/Expression/ Ed Meadows

26/10/2009 | Filed under Discover > Expression

We get the inside story on Microsoft’s Expression Web from Ed Meadows, Senior Product Manager

Ed has managed professional creative and authoring tools for about 20 years, including many years at Aldus and Adobe Systems. Ed has also been a founder in three startups and has launched 11 v1.0 products.

.net: How did you come to join Microsoft and the Expression Web team?

EM: I originally came to Microsoft 7 years ago from Adobe to launch Microsoft OneNote v1.0.

I’ve worked on and been passionate about authoring tools most of my career and have always enjoyed the work that my customers create with my products. So, I’d been tracking Expression Web since it was but a gleam in someone’s eye and I dogged the Expression marketing team until they hired me a few years ago.

.net: How have you gone about promoting Expression Web to designers?

EM: We’ve promoted Expression Web through online marketing, events, community efforts, and other tactics. And we have made the $79 (USD) upgrade price available to owners of a certain other company’s products.

.net: It’s fair to say that many web designers have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft products. Is this something you’ve chosen to tackle head on?

EM: Well, I certainly understand that most designers don’t think of Microsoft as offering tools that they would use. But, we’re early in our game here, just having shipped version 3.0 and we’ll continue to innovate at a very rapid pace. And designers are just now becoming aware of our offerings. The designers that I’ve talked with who have tried or used Expression Web have been pleasantly surprised at the depth of the tool.

.net: What are your favourite features in the latest version of Expression Web?

EM: I actually have two favorites: 1) SuperPreview, because it saves so much cross-browser debugging time, and 2) the CSS properties palette, which saves time by visually displaying the CSS cascade, helping diagnose problems with CSS rules and properties

.net: Why should designers use Expression Web over other site building tools?

EM: Expression Web was built explicitly from the beginning to support modern Web standards. Web standards were not something we thought about later and then bolted in.

Designers can have confidence that what they see on the design surface is what they will get in the browser because we base the design surface on the page’s doctype. So, designers can have the freedom to change the design on the fly without worrying about the underlying code. The practical benefit is that the CSS/HTML is very clean, which reduces browser rendering issues and improves page display performance.

What we’ve heard from our customers is that SuperPreview not only helps them see errors in Web page rendering on multiple browsers, but that it makes it easy to find the offending page elements and quickly fix the problem.

From our research, we know that designers use multiple tools to build Web sites. While I’d love Expression Web to be the only Web design tool they use, I’d really like designers to just try Expression Web with the free 60-day trial and tell us what they think.

.net: What’s exciting you about the state of web design in 2009?

EM: For me, it’s the richness of user experiences that are possible on the Web today because of tools that make it easier to implement a designers’ vision without compromise. It used to be that designers would have their designs modified by developers for any number of reasons; now with tools like Expression Web, that compromise isn’t necessary.

.net: How has Expression Web been received?

EM: Expression Web has been well received by press, customers, and partners alike.

.net: SuperPreview is a cracking tool. Are there any plans to incorporate all major browsers into the free version?

EM: Thanks. Yes, we’ve gotten great feedback about SuperPreview and how it solves a key productivity issue for Web developers and designers. We know that designers and developers test their Web sites on more browsers than we currently support and we’re working to address that.

Please note that the version of SuperPreview in Expression Web supports both IE and Firefox browsers; the free version of SuperPreview for IE supports only IE.

.net: Are there any exciting new developments you can tell us about?

EM: Yes, we’ve got some exciting upcoming developments, but we’re not ready to talk about them just yet. Please stay tuned.