FrontPage Hints and Tips to Live By

Here are the top hints and tips to remember about FrontPage 98.

Creating FrontPage Webs in the Explorer

1. Typically you'll want to create a new one page web and buld from there. Use the File | New command, and in the New FrontPage Web, choose One Page Web, then choose an appropriate title (such as "Human Resources Home Page") for the entire web, then change the URL to something easy to type (use the Change button).
2. NO SPACES (or weird punctuation) IN FILENAMES (or urls)! Be careful with the names you use in any "location" box. Lower case is always best.
3. Always close the FrontPage Editor before making sweeping changes (such as the spell check, publishing, or renaming a file). This guarantees that all of the changes are saved and reflected in the FrontPage Explorer.
4. It's easiest to use the FrontPage Explorer's Folders view. In particular, the Navigation view is confusing.
5. Deleting a Web is final! There's no undo, and no recycle bin.

Hints for using the Editor

1. Use a good title for each page, such as "Acme Human Resources: Staff Page". A default name like "Home Page" is terrible. Use the File | Page Properties menu to change the web page's title.
2. Anytime you want to edit something, remember to double-click on it, or else right-click on it and choose the properties command from the shortcut menu.
3. Don't use underlining -- it's confused easily with a link.
4. Fonts and colors and sizes are only a suggestion -- individual people will have different fonts and resolution and colors available. Keep the contrast high for your backgrounds. Make your font choices as general as possible -- use <FONT FACE="verdana,arial,helvetica,universe"> in the HTML view to maximize compatibility. Avoid special effects that only look good on a single browser.
5. In general, use percentages rather than pixels. After all, you have no idea what size screen is being used.
6. Don't forget to set a background color -- the default background is gray for Netscape Navigator 3 and Internet Explorer 3. Consider making your entire site share a single document's colors. Use easy-to-read colors with plenty of contrast. If you set the background, also set a contrasting text color and link colors. It's a good idea to explicitly set the defaults.
7. Remember which features are IE-only (marquees, page margins, background sounds, etc.) -- see the reference sheet.
8. Preview EVERYTHING in both Navigator and IE. In fact, get as many browsers (and different versions of browsers) as you can. Borrow a Macintosh and see how your page looks from a Mac.

Hints for using Themes

1. You can't use Themes AND Style Sheets -- it's one or the other.
2. You give up a lot of control with themes -- you can't change the background, and you'll lose any existing page colors and backgrounds.
3. Themes create a HUGE number of files in your Web, which you can't delete even if you later remove the theme. This means your Web will take longer to publish.
4. If you change a theme in the Editor, it's only going to change that one page. If you change a theme in the Explorer, you change the theme for the entire site.
5. Changing themes adds more files that can't easily be deleted, making your Web larger.
6. Everyone's themes all look the same. Even though there's 50 themes, people will still get to know them and recognize that you're using a canned theme. You can download the Theme Designer from Microsoft's Web site (http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/) if you want to make your own.

Hints for the Image Composer

1. Save two copies of every image you work on: One in the MIC format, one for the Web (either GIF or JPG).
2. Anything outside the white box will not be visible in a GIF or JPG.
3. Always use Image Composer as a separate program, don't try to integrate it with FrontPage. Save your work separately, then insert it in FrontPage using the FrontPage Editor's Insert | Image command.
4. Remember to right-click to see properties.

[To the Agenda for FrontPage 98]

Last Modified: March 12, 1999