Expression Web:Basic site

Before we embark on creating a web site using Expression web, it is useful to have a Site brief and do some design work first. For this example we will create a four page web site about three pets (cats, dogs and fish). If you want you could create a simple site on a topic that you are more interested in however, at this stage I want to demonstrate basic features of Expression Web so keep it simple!!

If you were to develop a commercial site a full design storyboard should be developed as described in the storyboard notes.

{{vmv:Box|Objective|3|| By the end of this page you should be able to:
 * Describe the context in which you will build a web site using Expression Web
 * Set up an Expression Web Site

Prior knowledge
Before you attempt this tutorial is is very useful to understand HTML. Please refer to the HTML/XHTML tutorials if this is not the case. }}

Design brief
As this is a very simple web site we will start with a navigation map showing what pages are to be included and how they are connected.

In this activity you will be constructing the following web site
 * index.html
 * cats.html
 * dogs.html
 * fish.html

Where
 * index.html links to cats.html, dogs.html and fish.html
 * cats.html, dogs.html and fish.html link back to the index page

Initialising a site
In order for the pages to be grouped logically together, Expression Web allows you to create a site. You can also import a site or Open a site.

For our project we will create a site called Pets.

Creating a new site
To start off our site we will create a site called Pets.


 * The default on your home computer will probably look something like C:\Documents and Settings\YourName\My Documents\My Web Sites\Pets
 * If you are working on a Network it may look something like H:\Pets
 * For this tutorial I am going to create a site on my D drive in _mvdata\_Development.

You have a choice of a One Page Site or Empty Site. The only difference is that the One Page Site creates a home page using the Microsoft default.html. Traditionally, the home page of a web site is index.html (as shown in the navigation map).

For the tutorial I will follow the index.html convention to show you how this is done.


 * 1) Start-up Expression Web
 * 2) Click on the Option
 * 3) Choose
 * 4) *Modify the Location (You can use the Browse... button ). In this tutorial I am using D:\_mvdata\_Development\Pets
 * 5) Choose, then

Note that a "Site View" Tab is created in the middle panel. This will contain a list of the pages as you create them.