In the beginning, the World Wide Web (WWW) was flat. It was an electronic library where academics and scientists posted dissertations and dusty data for reading with clunky, text-only browsers. With the advent of graphical browsers, the consumer oriented Web took off. Content became vastly more colorful. Remember where you were the first time you experienced the exciting blink and marquee tags? (I bet you wish you could forget those gems!) Anyway, the Web has evolved as a rich, interactive, and personalized medium. In the new version of Web (Web 2.0), functional pages aren’t enough. User experience (abbreviated as UX in geekspeak) is hot, and sites are cool. This chapter looks at Microsoft’s tools and technologies for creating and delivering engaging Web content.

Microsoft has a range of tools for authoring Web pages that appeal to several
skill levels. Some tools are more suited to Web page design, while others are
more appropriate to programming.

Microsoft Office (Including Word 2007)
When Bill Gates realized that Microsoft was lagging on the Internet front, the word went out to integrate Web support into every product. As a result, you can save Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and PowerPoint slides as Web pages.

Many companies use the Office suite to place information on their intranet because most employees are comfortable in Word and Excel. These tools are quite adequate for creating static Web content that some call brochure ware. Although somewhat bloated, the pages are faithful reproductions of the original document — especially when viewed in Microsoft’s latest Internet Explorer browser. There’s nothing to stop you from using a “saved-as HTML” page in an ASP.NET site. However, you may find that removing the unwanted HTML markup takes more time than building the page from scratch.

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