FrontPage 98 Tips - 3

Tip 1 FrontPage 98 Theme Verifier

The FrontPage Theme Designer installs a second utility: the FrontPage Theme Verifier. The program THMVERAS.EXE can be found in the \BIN directory under the FrontPage installation directory. This utility can be used to verify that the custom themes you create meet the basic requirements to work well with FrontPage.

Firstly to make life easy put THMVERAS.EXE on your desktop as a shortcut...
Then double click, this opens a large dialog box called the Theme verification assistant.
It will say 'There are no themes to display'.
Click 'Open' this brings up a listing of all your themes.
Select the theme you want to verify and press 'OK'.
This will bring you back to the 'Theme verification assistant' Next to the theme you selected will be a + sign, click on this. Now depending on whether or not the theme you selected has anything wrong with it...(The ones that come with FrontPage 98 don't)...A file of errors will show up...click thumbnail to see a cut of an error report.
If you want to save this report click Dump, this will dump it into a log file which you can save...For easy reading and printing I change it to a .txt file and save.

The Theme Verifier is most useful if you are going to create themes without the help of the Theme Designer. It analyses one or more theme directories and creates a report that can be saved and printed.

There are no help files with theme designer but there is a extensive web developer help file called FPDevkit.doc under the SDK folder on your FrontPage CD - ROM

Tip 2 The high life!

"I placed the cursor to
the left of the first letter, held down the shift
key and then placed the cursor at the end of the
text I wanted to change and viola'!...the whole
text area was highlighted."

Tip provided by Elaine Garvin

Tip 3 Marking the location of scripts

After inserting VBScript or JavaScript into a Web page, FrontPage then does not automatically show where the script is in Normal mode. So it is easy to delete by mistake.

Select Format Marks from the View menu. Then click the show/hide button on the toolbar (shaped like backwards P) When you do, the location of your scripts will then be marked with a little flag. JavaScript flags have a "J" on them, while VBScript flags show a miniature version of the Visual Basic logo.

Tip 4 Flowing Text

If you want text to flow around your image. The trick is to change the image's properties so that the text runs to the left or right of your image:

1. Right-click the image.
2. Choose Image Properties from the menu that appears.
3. Click the Appearance tab in the Image Properties dialog box.
4. Under Alignment, choose Left or Right.
5. Click OK to close the Image Properties dialog box.

Now your text flows around your image instead of sitting above or below it. If you don't already have text on the page, you can begin typing now, and your text flows automatically.

Tip 5 Design Tip

To stop other webmasters framing your site just insert the following piece of JavaScript code between the <head> </head> tags on your front page:

<script language="JavaScript">

</script>

Just change YOURURL to the full URL of the page you don't want
frames on. For example if I put that code on:

http://accessfp.net/

I would also use the same URL in the URL field in the JavaScript.

Tip 6 Hidden away

To help you organise your hidden pages, you can also create folders within the /_private folder, such as /_private/myfolder. Folders and files within the /_private folder are inaccessible by a Web browser unless you know the name of the folder.

Tip 7 Use a System Variable to Redirect to Another Page from the navigation bar.

1. Create a new page in FrontPage Explorer.

a. On the View menu, click Folders and then open your Web.
b. Click the New Page button on the toolbar. Name the page Link.htm and press ENTER.
c. Double-click Link.htm to open the page in FrontPage Editor.
d. On the File menu, click Page Properties, and then click the Custom tab.
e. In the System Variables (HTTP-EQUIV) section, click Add.
f. In the Name box, type "refresh" (without the quotation marks).
g. In the Value box, type "0; url=http://Server/Page.htm" (without the quotation marks) where http://Server/Page.htm is the absolute URL to the page you want to link to.
h. Click OK two times.
i. Save and close the page.

2. Add the newly created page to the navigation structure of your Web.

a. In FrontPage Explorer, click Navigation on the View menu.
b. Drag the Link.htm page to the position you want it in the navigation structure. For example, make it a child page of your home page.

3. Preview your home page in a Web browser and follow the link in the Navigation bar.

Tip Presented by Joan Middleton using as yet unknown resources.

Tip 8 Moving Title

FrontPage 98 moves the Title tag below the Meta tags when you use certain wizards and templates. This can cause your page to rank lower on some search engines. Your Title tag should appear before your Meta tag.
MS Articles/q182/6/15 MS Articles/q182/8/05

Tip by Chung Webster CurryPages.com

Tip 9 Never mind the quality feel the compression

FrontPage is set up by default to further compress inserted images by as much as 75 per cent, and this will degrade the quality of the image once the page is saved. To prevent this you can right-click on the image you just inserted into FrontPage Editor (prior to saving the page) and select Image Properties from the Context menu. Change the JPEG compression setting to 100 per cent, which will prevent FrontPage from compressing the image further.

Tip by Gene Cass Derbyshire Cottage

Tip 10 The short and the long

I want my navigation bar text to be short, my page titles as descriptive as possible. Page titles usually show up in search engines, so I want them very descriptive. Picture this: you spend a few minutes thinking in "search engine" mode and create a descriptive title for a .htm file. Then you go to explorer and add the page to the navigation bar. As you do this, the program wants to plug in the page title for the name of your navigation button. You think, oh, that's too long for a button, and you shorten it. If your using the banner in a theme changing the name in the navigation view will change the name in the banner.

If you're not careful, you will lose that carefully thought out page title. -- To have a descriptive title that pops up when you save to favourites, but a short page title in your banner and navigation view. Right click and select Page Properties...Then change the text next to Title and press okay. You can see the changed text in the blue bar across the top of the screen.

Tip Provided by Jana Meiser
(Edited by webmaster)

Tip 11 Move that Image

If you start off making your website and like me in the beginning did not know to put all images in the images folder. You can move them now to the images folder.

First don't attempt to move them to the folder in the right hand pane of folders view.
Select the all the images by

In the right hand pane click on 'Type' to line up all the Image files.
Click on the first Image file to select it, Press 'Shift' and hold down, scroll down to the last Image file and select it. let go of 'shift'

Right click within the highlighted files keep holding down the button drag all the files over to the LEFT hand pane and position over the 'Image' folder let go and click 'Move here' when the dialog box pops up. When you do this all the images will be moved over and a dialog box will pop up asking if you want to retain the links say yes. Don't forget to recalculate your links before uploading your website.

Tip 12 Find the line

If you want to find the line number in html after validating your code with a third party, just cut and paste the html into Notepad with Wrap turned off...then count down to the required line. This will give you the correct line number, count spaces between the code as well. FP2k now has this feature built in. (see FP2k-Tips)

Tip 13 Saved from...where?

Sometimes people pinch your web pages, they don't always look in the html though, you might not always know who they are, but you can do one thing that might alert you in future and that is by putting a comment in the code to tell everyone just whose code it is. If you see this and it does not belong to the address the page is on...you could be a good net citizen and alert the owner. Just place this comment code under the Head tag. Inserting your own url of course.

Tip 14 Unzip that Theme

Most times themes are contained in a zip file when you download them. Here is what you need to do once you download the file:

1. Open the zip file

2. Unzip all the files (using a program such as Winzip, which can be found at http://www.winzip.com )

Note: unzip each theme to a separate folder and make sure that the name of the folder is the name of the .elm file.

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Front Page\Themes\Insert name of folder for theme here\

3. Open Microsoft FrontPage

4. Apply the theme by going to the themes view and selecting it.