Yes, listen up developers! You can view .PSD files that designer gives to you without installing Adobe Photoshop :)

4. Lots of Report for Optimizing Your Site

Now here’s my favourite part. For every web designers & developers, optimizing web is a MUST. We need to make sure that the site we build are highly accessible and support cross-browser compatibility. Usually we choose any of the following schema (HTML, XHTML, Strict/Transitional/Frameset plus CSS 1.0, 2.0, or 2.1), and then check to see if our code meets its standard. Well good news, Expression Web 3 provides a built-in support for this, it has an awesome “checker” which highlights the non-standard element and then generate  reports out of it (could be in HTML like the screenshots).

Basically there are 3 types of report generated: Compatibility Report, Accessibility Report, and CSS Report.

1. Compatibility Checker – checks pages & CSS files for code that is incompatible with the doctype & schema specified.

2. Accessibility Checker – checks pages for accessibility issue (conflict with the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which has 2 level of priority, read more about it). This way it can help improve the site visitor experience for people with disabilities.

3. CSS Reports – generate a complete list of Unused Styles, Undefined Classes, and Mismatched Case in you websites.

And finally, to cover it all, there’s also a feature for generating SITE REPORT. Site reports summarize the whole site statistics, such as number of slow pages (this is very useful!), broken/unverified hyperlinks, master pages, unlinked files, etc. Using this statistics you can see how much space your site is taking on the webserver. Really, you should try it! On the ‘Site View’ tab, point directly to the bottom and click the third tab, ‘Reports’. Voila, as easy as that.. :)

5. Import Photoshop (.PSD) Files

At first I was so excited reading this: 

“Expression Web can import Photoshop files directly with complete control over transparency and full control over cropping, slicing, & layer importing. Expression Web remembers your layer and format settings so that you can quickly reimport to reflect any changes to the Photoshop original.”

 I thought i would be able to slice .PSD files in Expression Web, but then i realized i was wrong. False alarm guys.

Truth is, you can ONLY import .PSD files to convert it to external images as JPG, GIF, or PNG.

Of course you have full control of choosing which layer to show/hide, and also option for reducing the JPEG quality to reduce size. I guess this feature somehow appeared to be utilized ONLY by developers (or anyone with no Adobe products on their computer :p), because I still think many designers would prefer doing the whole IMAGE COMPRESSING via “Save for Web & Devices” dialog inside Photoshop itself. See the comparison I made below:

See the point? Why would you insert a 276KB image when you can have the 57KB instead?

Yes, the “Import Photoshop” dialog in Expression 3 isn’t very helpful. Even if you don’t have PSD Editor you can always ask for a SMALLER file size to your designer right? Come on, it can’t even resize :p  Maybe this feature is meant for inserting SMALL media images such as website navigation and buttons? Maybe. What do you think?

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Finally, that’s a quick round-up of  5 essential features of Expression Web 3 to help you improve web-dev process.

My conclusion? Simply put, Expression Web 3 makes my work easier and more convenient.. It is fast, handy to keep you on track with global Web Standards, also prevent you from getting busy switching one browser to another. Let’s keep hoping that the Redmond team will soon enables support for other browser such as Chrome & Safari :)

Have been using it too for your website project? Share your experience with me in comments.

Cheers!

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