Article website development

If you don't know this stuff don't waste your time on learning it. Hire/outsource a professional and let them build it for you or at least guide you through the process if still want that hands-on experience.

It's easy to make just any article directory but it has to stand out to attract people even if you offer the service for free.

Do customize it and promote heavily, in the beginning especially with personal messages to webmasters and contributors to other article directories.

Focus strongly on building the pagerenk and people will start coming soon.

I'm not overly familiar with the Expression line, but I suspect you'll hit limitations in the product at some point based on what you're trying to do. Much of the time when dealing with true development issues, any advice or pointers you find will assume you have the 'pro' tools, not the introductory/free ones. MS has a new program for independant consultants and small businesses called "websitespark.com", which offers many of their professional tools free for up to three years - I think it'll be something like $100 to buy the licenses for all of them if you want to keep using them after you've left the program.

If you're going to get in to website development, and you're going to use MS tools, it would probably make sense to join that program (it's totally free). There's a 'referral code' you can put in - if you want to do that, PM me and I'll send you my code (no $ remuneration that I know of, but it seems they want to track how this spreads).

ADDING: It looks like the Expression line is one of the things included in the program, but you can also use the full Visual Studio product. My earlier comment about the examples you'll see/read being mostly applicable to the pro tool was reference Visual Studio.