As I was making the move to Microsoft and the Expression Web team, a number of people asked what drew me to Expression Web.  A notion that I believe in with software is that over time, software quality decreases if you are not paying ample attention to it – software entropy.  I think this is something that everyone who has been on a software project over time knows.  With things like DI, Unit Testing and Continuous Integration, we incorporate tools that promote code quality and even set bars before checkins occur.  This keeps everyone’s eyes on quality based on the checks being done during build time.  Now why can’t we have this with our website design?  This is a key area where Expression Web fit into the picture for me because Expression Web offers up a series of reports for CSS, accessibility and compatibility.

CSS

Good design and up-to-date CSS takes a lot of time to get it right – not only on the first release but on subsequent releases.  Expression Web is really focused first and foremost on standards based design – and that’s a great place to start.  To my earlier point about software quality decreasing over time if people aren’t paying attention to it, Expression Web performs quality checks on your CSS that you can run at any time.  If you have styles that are no longer being used or they are causing problems due to composition, you get notified right away instead of finding out through diagnosing an edge-case problem on one of your target browsers. 

Compatibility – Again, while Expression Web takes a standards-focus design approach, you can tell Expression Web that you are interested in particular targets – say CSS 2.1 and XHTML 1.0 Strict.  As with the CSS Reports, you receive errors and warnings that take you to code that is in violation. 

Accessibility – Good website design requires making sure that the site is accessible to all people.  So making sure that images are properly tagged for screen readers and that dynamic menus degrade gracefully is incredibly important in this line of work.  Just recently, our locally headquartered Target Corp settled a lawsuit over accessibility. Expression Web floats errors and warnings about accessibility that you can run at any time on the site you are creating.  And whether you are getting version 1.0 of your site ready for the world or you are pushing version 3.3 out the door, being able to answer questions about accessibility is something  that benefits your product, your customers and their customers. 

So that's one big reason why I made the jump.  For me, I see an exciting product addressing very real needs and exciting directions for the future!