Opening an Existing Web Site in Expression Web

You can open most Web sites regardless of whether they were created in Expression Web. Use the Open Site command to open Web sites whose files are stored on your computer's hard drive or on a network drive.

To open a Web site located on your hard drive or on a network drive, follow these steps:

1. With Expression Web running, choose File Open Site.

   You can also click the arrow next to the Open button on the Common toolbar and choose Open Site.

   The Open Site dialog box appears, with the Web Sites location listed in the Look In text box.

   What about ASP.NET?

   As we're sure you've already discovered, Expression Web is a complex program, full of features that the beginning-to-intermediate Web designer (that's you!) are likely never to use. For example, in Expression Web you can create two types of Web pages: regular Web pages, also known as HTML pages, and ASP. NETpages.

   An ASP.NET page looks, to the casual Web surfer, like any other Web page. But from the Web designer's perspective, ASP.NET pages are vastly more powerful and complicated to build. ASP.NET pages can interact with Web server-based databases and other sources of live data and have specific hosting requirements. (They must eventually be published on a Web server that supports ASP.NET 2.0.) As such, they fall into the intermediate-to-advanced category, which is outside the scope of this book.

   That isn't to say that you shouldn't try your hand at creating ASP.NET pages. If your Web hosting provider supports ASP.NET 2.0 and you're feeling adventurous, go ahead and experiment with the Expression Web ASP.NET tools. The nice thing is that the features are there if you need them but don't get in your way if you don't.

   If you think that you want to give ASP.NET a spin, here are a few resources for finding out more:

   • Wikipedia, at http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asp.net, clearly describes what ASP.NET is all about.

   • Expression Web Help covers the basics of creating ASP.NET pages in Expression Web, as well as how to use the different ASP.NET task panes and tools. The Help feature also explains the different ASP.NET controls and how to add them to .aspx pages. Choose Help Microsoft Expression Web Help and then click ASP.NET.

   • Visit the Microsoft ASP.NET Developer Center at http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net to find out about ASP.NET and the tools that use it.

   REMEMBER 

   The Web Sites location is sort of a virtual bookmarking list for Web sites that have been opened in Expression Web, regardless of whether they were originally created in Expression Web. For example, if you open a site created in Dreamweaver or FrontPage in Expression Web, it appears in this list.

   Warning 

   If you delete or move a Web site in Windows Explorer, the reference to it still appears in the Web Sites list. It doesn't mean that the site is still there; it just means that Expression Web remembers that the site was there once upon a time in recent memory. If you try to open the site and the location is out of date, you get an error message. For this reason, you should always delete a Web site from within Expression Web. (We tell you how, later in this chapter.) To remove an outdated Web site pointer from the list, right-click and choose Remove.

   If you don't see the Web site you want to open, find it by using the shortcuts on the left side of the dialog box.

2. Double-click the Web site, or click to select it and then click Open.

   The Web site opens in a new workspace window.