NCWC: FrontPage Basics

Microsoft's FrontPage2002 is the web editing program of choice at NCWC. All computers in the public labs (Pearsall 187 and 189, the Library, and the Hartness Center) should have this program installed. Employees may request a copy for their office computers.

Faculty and staff may request web space for personal use or for College-related organizations. The Webmaster must create your web, and notify you of the name and location.

The only required content for your pages is your name and email, and a link to NCWC's home page.

To start FrontPage, click Start | Programs | Microsoft FrontPage.

You should see a dialogue box called Getting Started which asks which web to open; if not, close any other dialogues then click File | Open. If your web is in the list you may select it and click OK. Otherwise click More Webs then enter the name of the web server in the box (for faculty it is faculty.ncwc.edu). Click List Webs, select your web from the resulting list, and click OK. If you are not logged on to your workstation with your personal WESLINK account, you will be asked for your user name and password.

At this point you should see the FrontPage Explorer screen. To begin, click the "new page" icon on the toolbar (top left). This creates a home page named default.htm, which will be the page seen by visitors entering your web without specifying a file name. Double click the "home page" icon or the file name to edit the file.

Page editing takes place in the FrontPage Editor. In "normal" view this program is quite similar in operation to Microsoft Word and other WYSIWYG word processors. At the lower left of the screen are additional view tabs for "HTML" (which shows the underlying code for the page) and "preview" (which shows the page as it will appear to viewers).

You may type text directly in the Editor. You may also paste text from Microsoft Word into the Editor. Most formatting, including font styles and paragraph breaks, will be transferred. However tab characters are not transferred, because they are not part of the HTML standard. You may have to twiddle with advanced formatting such as tables.

Links:

The easy way to create a hyperlink is to type the address, like this: http://www.ncwc.edu --then press the space bar or return key and a link to that address will be created. You may then edit the text without affecting the location linked to.
Or, you may highlight existing text and click the hyperlink icon on the toolbar. This brings up the hyperlink properties box, where you can select from pages in your current web, or browse to a file on your computer or on the web . You can browse (using Internet Explorer) to the page you want, and its location will be copied to the link properties box.

Pictures:

To insert a picture, click the icon near the center of the toolbar. You can browse to files as with links. Once the picture is visible on the page, you can resize it by dragging from the corner; cropping and other effects are available on the image toolbar at the bottom of the screen. When you have the size right, click "resample" ( on the picture bar). When you save the page you should be prompted to save the pictures. Ideally these go in the "images" subdirectory of your web.
To copy an image from another web site, right-click and select "copy" then paste the image into FrontPage; this will copy all image attributes including size, alternate text and hyperlink if any. To get just the picture, right-click on the desired image, and select "save image as" or "save picture as". Remember where you saved it; then browse to it when you want to insert it.

Saving:

You can save using the at top left. The first time you save you should use File | Save As, and enter a descriptive title in the box under the URL. (This is what appears at the top of the browser window.)

Importing Files:

If you have created web files (.htm) with Word or another program, or you have image files (.gif or .jpg) which you want to use, you can import them into your web. The easiest way is to highlight them and click Edit | Copy, then switch to the FrontPage Explorer window and Edit | Paste.

Additional Pages:

You can create as many pages as you like using the new page icon or File | New in Explorer or Editor. You should save each one with a descriptive title and file name. You can link from one page to another using the hyperlink icon.

Templates and Themes:

If you create a page using File | New from the Editor, you will have a choice of file templates which allow more control over how text appears on the page. You can use these, or simply copy what they are doing in your own files.
You can select a web theme using the Explorer; this includes backgrounds and button styles to be applied to each page. You can also apply a theme to an individual page from the Editor using Format | Theme...