Microsoft Expression Web quietly went gold in December 2006. Made available to US customers the same month, UK users had to wait until the end of January. It was worth it. Microsoft has created a tool that will satisfy a discerning camp of users.

Replacing Microsoft FrontPage, Expression Web is a genuine, professional website development tool, built from the ground up. Though some template-based design features are retained, such as Master Pages, which apply a pre-defined layout to your entire site, the emphasis is now on CSS layout tools and dynamic, .NET-driven development.

When you fire up, there's a Folder List pane on the left - where it was in FrontPage. But where FrontPage actively hid your code, Web exposes every tag and property through a series of task panes. Tag Properties is always on, allowing you to change the attributes of any element contextually without direct coding.

Page creation

In the middle of the workspace is a large active document view, which can be alternated or split between design and coding views. On the right, we have the heavy-duty page-building commands. The Toolbox task pane lists HTML tags, form components and dynamic controls in a hierarchical tree, ready to drag and drop into the document window. Finally, we have Apply and Manage Styles panes complete with live previews of the formatting each existing class contains. CSS creation, layout and tweaking tools are at the forefront of Expression Web.

CSS layout layers now have their own task pane as well as a place in the main Toolbox. The execution is similar to Dreamweaver, with one key enhancement: in Expression Web, margins and padding can be altered visually in the document window. You can alter the same attributes in the CSS properties or Apply Styles pane.

Microsoft has been clever enough to keep things that worked in FrontPage. CSS for text styles can be generated automatically using Office-style formatting tools, and New Styles can be created from scratch in the Apply Styles pane. Usefully, embedded and inline styles can be dragged and dropped into any attached external style sheet.

Like Dreamweaver, there are Visual Aids accessible through the View menu - colour-coded outlines that show you where CSS blocks and other attributes are in your page.