Expression Web Designer is a professional design tool to help you create modern standards-based Web sites.

Expression Web Designer gives you all the tools you'll need to produce high-quality, standards-based Web sites the way you want them. Take advantage of the best of dynamic Web site design, enabling you to easily develop, design and maintain exceptional standards-based webpages.

Expression Web Designer helps you create and work with:
· Standards-based Web sites
· Sophisticated CSS-based layouts
· Extensive CSS formatting and management
· Rich data presentation
· Powerful ASP.NET 2.0-based technology

Here are some key features of "Microsoft Expression Web Designer":

· XHTML compliance
Design sites according to today's exacting standards with minimum effort by taking advantage of Web Designer's deep support for XHTML.

· Full schema support
Choose whatever schema you want to adopt, Web Designer builds appropriate code, and the compatibility checker highlights non-conformant custom code.

· Real-time standards validation
Receive instant feedback of standards violations so instant corrections can be made during the design process, whether in design or code view. Prevents time-consuming corrections at a later stage in the design.

· Accessibility checking
Use the built-in accessibility checker to make sure that Web sites can fully conform to accessibility standards for reading by screen readers, with support for WCAG and Section 508 standards.

· Professional design surface
Design high-quality Web sites and applications with a state-of-the-art, professional toolset and design surface that combines power with ease of use, allowing direct manipulation of margins and padding throughout the document.

· High-quality CSS rendering engine
Produce a faithful representation of the look of the final browser-rendered page with a powerful CSS rendering engine which allows design decisions to be made with confidence

· Standard or Quirks rendering
Render pages in Standard or Quirks mode depending on the doctype setting of the page for maximum browser compatibility.

· Site and page templates
Improve initial design productivity by starting with professionally designed templates that are fully XHTML and CSS compliant

· Tag property grid
Retrieve and set all valid properties for a selected tag. Access all the power of the HTML language through one palette.

· Intelligent CSS style creation
Focus on the design process and let Expression Web Designer take care of CSS style creation, avoiding repetitive style creation throughout your site.

· Drag-and-drop style management
Try out designs with local in-page CSS styles and then easily migrate styles to a central repository using drag and drop.

· Intelligent style renaming
Rename styles instantly without find and replace with locally stored site metadata recording all style usage.

· CSS reporting
View detailed reports on CSS style usage across sites in the Results pane to effectively manage the deployment of consistently styled pages.

· CSS design time preferences
Set preferences for exactly how CSS code is generated throughout an application to have complete control over Expression Web Designer code generation.

· Customized views of XML data
Design customized views of industry-standard XML data using powerful drag-and-drop tools to quickly achieve visualizations that conform to the CSS site design.

· XSL Transform support (XSLT)
Present data using XSLT, with support for editing views on live XML data to give designers full flexibility to represent XML data the way they choose.

· Powerful data manipulation
Fine-tune the raw data presented on the page with tools to sort, filter, and apply condition formatting.

· RSS Feeds
Retrieve and present XML data from live RSS feeds on your site, styled to match the look and feel of the site.

· Create and edit ASP.NET pages
Create, edit, and deploy Web pages with deep support for the newly released ASP.NET 2.0 standard. Capture the power of ASP.NET with the ease of use of drag-and-drop controls.

· Master Pages
Maintain the correct look of your site with the use of server-rendered ASP.NET Master Pages to speed up the design process and allow easy site-wide changes. Nested Master Pages allow complex designs to be maintained.

· ASP.NET controls
Access ASP.NET controls and their associated properties with the same power as Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 but rendered within the design surface of Web Designer.

· ASP.NET Development Server
Preview ASP.NET pages locally, without the need for a full Web server, with the ASP.NET Development Server, allowing design decisions to be made with full reference to the page's data.

· No code data binding
Use a drag-and-drop interface that accesses the power of ASP.NET with no coding requirement to visually bind data sources to controls on the design surface.


Requirements:

· To use ASP.NET-based features in Expression Web Designer CTP1, you need to download the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0

Hardware
· 233 MHz or higher processor
· 128 MB of RAM or higher
· 400 MB of available hard disk space

Video
· Super VGA (800 x 600) or higher-resolution video adapter and monitor

Web Browser
· Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 with SP1 or higher


Limitations:

· 30-day trial


NOTE: A product key is required for Expression Web 2. You can obtain a product key by visiting the Expression Web 2 product key page.