My Expression Blend experiences
The last few days I got some quality time with Expression Blend. Of course that’s not enough time to figure out all of Expression has to offer. So below impressions and opinions are based only on the experiences I had with the software last few days and information about it I’ve found on the Internet. So keep in mind these impressions can change any moment I find out workarounds or tutorials which make my live easier in Expression or don’t….
Silverlight & SEO
Okay, Silverlight is a plug-in just like Flash and Java are. That gets you into trouble when you want to do proper SEO. Some things are easy to change, like the META keywords, description and the TITLE of the site. The most important part however, the content of the website, doesn’t output in different HTML pages and the content is in Silverlight itself.
Search bots won’t read that part. Thanks to a colleague I’ve found some links with some SEO tricks we can do with Silverlight. See them below:
- SEO for Silverlight – Search engine optimization techniques for Silverlight applications
- Silverlight seo search engine optimization
- Silverlight SEO
Those solutions seem a lot of work to me however and most of the stuff they talk about I don’t understand well enough to give a decent opinion about it. Let it be clear though that SEO is really important for a website to get a proper score in Google for example. If we aren’t found we won’t sell anything. And I get the feeling that Silverlight isn’t good for some real good SEO.
Creating the design
Another thing which worries me is the ability to add certain things myself. As I look at it now, I can design all buttons, windows etc. etc. I design them separately in Expression and a programmer will take care of the rest, because I don’t have the proper coding knowledge for it. This is okay when setting up a website, but what if a banner has to change or a menu has to be different after the website is launched. Am I able to simply edit those features myself or do I need to design the part that needs changes separately? And is it necessary to go into the code of the site? It probably is, what makes it a bit harder to work with.
As you can read, I’ve mixed feelings about this. On the positive side it’s really nice to just pay attention to every part separately and let programmers handle the rest. On the other hand, that would take longer to change something on the website. See the point I’m trying to make?
Silverlight all the way
Is it wise to create a Silverlight only website? In my opinion a good question to take into consideration. When creating websites entirely in Silverlight it’s depending on the user to install a plug-in. A lot of users will do that, but there’s also an amount of users that don’t want to use plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight. That’s a problem I think, because those users can be customers for a company and we’ll miss those when we use a Silverlight only website.
Another option could be to use Silverlight only for animations and movies. The rest of the website will be coded in standard HTML + CSS. The framework of the website could be setup with ASPX. If I’m right ASPX works with C# also and supports all the Silverlight options. That way you can still use Expression to edit the websites. With this option I think it’s easier to create user friendly websites and it’s a bit better when looking at the SEO part again. That’s also why I would prefer this option. Don’t get me wrong, I like flashy websites (a lot) but I think websites without are more friendly towards their visitors.
HTML 5
Okay, you’ll probably heard about HTML5. This new version is currently a hot topic and I think it’s going to be widely used. I found an article online which discussed Expressions ability to export to the HTML5 canvas. The good thing about this is that a visitor won’t need the plug-in. The bad news probably is that we can’t create the applications we want. What do you think about this recent HTML5 development? Is it wise to create a framework with these new additions already integrated? Or shall we wait and see how HTML5 will evolve? Questions that are hard to answer from my view right now.
In the end
Expression Blend is a very broad and useful tool. It’s not exactly a Photoshop or Illustrator killer, on the contrary. That’s why I like the import function for Photoshop and Illustrator files. Especially the Illustrator Import is superb! It imports every layer separately and makes it editable in Expression. The only problem I’ve seen right now is that I can’t import Flash files already created for current websites. So re-using logo animations won’t happen anytime soon. On a scale from 1 to 10 I’ll give Expression a 7,5 right now.
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