SuperPreview - Expression Web's Key To Understanding Your Website

if you're creating a website, it's best to be aware of what it will look like. It is important, then, to create a good first impression, to show your business to new, potential and returning customers in as positive a light as possible.

If you're a chef, you'll taste the food you make before you serve it to your paying customers. An electronics company will rigorously test their products in every imaginable situation. A TV producer will show their programmes to audiences long before they're released to the wider public. It pays, in any situation, to ensure that what you intended to create is what your target audience will actually see, and whether it all comes together as well as you'd hoped.

So, if you're creating a website, it's best to be aware of what it will look like. After all, this will be many customers' first - or, for a purely online business, only - encounter with the organisation. It is important, then, to create a good first impression, to show your business to new, potential and returning customers in as positive a light as possible. You'll want your site to follow a coherent branding pattern that fits with your company's established style, to display any relevant information, and vitally, to display the goods or services that you offer in such a way as to make them more attractive than rival offers in a competitive market.

It'll also be very important to ensure that your site is easy to use, that customers can find what they need quickly - ideally requiring no more than three clicks - and can navigate about your site intuitively.

Any sites you create will need to cater for all kinds of internet users, from the most to the least experienced - and it is particularly important that even those with no experience will be able to understand how to find their way around your site to the products they need to purchase. This might mean ensuring that links appear clearly and in the right place, and indeed, that they work. Or it might be confirming that the layout and visual appearance of your site is clear and comprehensible, with everything that needs to be found being easily located and accessed.

Okay. You've taken this on board. You've sat down with a WYSIWYG editor, and produced a page that ticks every box. You've arranged everything in an easy to use fashion, you've laid out your colour scheme appealingly, you've made sure your branding is effective but unobtrusive, perhaps you've inserted some dynamic content or multimedia. But there's no guarantee, unfortunately, that the code that your WYSIWYG editor has created will appear as you intended. It may seem aphoristic that the pages you've created will be just as you intended - What You See Is What You Get, no? - but unfortunately, web browsers like to complicate matters.

Imagine asking three different people for directions around a strange town. The details of where you're going to won't change, and none of the answers your given will be wrong - but they may all be different, because each person will think about your question differently, interpret it individually. Different web browsers are much the same. When you use web editor, whether it be WYSIWYG or typed, you end up with a large amount of code, and this code is interpreted by web browsers to bring up a web page.

Even if you design your page completely visually, using a WYSIWYG application and never even looking at the code, the page you've made is still converted into code by your software, and then back into the page by the browser. How, then, can you ensure that the page you wanted your customers to see, the page you've worked on to best portray and promote your business, is seen in the way you intended?

If the editor you've been using is Microsoft Expression Web, then there is nothing to be worried about. An integral part of the software is a tool called SuperPreview. As you're creating your page, you can - without leaving Expression Web at any time - open up your page in multiple browsers, where SuperPreview will highlight any elements of the page that are appearing differently in one browser or another. For instance, it can show you how your page will look in both Internet Explorer and Firefox simultaneously; if you select a particular item in the IE window, it will be highlighted in the Firefox window, and any differences between the two will be clearly displayed. This area of difference can then be identified in the code itself, and be put right immediately.

There's never any way to be certain how your customers will approach your site. They may have different browsers, different levels of expertise, older or newer or less powerful or more powerful computers - and you'll want to cater for them all. SuperPreview in Expression Web can help you to ensure that all of your customers get the most out of your site, and a short training course can show you how to use this tool to the greatest advantage. Your customers are different; what they expect of you will be different; but there's no reason why any of them shouldn't enjoy the best service you can offer them.