Just as the Save All command lets you save multiple pages at one go, Close All Pages command lets you close multiple pages at once. The command can be found under the Window menu, see below:

When you invoke the Close All Pages command, Expression Web will close all the saved pages and throw a warning for those pages that are not saved. See below:

Expression Web will prompt you to save each and every unsaved page before closing them. Click Yes to save the page. A good practice would be to use the Save All command in conjunction with Close All Pages command. So before you use the Close All Pages command, use the Save All command to save all the unsaved pages.

In Expression Web 3 you cannot customize the toolbars or menus. But if you are still using Expression Web 2 or 1 you can place the Close All Pages command under the File menu under the Close menu item or anywhere else you find it convenient to use. Follow the tutorial Add a command to toolbar and menu bar in Microsoft Expression Web 2 to add the Close All Pages command to the ‘File menu’. The ‘Close All Pages’ command can be found under the Window and Help category in the Customize dialog box.

I hope you find this command useful.

A hyperlink is created using the HTML anchor tag. With hyperlinks you can link to another web page, document (like spreadsheets, pdf, etc), image or a part of the same document. Named Anchors, also called Bookmarks let you create such hyperlinks to specific sections of your page.

Any hyperlink within a page will have two parts:

a. The hyperlink: is the text to be displayed as link, from where you would initiate the action.

<a href="#top">Top of the Page</a>

b. The bookmark: the location where you want to go.

<a name="top">Creating Dynamic Web Templates</a>

Anchors are created using the ‘href’ attribute of the anchor tag, whereas the named anchors are created using the ‘name’ attribute of the <a>. Any anchor element can have a name attribute, but until it is not referenced from anywhere, it is not termed as a bookmark.

For instance; <a name=”top_page” href=”#top”></a>

href=”#top” – is already referring to another bookmark – top

The name attribute in the <a> tag can be referenced from another <a> tag using the # sign.

A named anchor is not displayed in any special way on your rendered page. Yes in Design view your bookmark will have a dashed underline below the text, or if an empty location is bookmarked, it will be denoted by the a bookmark icon   when ‘Show’ and ‘Paragraph Marks’ are both selected under ‘Formatting Marks’ on the ‘View’ menu. The bookmark should be referenced using a hash ‘#’ sign.

NOTE: Since the bookmark in within the document, you need not give the entire path to the location. But you can directly link to a bookmark on another page by using the entire URL of that page, followed by ‘#bookmark_name’.

Creating bookmarks in Expression Web

Follow these steps:

1. Open a webpage in Design view or Split view.

2. Select the text to which you want to assign a bookmark.

3. Go to Insert menu > Bookmark… (or key in the shortcut CTRL + Shift +G in Expression Web 3 and CTRL + G in earlier versions)

4. In the Bookmark dialog box, enter a name for the bookmark in the Bookmark name: textbox.

5. Click OK.

Deleting bookmarks:

1. Open a webpage in Design view or Split view.

2. Select the text to which you want to assign a bookmark.

3. Go to Insert menu > Bookmark… (or key in the shortcut CTRL + Shift +G in Expression Web 3 and CTRL + G in earlier versions)

4. In the Bookmark dialog box, select the bookmark you want to delete.

5. Click Clear.

Navigating through bookmarks in Design view

Hold down CTRL key and left click the hyperlink on the page.

Navigating through bookmarks within Code view

Do either of the following:

A. Hold down CTRL key and left click the hyperlink on the page.

B. Place the cursor inside the hyperlink, from Edit menu > Code View > Follow Code Hyperlink (or CTRL + [)

NOTE: Use the Next Code Hyperlink and Previous Code Hyperlinks buttons to move between the source and destination of the hyperlinks.

You must have come across websites that play sound (some music) while you are visiting it. Some design sites, personal sites of stylists or e-cards and gift sites usually have such background sound, sometimes on the home page or to all the pages. Personally, I find it irritating. Though you can actually specify how many times the sound should be played after the page is loaded or should it be continuously played in a loop. But if you would like to add some music to your website, here is how you can do that.

To add a background sound

1. Open the website and then open the web page in Design View.
2. Right click the page and choose Page Properties.
3. In the ‘Page Properties’ dialog box (see image below), under the General tab, in the Background Sound section, browse to the location of the sound file and choose the file and click Open.



