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Frontpage 2003 observations and tips.
| FrontPage is being replaced!!! |
| Microsoft FrontPage is nearing the end of its life cycle .
please read our ongoing
review of
Expression Web of Microsoft's new web design tools |
We use Frontpage for most of our web development. Once you
understand FP, it allows you to quickly build sites and then maintain them.
For beginners
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Don't try to create a page,
create a web. You will almost always want to create or open a web. For
example, if you want to create a website, choose File, New, One Page
Website and not File, New, Blank page. By creating a website, you
will have a fully functional website. If you just create a page, you will not
have all of the functionality. Once you have started your web, you can then
use File, New, Blank Page to create new pages.
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Backup before you begin
working on a web - If you are publishing from a local to a remote machine,
always back up your local web before making any changes. We store all of our
local webs under one folder. In that folder is a folder called 'backups'.
Before doing any modifications on the local web, we right click and copy the
web folder we will be working. Then go to the backups folder and right
click-paste. If anything goes wrong while you are working on the web, you will
have a copy of a good, working web.
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Always import graphics and
files into your web through Frontpage. A common mistake for beginners is
to start a web and then copy and paste files such as graphics into the web
folder via Windows Explorer or anything other than Frontpage. If you want to
import a file, copy it from it's place in Windows Explorer and then paste it
into the appropriate folder in the folder list in Frontpage. When you do that,
you will see a dialog box that says 'importing'. This way, the file is now
recognized by Frontpage properly.
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Use Edit, Paste Special,
Normal Paragraphs when pasting from other applications. If you copy
something from a Word document and then paste it into Frontpage with a regular
paste, it will keep the formatting that was in the original document. In most
cases, this will conflict with the styles you want in your document. If you
edit, paste special, Normal paragraphs, the text you insert will take the
characteristics in place at the insertion point.
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Learn how to use the
navigation buttons - One of the reasons for using Frontpage is the way it
manages your navigation. Go to View, Navigation. This is where you will
set up the relationships between your pages. You will need to go to your pages
and Insert Navigation, bar based on navigation structure to put the
navigation bars on your pages. The important thing is to understand the
differences between the different levels: parent, child, same, back and next,
global and child pages under home. Once you learn how to use the navigation
you can easily add pages to your site without having to manually edit the
navigation on every page.
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Don't use spaces in your
filename - In some cases, the use of spaces in a file name can cause
problems for visitors.
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View your site from someone
else's machine - Many beginners have not imported their images correctly
or are otherwise pointing to files on their computer. When they view their
published site, everything looks fine because your browser will usually find
the pages stored on your machine. However, anyone else viewing the page will
not see your local files and the pages will be broken for them.
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Watch your size - Take a
look at the bottom right of your screen. There is an indicator there telling
you how long that page should take to load at different connection speeds. Set
it for 56k and try to keep your page load times to about a half minute or so
(depending on the content)
Also check out our
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