Microsoft Expression Web and Expression Media are two applications that I hoped would fill important needs for me. For two separate sets of reasons, I don’t think my needs will be met.

Expression Web is a capable editor that has many of the niceties of an app like Dreamweaver. Expression’s use of dynamic web templates means that you can build a site and make changes to certain elements (headers, navigation) in a central place that automatically get inherited to all child pages. It also has a decent file management interface which is compatible with FTP, WebDAV, etc. GoLive and other tools do this as well. I don’t see what exactly makes this tool worth the $300 price tag. I suppose if your sites are heavily reliant on Frontpage today, this makes sense. I’d rather use a free template-based tool and split off the file management portion for that money. I take hope from this blog that either NVu or the Seamonkey Composer application will see big improvements soon.

Expression Media is probably more of an inevitability than the Web product. iView Media Pro has been discontinued so if we want to maintain support I’m sure we’ll eventually need to move to the MS version. However, from reading the support forums and newsgroups it does not look like this is the time to move. Longtime iView users claim that the same bugs from iView 3 are still there in the new version! The only reported major new feature is Silverlight export. I don’t see how photographers and content managers will care about producing Silverlight content.

For now I will pass on both products.