Harness the Power of FrontPage 98

Smart Page Building

My old ROTC platoon commander used to say, "Tables and frames will ultimately lead us to victory." (He was a computer science major.) Here's a little FrontPage boot camp on simplifying common tasks, such as customizing tables and frames, while keeping your pages slim and speedy. Ten-hut!

Your Table Is Ready

Tables let you position text and graphics easily and neatly on your pages. To create a professional look, you'll want to customize the default settings of your tables, and FrontPage can help.

To get started, select Table, Insert Table and set the number of rows and columns you want to appear. Then click OK. If you decide to add more columns or rows later, you can click the Draw Table icon on the toolbar (it looks like a pencil) and then click and drag from one border to another--horizontally, for instance, to add a row. The new column or row appears immediately. (Are you familiar with the Draw Table feature in Word 97? It works the same way in FrontPage.)

Customize Your Tables

Now for the fun part. Right-click the table on your page to open the Table Properties dialog box. If you want a colored table--to highlight a portion of your pages, for instance--click the Background Color drop-down box and choose something subtle. Now let's get rid of that obnoxious table border. Under Layout, type 0 in the text box labeled Border Size. Big finish: Click OK.

The Great Frame-Up

FrontPage offers a number of starter templates for quickly creating pages with frames. A good way to begin is with the Contents template, which places one frame down the left side (for your table of contents), and a pane on the right to display your site's wares.

From the FrontPage Editor, select Frame, New Frames Page. A list of templates appears; click an option on the left (Contents, for example, or Horizontal Split) to see a sample in the Preview pane. To commit yourself, click OK.

A new page opens in the Editor. In each frame you'll see three buttons. You need to tell FrontPage what to display in each frame. Click Set Initial Page to choose an existing page from your site. The Create Hyperlink dialog box appears. Navigate to the page you want and click OK.

To start from scratch in any frame, click the New Page button to open a blank page and begin adding content to it.

To put it all together, select File, Save. If you haven't saved the pages in your frames, FrontPage prompts you to do so first. Then you enter information for the page containing the frames. Name the page in the URL box (yourtitle.html). In the Title box, enter the name you want to appear at the top of your page. To preview your new frames page, click the Preview tab at the bottom of the Editor window.

Subtle Frames

For frames that are easy on the eyes, remove the default borders between pages. Right-click anywhere inside the frame you want to change. Select Frame Properties, and in the dialog box that appears, click Frames Page. Deselect Show Borders. Click OK and then click OK again to close the Frame Properties dialog box. In the Editor, you'll see dotted lines that represent your frames, but your site visitors won't see them.

Dynamic HTML

Here's a tip: Skip this feature. DHTML, an amalgamation of Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, and more, is for creating animated text and graphics that zoom in or fly onto the page. Such effects are flashy but less than useful--plus, FrontPage 98's implementation of DHTML requires Internet Explorer 4.0, so people visiting your site with Navigator won't see all the fancy features and may even make it a point to never visit you again. Thankfully, FrontPage 2000 generates DHTML that works in either browser. If you're dying for animation on your page, it's better to stick with animated images, which leads us to ...

Animating Images

FrontPage ships with Microsoft GIF Animator, a simple-to-use program for creating moving images. To open the program, choose Start, Programs, Microsoft Image Composer, Microsoft GIF Animator.

Press Ctrl-I to insert an image, then navigate to the image you want. Double-click the image. Repeat as necessary (in the order in which you want your images to appear) to add further frames. Then press Ctrl-A to save your images as an animated GIF.

From the FrontPage Editor, open the page where you want to place the animation. Place the cursor where the animation should appear. Choose Insert, Image to open the animated GIF, click OK to select the image, close the Image menu, and place your animation. Click the Preview tab at the bottom of the page to view your creation.

Bonus tip: If you want to save some hard drive space, lose the 369KB of sample GIF animations in the following directory: C:\Multimedia Files\Graphics\Web\Animations\Microsoft GIF Animator.

Handy Editor Shortcuts

To jump back and forth between the WYSIWYG Normal view and the HTML view, press Ctrl-Page Up to toggle through Normal, HTML, and Preview modes. When you're working on more than one page at a time, press Ctrl-Tab to jump from page to page, and Ctrl-Shift-Tab to go back to the previous page.