Design your Web site

What's new home

Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 has an improved design environment, new layout and design tools, templates, and improved themes— all created to help you realize your Web site vision without requiring any knowledge of HTML.

Improved work environment and larger design area

FrontPage 2003 centralizes all of the Web design features and gives you a panoramic view of your entire Web site, making site and page design easier than ever. The larger design area also reduces scrolling.

Layout tables and cells

You can create professional-looking Web page layouts by using layout tables and cells. A layout table is the framework you create for your page. Layout cells are regions within that framework that contain the content in a page, including text, images, Web parts, and other elements. You can select from a list of predefined layouts or you can draw your own— and you can try a variety of layouts before you make your final decision.

The layout table tools are located in an easily accessible task pane. You can use the tools to apply additional formatting, such as rounded corners, borders, autostretch, and other visual effects.

Image Tracing

When you use image tracing, you create a mock-up image of a Web page in a graphics program and then use it as a visual guide to create or trace the Web page design in FrontPage. You can show or hide the image, set its opacity, and change its position.

Dynamic Web Templates

You can quickly create HTML pages that share the same layout by attaching Dynamic Web Templates to them. You can specify that certain regions within a template are available for editing, while all of the other regions remain protected. This means that you can allow others to add and edit content, yet preserve the layout of the pages and the template itself.

You can use any number of Dynamic Web Templates in a Web site, and you can attach a Dynamic Web Template to as many pages as you like. You can also save Dynamic Web Template (.dwt) files to any location. If you choose to detach a Dynamic Web Template from one or more pages in a site, you do not remove the content from those pages. You remove only the formatting provided by the template.

Page rulers and layout grid

Precision design and placement is a snap with helpful positioning guides, such as page rulers and the background layout grid. You can customize the rulers or the grid by choosing a unit of measurement, line styles and colors, and spacing options.

Design-time layers

In FrontPage 2003, layers can contain HTML elements, such as text and graphics. In the Layers task pane, you can view an itemized list of all the layers on your Web page. You can overlap, nest, and show or hide layers on a page. You can also animate layers by using the Behaviors task pane, which enables you to add Dynamic HTML (DHTML) script to any element on a Web page.

Improved themes

FrontPage 2003 uses cascading style sheets rather than HTML to apply themes, so your files are smaller, more transparent, and easier to control and modify. Additionally, pages with HTML themes applied in previous versions retain their settings in FrontPage 2003.