ajax makes it possible to update a portion of a page without the user experiencing the full-page flash of a reload. Suffice it to say that today’s web designer can achieve just about anything he or she desires when it comes to designing a site.
This is just the kind of talk that excites those new to web design, right up until the point that he or she creates the first new page and sits staring at a blank screen. Talking about all of the amazing things that you can do with a web site is easy. Putting that talk into action is a lot more difficult.
A few years ago, Microsoft released a new web design application aimed at replacing the often maligned (and often justifiably so) Microsoft FrontPage. Microsoft’s goal was to focus on giving web designers a tool that would make it easier to design web sites that conform to modern web standards. Microsoft succeeded in that goal, but as with any other art form, the end result in web design is largely reliant on the skill and knowledge of the artist and not the tool used to decorate the canvas.
During the month of October, I’m going to be posting several blog posts with the goal of increasing your knowledge of Expression Web 3. My name is Jim Cheshire and I am the author of several books on FrontPage, Expression Web, and ASP.NET. My latest book, Microsoft Expression Web 3 In Depth, will be available soon. In the meantime, I hope you’ll visit this blog often during the month of October, and I sincerely hope that you’ll share your feedback with me and others in the Network World community.
If you have a topic suggestion for this blog, please feel free to contact me via my site, www.jimcobooks.com.
Jim
