Mea Culpa

By Chris Leeds

Some months back I set up a website to support the book I wrote for Microsoft Press; I set it up on an unfamiliar host and decided to use a very complex industrial level content management system. I guess I went to the content management system for the same reason a lot of people do; once you master a desktop application like FrontPage, Dreamweaver, or Expression Web, you tend to move towards server side scripting, database functionality, and that sort of thing.

All of us who’ve done this forget, or at least suppress the fact that every major desktop application for web development IS a content management system. It’s just that these applications do the content management at the desktop level and then the changes are published to the web. While there are many things you can’t do all that easily with desktop applications that you can with server based applications, for instance; multiple authors and publishing control, etc. You can easily manage the content of an informational website which is what ExpressionWebStepByStep.com is supposed to be anyway.

Since my second book on the series; “Expression Web 2 Step By Step” has just been released to print, this seems a perfect time to dump the server based content management system and lean on Expression Web to the fullest extent possible. I think that’s greatly more appropriate than simply using the Expression products to make a single “skin” then running a server based content management system completely independent of the software that the site is about.

So, to the greatest extent possible I’m going to use non scripted HTML and CSS in place of server-side technology.  This site’s template will even be available for download in a few days to serve as a learning aide.