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About creating and designing Web pages

Some of the content in this topic may not be applicable to some languages.

Web pages are the basic documents of the World Wide Web. They can either be part of a Web site, or they can stand alone. Many of the features in Microsoft FrontPage are used when working with a Web site. There are also features in FrontPage that will help you to both design and create your Web page.

To help you create professional-looking and well-designed Web pages, FrontPage provides several page templates that you can use to quickly create pages with a variety of layouts and functions. For example, you can use a FrontPage template to create a user registration page, guest book, feedback form, a page with a search form, and more.

You can use themes to create pages with a consistent design. A theme contains unified design elements with a color scheme, including fonts, graphics, backgrounds, navigation bars, horizontal lines, and other page elements.

If you prefer to design and lay out pages yourself, you can start with a blank page, and then do one or more of the following:

• Use frames, tables, layouts, or absolute positioning to precisely position text and graphics on a page.
• Add page elements, such as text, graphics, page banners, tables, forms, hyperlinks, and so on.
• Add dynamic elements such as Flash content, video, sound, or animated GIFs.
• Add content or functionality that can change, such as marquees, hit counters, time stamps, page transitions, interactive buttons, and behaviors that use Dynamic HTML (DHTML).
• Format text by applying styles or using style sheets.
• Set the background of your Web page with either color or pictures.
• Create your own page templates by using dynamic Web templates, which can include pages that contain page settings, formatting, and page elements.

You can also start with a graphical representation of your Web site, called a tracing image. You can do this by creating a mock-up of a Web page image in a graphics program and then use it as a visual guide to re-create or trace the Web page design.

Editing in FrontPage

You do not need to know how to code in HTML to use FrontPage. While you edit pages as you would in a word processor — typing and formatting text, and adding graphics, tables, and other page elements — FrontPage adds the HTML tags in the background. You simply edit your pages in Design view.

However, if you want to familiarize yourself with HTML or edit HTML code directly, you can also use Code view, which displays the HTML code of a Web page, or Split view, which displays both Code view and Design view simultaneously.

If you are familiar with HTML, you can display the HTML tags in Code view and you can write and edit the HTML tags yourself. With the create and maintain optimized code options available in FrontPage, you can create clean HTML, and easily remove any code that you do not want.

In FrontPage, you can use Extensible Markup Language (XML) to complement, rather than replace, your HTML. You can view or edit files, apply standard formatting to the structure of code in XML files, view the XML tree, and create custom displays of XML data on Web pages. For example, you can create a Web page that displays data from an XML file, format that data, and apply filtering, sorting, and conditional formatting to display the data the way you want.