About webpages

Pages are the basic documents of the World Wide Web and are written in HTML (HyperText Markup Language). Pages can either be part of a web, or they can stand alone. However, many features in Microsoft FrontPage are only useful if you are working with a web. For example, a navigation bar, which lets a site visitor navigate to other pages in a web, is meaningless in the context of a single page.

HTML

An HTML page contains HTML tags, which are embedded commands that supply information about the page's structure, appearance, and contents. Web browsers use this information to determine how to display the page.

You do not need to know HTML to use Microsoft 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. Your page is displayed to you as it would appear in a Web browser. However, you can display the HTML tags on the page, and if you are familiar with HTML, you can write and edit the HTML tags yourself.

Creating and designing pages

To help you create professional-looking and well-designed web pages, FrontPage provides several page templates so you can quickly create pages with a variety of layouts and functions. For example, you can use a FrontPage template to create a two-column page or a page with a search form. You can also use one of several 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:

• Use frames, tables, or absolute positioning to precisely position text and graphics on a page.
• Add page elements, such as text, graphics, page banners, tables, forms, hyperlinks, banner ads, marquees, hover buttons, time stamps, hit counters, and so on.
• Format text by applying styles or using style sheets.
• Animate page elements and set page transitions for lively pages.
• Set the background color, picture, or sound.
• Create your own page templates.