# Expression or SharePoint Designer?



## pianogirl68 (Aug 12, 2007)

I've spent the past year helping our faculty and staff of 60 learn to use FrontPage in creating an online presence for their classes. Now MS is discontinuing the software, so I'm going to have to start all over. None of the faculty members are ever going to be designer gurus, but they need a program that has a very short learning span for the basics. Of the two MS products (Expression or SharePoint Designer), can someone recommend one over the other as far as its' ease of use and perhaps similarity to FrontPage? Or is there another program that will be comparable, without having to completely redesign everything they've created thus far???


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## DonaldG (Aug 23, 2007)

I would suggest that you take a look at Adobe Dreamweaver. It has the ability to design in pure WYSIWYG or in HTML or both, depending on the ability of the user.

There will be a learning curve, but hopefully not to hard - If the principle have been acquired using MS FrontPage, then they should reasonably translate over to Dreamweaver (as long as you do not use the Front Page Extensions.)

See:
http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/?ogn=EN_US-gntray_prod_dreamweaver_home


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## Redcore (Aug 14, 2007)

SharePoint Designer is basically FrontPage for the SharePoint portal system. It is not intended for web design anymore...just for development in SharePoint.

I would have to say that Dreamweaver is the best choice as well. There is definitely a learning curve but learning those features won't impede what you need to get done with the skills you have currently. The software will become more valuable to you as you learn it. You'll be able to do everything you need to right out of the gate because of it's WYSIWYG editor.

Microsoft Expressions Web is a whole new revamped web software - and I mean redeveloped from the code base up. Given that, I'm sure that it's learning curve is comparable to that of Dreamweaver simply because Expressions is not at all like FrontPage.

FrontPage tended to inject it's own codes into web documents - making them very unclean (I call them ugly) ... so your site(s) should not have to be redone, but you may have to pick through them and clean em up a bit.


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## pianogirl68 (Aug 12, 2007)

Thanks Donald and RedCore. I knew I had DreamWeaver to fall back on, but I was hoping there was something easier. It's not THAT hard, but you don't know these folks. There are maybe 5 who are actively using FrontPage now, and the remaining 30 or so who trained on it still have problems just remembering how to put in a hyperlink. Maybe this summer I can do some inservice with them :sigh:


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## Redcore (Aug 14, 2007)

Eek. I don't know those folks - but I know a lot like them. I suppose you'd need to develop a basic curriculum to get them going - like inserting hyperlinks. A good source for some class material might be Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Classroom in a Book ... or you can make your own.

I personally feel that once you find your way around Dreamweaver, it's more user friendly than Microsoft FrontPage.


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