The
following tips should help you you manage your FrontPage web more effectively. As your web
grows in size, you will find that these tips could save you a lot of time, and make you
glad you chose FrontPage 98 as your web site creation package... ...
Style Sheets are a good way to keep your site looking consistent. They can also be used to save a great deal of time. If you specify the appearance of the various parts of your document in an external style sheet and point all your pages to pickup styles from this style sheet, making subsequent changes to your site is very straightforward. All you need to do is change the style sheet!
Unfortunately the Style Sheet editor within FrontPage is very basic, and doesn't allow you to save your Style Sheet as a separate file. The best thing to do is to learn how to create Style Sheets by hand, so you can use a text editor such as notepad to create and edit the file. Alternatively, find yourself a dedicated Style Sheet editor. A range of shareware Style Sheet editors are available. There is also an article from The Complete Webmaster that explains some of the basics behind the use of Style Sheets.
Once you have created your Style Sheet, import it into your FrontPage web and link it to your web pages. Web pages can be linked to an external Style Sheet using something like the following:
<link REL="stylesheet" HREF="http://www.mysite.com/mystylesheet.css" TYPE="text/css">This HTML should be placed somewhere in the HEAD portion of the document.
Not many people know about this, but it is possible to configure FrontPage so that it will get the page properties of one document from another document. Using this technique it is possible to specify the page background image and color, as well as the color of text and various types of hyperlinks. The good thing about this is that if you suddenly decide to change the background color of your entire FrontPage web you will only need to change a single document!
To configure a document so that it gets its colors and background properties from another page, choose the Page Properties option from the File menu. Under the Background click-tab of the Page Properties window, ensure the Get Background and Colors from Page radio button is selected, then use the Browse button to choose a page in your FrontPage web from where the current page should pick up the style settings from.
If you look at the HTML of your page you will then see that the page is set to pick up the body style from another document:
<body stylesrc="http://www.babylon6.demon.co.uk/index.html">When you save the page, the HTML of the <BODY> tag is expanded to
include the styles from the other page:
<body stylesrc="http://www.babylon6.demon.co.uk/index.html" background="images/cream-slate.gif" bgproperties="fixed" bgcolor="#800000" text="#008000" link="#FFFF00" vlink="#800080" alink="#00FFFF">
Note that the ability to get page styles from a master page doesn't seem to work with disk-based webs.
Many people like to give an indication of when a page was last updated. FrontPage 98 can make this feature easier. Like Microsoft Office applications, FrontPage 98 has a timestamp feature. Whenever you edit a page in FrontPage 98 containing a timestamp, it will be automatically updated. The relevant menu option is Timestamp (accessible from the Insert menu). There are a large number of different time and date formats that can be inserted with this option, so choose one appropriate for your site.
Another common thing to put on pages is the URL of the document. These can be inserted by using the FrontPage Component option from the Insert menu. When the Insert FrontPage Component window appears, choose Substitution, and click on the OK button. A list of insertable labels will be displayed in a drop-down list - choose Page URL and the document's URL will be inserted into the page.
Shared borders are another feature in FrontPage 98 that can be a huge timesaver. These were described in a previous article from The Complete Webmaster. I use shared borders extensively on my web sites. The top shared border typically contains a corporate logo. The bottom shared border contains a text-based navigation bar to other pages in the FrontPage web, as well as a timestamp showing when the page was last modified and the document URL (useful for when people print pages and can't remember where they were from).
Finally, don't forget that although shared borders can be used to display identical content on all the pages in your FrontPage web, items such as timestamps and Page URL substitution components placed in a shared border will be unique for each page.
The Include Page Component is a useful alternative to using Shared Borders on your site. It can also be used in many other situations to save a lot of time.
The Component allows you to include one web page in another web page. So if (for example) all your pages had your corporate logo at the top of the page and a copyright notice and other information at the bottom of the page, it would be possible to create the header and footer pages once, then include them in all the pages on your site. Then if you needed to change your company logo, you would only have to edit the header page.
A page is included within another page by choosing the FrontPage Component option from the FrontPage Editor Insert menu. Once the Insert FrontPage Component window appears, choose the Include Page option. The Include Page Component Properties window will then appear, allowing you to choose a page to include from your FrontPage web.
Author: Brett Burridge
Date: 11/19/1998
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