FREE Dreameweaver Alternative

(Sorry mac users, Move along, these are not the freebies you are looking for... LOL)

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/ (link on right side of the page for Expression Web 4)

Some of you may have already heard of Microsoft's (see I warned you mac users) Expression Studio. Well at the end of last year, they kinda forked the product. The "goodies that they will keep developing" will be put into Visual Studio, However they also released Expression Web 4 for FREE.

While it may not develop any further that the version out there, it is a pretty darn good what is offered compared to Dreamweaver, some of the big things people might like:

1. Site management, set up a site with files on your machine to easily upload them to the server and manage multiple sites

2. Being able to do Vidual view as well as Code view (code view is great for doing things such as .php, .asp, .js, .css files) with syntax color highlight and code hinting for you. The code hinting is very nice as you are getting used to coding

3. For simple static sites, they appear to use Dreamweaver based templates (DTW) that let you manage a small static site very easily.

4. Drag and drop from your file viewer. Example: you are working on a site, and need an image on the page using the IMG tag you can just drag it over to the page (even in CODE view) and it prompts you for ALT then auto fills in path height width)

So if you like the idea of Dreamweaver, this has a lot of the same functionality, again 100% FREE from Microsoft, if you can stand that.

Oh, one other nice thing they give you , Expression SuperView. Many people forget to cross check when making a site, they figure "looks good in what I'm using" and skip everything else, othe y they just view it in browsers they have. BUT one thing to keep in mind, is that until recently, Microsoft had a bad habit of changing the way things rendered across different version of IE. SuperView lets you view a page in IE6, IE7, IE8, IE* rendering as IE7, and IE9. VERY NICE (although I say ignore IE6, it is dead to the world of developers, IE 7 getting close, but a lot of business that have systems locked down still have it)

Another thing in the link they have is to Expression Design, which looks to be an object based graphic program, I didn't dive into it much, but for being free. Normally for people looking for basic image editing for free, I recommend Paint.NET (not to be confused as being from Microsoft). This may be a new good alternative. (The link to Expression Design is on the right as well, down towards the bottom)

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/