Build your own Website

Pro

1. Installation

Microsoft FrontPage is Microsoft’s approach to Website design and development. It is an integrated package that allows you to design the look and feel of a Website, add features, such as user feedback forms and e-commerce features to your Website, and develop the online presence that is required for small and medium business enterprises today.

The installation of FrontPage is simple and straightforward. Simply insert the CD and follow the installation wizard. FrontPage should install in minutes, allowing you to design your Website.

2. Set-up

Web pages are the basic documents of the World Wide Web and are written in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). Web pages can either be part of a web site, or they can standalone. However, many features in Microsoft FrontPage are only useful if you are working with a Website. For example, a link bar (link bar: A collection of graphic or text buttons representing hyperlinks to pages both within your Website and to external sites.), which lets a site visitor navigate to other pages in a web, is meaningless in the context of a single page.

To help you create professional-looking and well-designed Web pages, FrontPage provides several templates, which are a set of pre-designed formats for text and graphics on which new pages and web can be based.

After a page or Web is created using a template, you can customise the design so you can quickly create pages with a variety of layouts and functions. Themes can consist of designs and colour schemes for fonts, link bars, and other page elements to create pages with a consistent design. A theme contains unified design elements with a colour scheme, including fonts, graphics, backgrounds, navigation bars, horizontal lines, and other page elements.

3. Structure

The most important thing to know and understand when putting a site together is what sort of site works and what doesn’t. The structure of the Website is the most important. If your users or potential customers find your site difficult to use, it is likely that they will not return to it, and you will have lost part of your audience – because of this, making sure the site is easy to navigate is of paramount importance.

In FrontPage, the menus used for navigation of a Website are known as link bars – a set of links used for navigating a Website. For example, a typical link bar might have hyperlinks to the Website’s home page and its main pages. You can display a link bar on every page in your Website so that your site visitors can always get to the Website’s main pages quickly and easily. Link bars can use graphical buttons or text hyperlinks.

You can create a set of hyperlinks to use for navigation yourself—that is, you can create your own set of buttons and link them to the relevant pages within your Website and outside it, and repeat this on each page where you want a link bar. You can also choose to set up the navigation structure of your Website, and then let Microsoft FrontPage create the link bars for you. FrontPage maintains the link bars it creates; if you move or add a page, FrontPage updates (recalculates the hyperlinks) the link bar accordingly.

FrontPage does not require a knowledge of HTML, the code that is used to display information in web browsers, however, a basic knowledge of HTML is always an advantage, as it gives you a good idea of how FrontPage puts your Website together. While you edit pages as you would in a word processor-typing and formatting text, and adding graphics and other page elements, FrontPage adds the HTML tags in the background. Your page is displayed to you as it would appear in a Web browser. However, you can display the HTML tags on the page, and if you are familiar with HTML, you can write and edit the HTML tags yourself.

4. Graphics

What FrontPage does not do is design graphics for your Website. While it comes with pre-designed template images, you will still have to have access to images that are specific to your company, such as the logo of your company, or photographs of key staff members. For this, you will need to have an understanding of a graphics program, such as Adobe Photoshop or Jasc’s Paint Shop Pro. Graphics programs are used to output GIF and JPEG types of images — more about these below.

You can use graphics on your Web pages to provide information, artwork, theme elements, or a company logo. In addition to being decorative, graphics can be useful, for items such as navigational buttons. With Microsoft FrontPage, there are a variety of ways to lay out the graphics on your Web pages.

The formats that are used for Web pages are GIF and JPEG. Graphics in GIF format can contain up to 256 colours. They are mostly used to illustrate diagrams and charts, both of which do not usually contain much colour.

The JPEG format is commonly used for images containing thousands or millions of colours. A good example of this would be a scan of a photograph.

When you add a graphic other than a GIF or JPEG to a page and then save it, Microsoft FrontPage automatically converts the graphic to a GIF if it has eight colours or less, or to a JPEG if it has more than eight colours. Graphic types other than GIF or JPEG include Bitmap files (Known on Windows systems as BMP) and Encapsulated Postscript Files (known as EPS files).

5. Going live

Publishing a Website generally means copying all of the files that make up a Website to a particular destination. In Microsoft FrontPage, you would typically publish your site when you want to make your site available for public viewing. Normally you create or update pages for your Website in a location where others cannot find or view the pages with their Web browser – most often this location would be the hard drive of the computer, where you design and build your Website. When you are ready to let others view your Website on the World Wide Web or on your company intranet, you would use the FrontPage publishing feature to copy the files to the Web server.

A Web server is a computer that makes it possible to display pages on the World Wide Web – these servers are usually run by an ISP (Internet Service Provider). It will be necessary to contact an ISP to open an account for you to have a presence on the Web. It’s also possible to have your ISP organise a domain name, such as www.yourcompany.ie or www.yourcompany.com. Once these have been organised, you can upload your Website and start to publicise your Website.

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