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5 ways to improve your FrontPage web

1. Check your links

An annoying problem with using the World Wide Web is finding a site with lots of interesting but unfortunately broken hyperlinks. If you use FrontPage 98 to create and manage your website, you can easily check your pages to ensure your links to other sites are all working. This will ensure that visitors to your website aren't frustrated by this problem.

To check the links on your FrontPage web, ensure that you have the web open in the FrontPage Explorer. Click on the Hyperlink Status button in the Views pane. After a few seconds, a list of all the hyperlinks within your FrontPage web will be displayed in the main part of the FrontPage Explorer window.

To start the hyperlink verification process, use the menu command Tools|Verify Hyperlinks, and a new Verify Hyperlinks window will appear. In this window you can set the program to verify all the hyperlinks (the default option - although if you have previously selected a few of the links, it will give you the option of verifying the selected hyperlinks). Clicking on the start button in this window will start the verification process. FrontPage 98 will then connect to the Internet, and attempt to visit all of the sites referenced in your hyperlinks. The progress of the checking procedure is shown in the status bar at the bottom of the FrontPage Explorer window. If FrontPage is able to connect to the site, it assumes the hyperlink is correctly functioning, and the site gains a green light (). Sites that it cannot connect to are indicated by a red light (). Unchecked sites have a yellow light ().

If a hyperlink appears broken, it may be that the page is still at the location you built the link to, but the server on which the page resides may be temporarily unavailable. Needless to say, it is better to perform the hyperlink verification when the Internet isn't too busy, so that the program can access remote sites as rapidly as possible.

Right clicking on an entry in the Hyperlink View window will give you a number of options:

• Edit Hyperlink: Enables you to change the hyperlink on the page without having to load the page into the FrontPage Editor. Note that if you have linked to this location in a number of different places throughout the FrontPage web then you will be able to change all instances of this hyperlink.

• Edit Page: Loads the page with the broken hyperlink into the FrontPage Editor. The broken link will be highlighted, enabling you to quickly edit it. Don't forget to save your changes to the page.

• Add Task: Adds an entry to the FrontPage to-do list, reminding you to fix the broken hyperlink.

2. Check the spelling

Obvious though it may seem, there are millions of web pages containing spelling mistakes. All printed literature produced by an organization or company should be checked for spelling before being sent to the printers. The same is also true of web sites.

Individual web pages can be spell checked by opening them in the FrontPage Editor and using the command Tools|Spelling. Alternatively, press F7 on the keyboard.

It is also possible to check the spelling of all the documents in your FrontPage web. To do this, open your web site in the FrontPage Explorer (use the Explorer menu command File|Open FrontPage Web). Then use the command Tools|Spelling (or press F7 on the keyboard). When the Spelling window appears, toggle the radio button to select whether you would like to check the spelling of all pages within the FrontPage web, or just the selected pages that you may have highlighted. Clicking on the Start button in this window will then start the spell checking process. If you ticked the Add a task for each page with misspellings checkbox in the Spelling window, FrontPage will add a new entry in the FrontPage Explorer Tasks view to remind you of pages containing misspelled words. Otherwise, the Spelling window will display a list of pages containing misspellings as it checks the individual pages.

3. Turn off table borders

Many people use tables to provide frames in which page content can be arranged into columns. A common error is to keep the table borders turned on. This rarely looks good, and it is something that will hardly ever be seen in traditional printed literature. To turn off the table borders, click anywhere in the table with the right mouse button, then select the option Table Properties. When the Table Properties window appears, change the Border Size field in the Layout part of the window to zero. Don't worry about no longer being able to see the table borders in the FrontPage Editor - the table cells will be surrounded by dotted lines, which won't show up when the page is viewed in the web browser.

4. Make images transparent

When using a patterned background to your web page, ensure that you give buttons and other images on your page a transparent background. This will ensure that the image blends in a lot better. For example, in the screenshot below, the button on the right hand side has a transparent background, the one on the left does not.

Most graphics programs give you the opportunity to save an image with a transparent background. If you use Image Composer (the graphics package supplied with FrontPage), the menu option File|Save for the Web will allow you to easily create images with a transparent background.

Alternatively, once an image is imported into the FrontPage Editor, highlight it , then use the Make Transparent button in the Image toolbar (). Clicking on this button will cause the mouse pointer to turn into the following shape: Move the arrowed part of this mouse pointer to the color you would like to make transparent, then press the mouse button. Don't forget the image will need to be saved again after the background has been made transparent. Remember that only one color in an image can be made transparent, so this effect doesn't work for certain images (such as those with blue skies composed of many graduated colors).

5. Turn large images into thumbnails

If you have a number of large images that you would like to put on your web site, then you might like to use the FrontPage AutoThumbnail feature. This automatically produces thumbnails hyperlinked to the original image (such as those below):

An detailed article about using the AutoThumbnail feature is available from The Complete Webmaster.

Author: Brett Burridge
Date: 09/03/98

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