Reporting

Expression Web includes great reporting tools to help you identify problems with your site, without wading through megabytes of code. In the Tools menu you can find options for running accessibility reports which will point out code which could make it hard for people with disabilities to use your site. There's also an option for running compatibility reports to make sure your code is compliant with rules for HTML, IE (going back as far as IE 3.2!) and XHTML.

The option that I use the most from the Tools menu, however, is the CSS Reports menu item that helps clean up your CSS stylesheet. For example, you can track CSS elements that are defined on the stylesheet but not used anywhere on your site, elements that are called in the HTML but not defined on the stylesheet, and instances where you might have a case incompatibility (such as .red on the stylesheet and class="Red" in the HTML) which will make your code not work.

Even more valuable than tracking the CSS errors is the ability to track the CSS usage. You can find out precisely where each style is used by page and line number and where on the stylesheet it is defined, information that comes in very useful when you're going back to edit something you haven't worked on in a while.

You'll find more reports under the Site menu. The Reports menu item has a submenu which gives you options to find problems such as unlinked files, slow pages (you even get to define what file size is considered a "slow" page) and hyperlinks. This makes it a lot easier to manage your sites.

Do you need to delete a page from your site? A Hyperlinks menu item gives you a quick view of which pages link to a particular page and which pages (or external sites) a page links to. That way you can go back and make changes to avoid broken links on your site.

Keeping it Clean

Another great feature that Expression Web has is the ability to clean up the code. If you've ever been handed some pages to edit that were obviously created in early WYSIWYG editors that produced bloated code, you'll appreciate this feature. Under the Tools menu is an option to Optimize HTML. When you click on that menu item, a dialog box will pop up with choices for removing comments, removing whitespace, removing unused content (such as empty tags and unused styles) and even removing generated HTML. Now just because you design in an editor doesn't mean you have to live with bloated code.

The power of ASP.NET

One final advantage of working with Expression Web is the ability to integrate with an ASP.NET site. If you have the .NET framework installed on your computer, you can add any ASP.NET control to an .aspx page simply from the Insert menu.

When you're working with ASP.NET sites, Expression Web works easily with both Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer. In fact, the Expression documentation even suggests designing the page, including the controls, in Expression Web, and then opening it in Visual Studio to code and debug them.

Try it; you'll like it

I've touched on some of the great features of Expression Web, but there are a lot more.

You can currently download a trial version from Microsoft and also find links for where to purcahse it. I highly recommend giving it a try and seeing how it can help you.