Introduction

SharePoint Designer is Microsoft's premier offering for Web designers, information workers, and business users to be able to interactively design collaborative SharePoint-based Web applications. It has its roots in FrontPage technologies and is considered the product of choice for users who want to work specifically on SharePoint Web applications.

This book tries to align its content to the development life cycle of a Web site or application. From the initial decisions about the server technologies to be used for Web site development to the actual Web application design and implementation and finally to the Web site maintenance and housekeeping, all facets of SharePoint Designer are covered in simple and easy-to-follow chapters.

This book strives to introduce readers to most of the server-side aspects of SharePoint Designer. Because SharePoint Designer relies on a number of server technologies, such as Internet Information Services (IIS), FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE), and SharePoint, a substantial portion of this book is devoted to helping develop understanding on how these technologies work individually and in relation to SharePoint Designer. Before the book starts to explore the SharePoint Designer functionality, it offers insight into the server products that SharePoint Designer can interact with. Throughout the book, you find notes and tips about features provided by the server technologies that SharePoint Designer either relies on or interacts with. Overall, one of the intentions of this book is to simplify understanding of SharePoint Designer's interaction with the server technologies to help troubleshoot common issues with remote authoring and publishing.

After a deep dive into SharePoint Designer's remote authoring internals, readers are exposed to the SharePoint Designer tools and features that they can exploit to design Web pages on SharePoint and non-SharePoint Web sites. Easy-to-follow exercises help you understand the power of SharePoint Designer in laying out Web pages, using ASP.NET controls and FrontPage Web components, and working with data and SharePoint-specific features, such as data forms and workflows.

Finally, the later parts of this book focus on SharePoint Designer's ability to help administer SharePoint and non-SharePoint Web applications. I also discuss in detail how to use SharePoint Designer to export and import sites, publish Web applications, and perform site analysis.

As a personal note to readers, it's recommended that you go through the exercises in this book by actively using SharePoint Designer. These exercises are designed to introduce you to the SharePoint Designer user interface. Also, it's a good idea to read through the text in SharePoint Designer dialog boxes. A lot of useful information and hints are written right on them.

Ultimately, I hope you find that this book encourages your Web design capabilities and gives you confidence to design creative, interactive, and successful Web pages and Web sites.