UPDATED March 18th, 2012

This book is based on our You Tube videos but goes into more detail and is, of course, a book and a lot more portable. We spent over a year working on it and hope you'll consider getting yourself a copy. We wrote this book as if we were advising a friend on how to build a website. We never make the claim that this is the only book you will ever need and that it will teach you everything you will ever need to know. It is simply meant to teach you some basics, from start to finish, and get you up and running. In fact, in the book itself, we make very specific recommendations about other resources you will probably need.

On Amazon, someone recently posted a review and advised people to save their money and buy a more expensive book somewhere else. We feel this is misguided advice because if you follow it, you will not only be depriving yourself of our best advice to you as a friend, you will lose out on learning our tips for saving time and money. You can save $8.99 and not buy the book, but then spend ten times that on things you don't really need. That's the crazy thing about taking a critic's advice---you won't know how bad it is until it's too late!

We are quite familiar with all the Expression Web books out there, and while they are bigger than ours and fine for what they are, our book stands alone in its brief, but common-sense approach. We wanted to keep things simple and focused on quality of information, not quantity. For ourselves, we would rather buy a small book filled with actionable information than a big book with interesting but inactionable details. Both books have their place; it just depends on what you want. For instance, none of the Expression Web books, for as big as they are, goes into the detail we do about hosting accounts, but knowing how that works is absolutely critical to getting your site up and running and that's why we included it in the book!

As far as the price of the book goes, we priced it at only $8.99 (a couple gallons of gas!) because we felt that was a reasonable price for the amount of information you get and the time it took to put the project together. You should also know that we only get a small portion from each sale, and the publisher gets more than two-thirds. It is not like we are sipping champagne and cruising on a yacht somewhere, although that would be nice.

If you get the book but don't happen to like it, please feel free to give us constructive feedback and/or email us with any unanswered questions you might have. We always try to respond and help people out.

If you get the book and do like it, then by all means, please write a review and share what you liked with others. We could use some positive feedback every now and then!

If we have learned one thing as a result of this experience, it is that you can please some of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time. Just the same, we'd be lying if we said getting a less-than-favorable review doesn't hurt just a little, but when the reviewer gives bad advice on top of that, well, that's just wrong.

We just hope you are able to see beyond the naysayers and will draw your own conclusions.

Thank you for your continued support!

How To Build A Website Fast Using Expression Web

Unfortunately, we have been getting bombarded with amazing amounts of SPAM and found it necessary to implement a CAPTCHA service. In looking at everything that is available, reCAPTCHA seems to be a very easy to use alternative. If you want a SPAM blocker that is effective and simple to install, you really can't go wrong with this. And the best thing is it is entirely free. In a way, much of the SPAM seemed harmless enough, but there was just way too much of it. One of our entries had 1,600 comments and sad to say, most of it was SPAM!

You can check out reCaptcha here.

We just uploaded a video on how to build a form with multiple fields and send the data using the PHP mail function. As you might know, Front Page Extensions is going away and at some point, you will be forced to use PHP or ASP.net to create functional forms.

We like PHP because it is relatively easy to learn and allows you to create a form without having to link to a database, even though you might want to do that at some point if you start collecting a ton of data. 

If you are going to learn PHP, we highly recommend this book:

Head First PHP & MySQL

This book is extremely well written and walks you through a variety of functions you are likely to use on most any website.  In addition, this website supports the book and has all the code from the book ready to download. This makes it very easy to copy and paste the code into your website, then modify it for your own personal needs. It really saves a lot of time. I got so wrapped up in the book, I completed every exercise in about a month.

Apparently while we went to sleep, Microsoft has already come out with yet another version of Expression Web. This time it is version 4. It made its debut in New York on June 7th.

Now don't get us wrong. We are all in favor of progress and innovation, but to be honest, we were just getting comfortable with Expression Web 3 when 4 came out. At some point, we think Microsoft will need to slow down a bit and take it easy with all the new versions.

