A few days ago I met with Aaron Timmerman, owner/operator of Tech80, for a business lunch to discuss a partnership between Tech80 and Port Eighty. To sum up how the meeting went I will merely say it went GREAT! Tech80 offers SUPERB outsourced IT support. Aaron and his techs are able to offer their customers the immediate & professional response times that businesses require along with being able to setup short term and long term IT plans for growing businesses.

Tech80 & Port Eighty will work together to provide clients with their IT infrastructure needs and their online marketing needs.

While on a peacefully run to the local Office Max (needed a new HD, main OS hd was having bad sector errors) my eyes befell on a Microsoft product that it seems like forever and a month ago I heard about. Microsoft Expressions. Microsoft Expressions Web to be more precise. Now why is this product worth blogging about? Well because I as a Web designer and developer I felted “Assaulted” by some of this products claims. Mainly the claim in the biggest and boldest word on the package proclaiming “Standards Based Development”. Now all I can think of the moment I read this “Wait, Microsoft, the company who’s product has made web development a pain in the but it is for cross browser compatibility is now thinks they are going to help me get the job done?” . Seriously though who’s standards are they going to help us develop to, their standards once again? Sorry Microsoft, not going to happen. I am glad Dreamweaver & GoLive will get more competition which will hopefully lead to better products in general, but Expressions Web, yeah I will definitely try to give it a fair shot but come on…..they had a lot of time to get things right and up to date ie IE7 and yet their browser is still behind!

http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/web_designer/default.mspx

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… just another Web designer blogging.