4. In the same window, to choose the duration of the sound, do either of the following:
   • Check the Forever checkbox, to play the sound continuously unless the window is closed.
   • Uncheck the above checkbox and enter/choose an integer to play the sound for a fixed number of times.

NOTES:

• The background sound would be added only on the page you are configuring on. To add it on other pages, follow the same steps on the other pages.
• The <bgsound /> tag is added when you add a sound to the page. This featureis not supported in Mozilla Firefox browsers.

To remove a background sound, in the General tab of the Page Properties window, delete the location under the Background sound.

TIP: As a good practice, provide the users with an option to turn off the sound.

In my earlier article Insert Code Snippets in Microsoft Expression Web 3, we saw how to use the built-in code snippets and create your own snippets to make your coding speedier. But the custom code snippets that you created in earlier version of Expression Web (EW 2) are not accessible in EW 3. A simple solution to this is to import the code snippet xml file to your EW 3 and use it.

The built-in code snippets are found in these locations:

In Expression Web 2

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Expression\Web 2\Templates\1033\Snippets12\FPSnippets.xml

In Expression Web 3

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Expression\Web 3\en\Snippets\snippets.xml

Any custom code snippets you add are stored into your roaming profile. In Expression Web 2, they were stored at:

C:\Users\User Name\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Expression\Web 2\Snippets\SnippetsCustom.xml

In Expression Web 3, they are located at:

Windows Vista

C:\Users\ User Name\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Expression\Web 3\Legacy\Expression\Web 3\Snippets\SnippetsCustom.xml

Windows XP

C:\Users\ User Name\Application Data\Microsoft\Expression\Web 2\Snippets\SnippetsCustom.xml

Both these ‘xml’ files are different. While working in EW3, when you add code snippets they will be stored in the ‘SnippetsCustom.xml’ in Expression Web 3 folder.

To continue using the SnippetsCustom.xml from Expression Web 2 in Expression Web 3, before you start working in Expression Web 3, replace it with the one in Expression Web 2 folder. You need not delete the SnippetsCustom.xml that was created by default in Expression Web 3 folder, just rename it, and copy-paste the Expression Web 2 ‘xml’ file over here. Now you can use all your older snippets from Expression Web 2 in Expression Web 3 and any more you add would be updated in this file itself.

We often use the Find and Replace tool (CTRL + F) to search for words, in our context, tags, elements, properties and so on in our page. But the same dialog box offers a cool feature of setting HTML rules in your search. These HTML rules let you add conditions as to where in your code to search. Let us take a look at how that can be done.

Follow these steps to set HTML rules for searching -

1. Do either of the following
   • To search within a single page, open the page.
   • To search the entire site, open the site.
   • To search more than one page in a website, open the site and in the Folder List panel or the Site View, select the pages. Else open all those pages you want to search.
2. Go to the Edit menu and choose Find… to find text, and Replace… to replace text. Both would launch the same Find and Replace dialog box, with different tabs selected by default.



3. Click on the ‘HTML Rules…’ button. The HTML Rules dialog box would be prompted.



4. Click on ‘New rule…’ In the drop down box (left bottom corner of the window, choose to set the rule ‘Inside tag’ or ‘Not inside tag’. In either case, select a tag, from the other drop down. The rule would be created.



5. To configure the rule, click on the ‘New rule…’ (appears as a child under the rule we created above, in the tree view). Choose the options in the bottom left corner for the rule. They are as follows:
   a.       With attribute: to search inside a tag with the given attribute. For example, inside tag <p>, search for only those tags that have attribute class = content_text.
   b.      Without attribute: to search inside a tag without the given attribute. For example, inside tag <p>, search for all other tags except for the ones with attribute class = content_text.
   c.       Containing: to search only if it is in another text or tag that you specify.
   d.      Not Containing: to search only if it is not another text or tag that you specify.
   e.      Inside Tag: to search only if it is in a tag that you specify.
   f.        Not Inside Tag: to search only if it is not in a tag that you specify. 
6. To delete a rule, choose ‘Delete rule’ and to delete all the rules, choose ‘Delete all’.

