FrontPage Help
Split or merge frontpage tables
FrontPage behaviors and layers
Set up your navigation structure in FrontPage
It sounds complicated and yes what FP does for you, is. But for a new or experienced user, the Front Page navigation Pane is a must.
Navigating a site should be simple for your user to do. And like all good things, 90% of your time should be spent planning and the following 10% doing.
How do you want your navigation?
If you have just a few pages, who cares! But as your site grows, the amount of work you have to do will increase so any way of saving time will be beneficial.
Maybe at the moment you are adding links and button by hand! Typing out the words, adding colour maybe underlines or line through? What ever you are doing if you are not using FP to create your navigation, read on.....
Microsoft Front Page allows you to set up your navigation even before you design a single page! Whilst we all like to jump right in and start designing web pages, I would advise anyone who is serious about web site design to sit back and work it all out on paper first!
The following tutorial shows you how to set up your navigation. Once done, Front Page will update your navigation structure automatically each time you add or delete a page.
The Relationship.
Consider your navigation as a family tree! You start with the home page (parent) and add pages to this (child) So from your home page (Index) your additional pages would be child pages and or child/parent! How confusing is that? Well here is a graphic to explain.
Note the #Parent Child# this box is the parent of the box below but the child of the box above (index)
Don't get bogged down with all this parent child thing! However the fact remains that your site navigation is only as good as your preparation.
When you click on the navigation tab at the bottom of your
screen, you are presented with a page like the one below.
This is the Parent.
If you already have pages in your web site, great! If not you should make three up. For this example 4 pages were used.
Template Page - This page would be the main design of the site and used for all new pages.
Index.htm - The Home Page
About Us
Products
You may well have a page titled new_page1. If this is the case just forget about it. So now we can make a start on the navigation structure.
Assuming you have the pages above you can follow along - If you
don't - Don't worry you will understand.
Click on aboutus.htm and drag it under the index page in the
navigation window.
Do the same with products.htm
Note - The index page is the parent and About Us and Products are the child pages.
Congratulations, you have taken your first steps towards building your navigation structure. That's all you have to do. Each new page should be dragged to the position you want it to appear in the navigation Bar then all existing bars will update when refreshed to reflect the addition.
Inserting a navigation bar
Where ever you want a navigation bar just click your cursor there and do Insert/Navigation/Bar Based on Navigation Structure. An alternative is to use either shared borders or page include