The good news, if there is any, is that if you already own Expression Web 3 you can reportedly upgrade to version 4 for free. We just downloaded version 4 and so far, it does appear that the upgrade is indeed free, so we can confirm it's true. On Microsoft's own web site, they write that:

"If you purchased Expression 3 from a store, download the trial below of Expression Studio 4 Ultimate or Expression Studio 4 Web Professional. Provided you have Expression 3 installed on that computer, the full version will automatically be enabled. Owners of Expression Web 3 can upgrade for free to Expression Studio 4 Web Professional and owners of Expression Studio 3 can upgrade to Expression Studio 4 Ultimate."

We will be playing around with Expression Web 4 over the next couple of months, and we are anxious to see how it goes. We hope it can live up to the hype. We would imagine that they are already working on Expression Web 5, but hope they give version 4 more than a year or so before changing again.

We plan on using version 4 for any future videos we make and hope it isn't all that much different from the previous versions. So far, it doesn't look or feel all that much different.

Take care!

We just spent this weekend redesigning our own website and in doing so, we put into practice a couple of concepts we believe in when it comes to website design.

First, we believe that in order for a website to "look professional," you have to have a professional-looking graphic or logo. The good news is you don't need a lot of graphics, just one or two that look good. If you look at the busiest portal of all, Google, you'll notice their website IS their logo and not much else, at least on the home page. We sincerely believe you don't need "a busy" home page, just one that is clean and simple.

The second concept is your website should have a slick and professional-looking navigational menu. In our case, we chose to use a flash-based menu, but tried to keep it simple. It is our opinion, and only our opinion, that if you build a website using one or two professional-looking graphics AND a slick menu, you can develop a website that is right up there with the best of them.

You don't need to invest a lot in developing these things, but you should take your time and think about what is really important on your home page, then start with a professional graphic or menu, then build the rest of the site around those key elements.

We added a graphics service to expressionweb.us this time around. This is just something that we decided to do on the side for now and believe it is a good value if you are looking for a graphic for your site. If that is something that might be of interest to you, please check out our graphics page. You can also learn how to create your own graphics if you've got the time.

Any way, we hope you like the look and feel of the new site. Just for historical reference, we kept a link to old site in the footer.

If you are looking to build your own website and don't have a lot of money to spend, it is really hard to go wrong with buying the first edition of Expression Web. Currently, it is for sale on Amazon for $31.99! When you consider it initially had a retail price of $299 and this is a full version, that's a good deal. Although the interface has changed in Expression Web 3, you can still create the same websites in either Expression Web 1,2 and 3. And you can always upgrade from 1 to 2 or 3 if you feel like you are missing out on something.

By way of comparison, if you wanted to buy an older version of Dreamweaver, which would be Dreamweaver 4.0, you would have to pay $164.99. And we don't know if you would be allowed to upgrade from that to the current version of Dreamweaver. Adobe is rigid about their upgrade policies.

The bottom line is this: If you want to learn how to build websites using a professional-level system, it is pretty hard to beat the current price of Expression Web 1. Even if you don't find it useful, you are only out $30. We don't know how long these old versions of Expression Web will be around, so we wouldn't recommend waiting too long. You really can't go wrong at the current price. We bought 10 of them and consider it an investment.

Our blog is finally back again. We apologize for the absence, but our blog engine totally crashed and we ended up having to re-install everything. What a nightmare that turned out to be. Any way, we have it back up again and hopefully it won't crash again. And unfortunately, we seem to have lost all the previous comments that were in our databases. We are trying to see if we can't reload some of them, but aren't holding our breath. At any rate, at least we got the thing back up and running, so now we can get back into Expression Web.

We are working to improve our You Tube videos and are trying to make them a little more entertaining. We've also cut out a lot of the fluff and try to just go over what you need to know to get going. We figure you can learn all the technical details on your own and don't need us to point out what every little button does. Any way, we are glad the blog is back and hope you will check out our You Tube videos and subscribe. Our channel is learnexpressonweb on You Tube, so please go visit. If you have any suggestions for videos you'd like to see, please comment and let us know.

Thanks again!