Here are some websites and blogs that offer very informative tutorials, articles, tips, tricks, trainings, ebooks and other resources for Microsoft Expression Web.

1. http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/cc197140.aspx for tutorials, videos, free Expression Web templates.
2. http://any-expression.com - is owned by Tina Clarke, who is a fellow Expression Web MVP. The site features plenty of tutorials, tips, ebooks on Expression Web and FrontPage.
   Her blog http://www.expression-web.net/ also offers useful Expression Web resources.
3. http://by-expression.com features excellent Tutorials and Sample Sites by Expression Web MVP, Cheryl D. Wise. She also conducts trainings for EW.
4. http://www.expression-web-designer-help.com/ is a great site to seek help in MS Expression Web, run by Jim Davidson, MVP Expression Web.
5. http://www.expression-web-tutorials.com/ and http://www.expression-web-tips.com/
   Owned by Expression Web MVP, Patricia Ann Geary, these sites include EW tutorials, templates, tips and news on EW as well as FrontPage tutorials.

When you create a form, you add form controls to the form. In other words, form controls like textboxes, radio buttons, and check boxes are grouped inside form tags. But if you add form controls directly to your page, they are not enclosed within the form. But you can set Microsoft Expression Web to automatically add form tags around any form control that you add to your page. This will take care of the form controls if they are not already enclosed within the form tags.

To automatically add form tags around HTML form controls, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Tools menu > choose Page Editor Options.
2. In the Page Editor Options dialog box, click the General tab.
3. Select the checkbox: ‘Automatically enclose form fields within a form’.

As you create a new page and start adding content to it, or when you open an existing page, the way it appears in Code view or Design view is laid down by Expression Web. For instance, in Code view normal text appears in black, HTML comment appears in gray, in Design View Layout table border is green in color and so on .This is so that you can differentiate between the different elements and content on your page. But you can always customize them according to your liking.  

To customize colors and font in Code and Design View

1. Go to Tools menu > Page Editor Options.
2. In the Page Editor Options dialog box, switch to Color Coding tab.
3. The default selection is Code View unless you changed it. Choose the view you want to customize.
4. Choose an item from under the Display items box and select Item Foreground, Item Background and Font style.

 

5. Click OK.

A drop down box can be created as a form object. But when you want it to be independent, without a form, you could do it with a ‘Jump Menu’. Here is how to create a jump menu, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Behaviors task pane, which should be visible besides the Apply and Manage Styles task pane. If it is not visible, go to Task Panes menu and choose Behaviors.
2. Place you cursor at the location where you want to add the drop down menu.
3. In the Behaviors task pane, click the ‘Insert’ button and choose ‘Jump Menu’.

 

4. This will launch the Jump Menu dialog box.

 

5. Click on Add button and the Add Choice dialog box will be prompted.

 

Add the choice and their value. You can also browse to the URL. When done, , click on OK.

6. Similarly add all the choices and click OK in the Jump Menu dialog box.

  

The choices will be displayed the way they are added. But you can always use the Move Up and Move Down buttons to rearrange the items.

7. ‘Open URLs in:’ lets you choose if you would like to open the URL in the same window or a new window. ‘Select first item after URL change’ checkbox when checked will always highlight the first option in the drop down after every URL change.
8. The drop down won’t work in Design view, but when previewed in the browser, it would look like:

Jump Menu Go behavior lets you associate a button (Go button) with a jump menu. In that case a jump menu should already exist in the document. Though a jump menu does not need a go button to execute, selecting an item from the jump menu causes a URL to load on its own. But a go button may be required if you want to re-select the already chosen item, which may not be registered just by choosing it from the jump menu.

When you add a jump menu go behavior, your go button will perform the “jump” action to take to the associated URL. Selecting a menu item from the jump menu will no longer direct the user to the related page then.

To create a Jump Menu Go button, follow these steps:

1. If a jump menu is not already created create one. How do I create a jump menu?
2. Add a button object near the jump menu.

 

3. In the Behaviors task pane, choose Insert and from the menu select ‘Jump Menu Go’.

 

4. You would be prompted with ‘Jump Menu Go’ dialog box, as shown below:

 

5. Choose the menu for Go button to activate and click OK.