by Sangeeta Deogawanka

Created on: January 05, 2011   Last Updated: February 03, 2011

An offering from Microsoft, the Expression is an application suite containing the tools for designing high quality standards-based websites. A boon for website designers and independent users of collaborative websites working on the CMS (Content Management System), it is increasingly being used for incorporating the WordPress onto the customary website. The latest upgrade, called Expression Suite 4, includes all the best of Expression offerings, including Expression Blend, Expression Web, Expression Design and Expression Encoder Pro. So with Expression Suite 4, now you no longer need to confine yourself to the customized WordPress templates, but can build it up from scratch using Expression, and embed within your website.

By using the Expression Suite, you have the advantage of using WCM (Web Content Management), where blogs can not only be uploaded, edited and published by multiple users or user groups, but also be done without any technical knowledge or HTML use.

With this, a new era in website design and blog management has ushered in, that allows for the website design to work separately from the blog content.

If you are already familiar with WordPress, then you have the advantage of using it’s various plug-ins. By simply tweaking the CMS codes you can incorporate the functional changes in your site using Expression Design.

Blogs like WordPress support both ‘content’ and ‘style’, although, separately.  The content is controlled by PHP codes or disconnected template files in the MySQL database like header.php, index.php, page.php, sidebar.php, footer.php and single.php. On the other hand, the style or look of content on the blog is decided by files in WordPress Theme. So you can successfully use the Expression tools to change the look of the website, without any difference to content uploads, even while the re-design is in progress.

Walk through the following steps to use Microsoft Expression with your WordPress, whether you are simply making changes to your website or starting afresh with WordPress.

Create a static WordPress page

Set your website in Expression Web to access all files. Open the first page of your website on your browser to view the source code. Copy-paste the entire source code on to the CodeView of a new HTML file in Expression Web. Save this in the root of your site with a name of your choice.  Look for the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in the HTML code, and change the link to a link containing

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