Overview

Once you've had a chance to navigate through all the example pages and elements provided, you can plan your site. Before making any changes to the template, create your back-up file.

Couple of things to get you started off the blocks....

Logo and "Your Site Name Here"

Each page offers a logo and place holder for your new web site name. Simply open the logo.htm file (see the 'includes' folder) and edit it to your liking. Once you have saved your changes, all the pages which call this file into the header will receive your update.

Footer & Copyright

The footer.htm file (see the 'includes' folder) also contains some data which will require your personalization.

Tips n' tricks

If you're using FrontPage 2003, we recommend that you start using the split screen view. Watch what you're working on as you make edits to become more familiar with the html code. This will also show you what classes (from the style sheet) we have used to make sections of content look as they do. You may also use the view "Reveal Tags" (see View + Reveal Tags) which provides some visibility into the work you are creating / editing.

Editing the CSS File

The style sheet is categorized into sections: colors, layout, general tags, and customized elements. Each section has comments to tell you what they are. This way, you can easily see the sections which contain warnings - "do not edit" - to prevent any major design changes (and errors).

Just like any major changes to the overall layout and design of this template, we do not make any warranties to major changes applied to the Styles. We have noted acceptable areas of change and highlighted the areas to be left "as-is".

Formatting Toolbar, Font Sizes, and Your Visitor's Experience

Be sure to have the formatting toolbar on so you can access styles easily. Go to View + Toolbars and select "Formatting" from the list of available toolbars. The toolbar will show you (from left to right) the Styles dropdown list, Font Families, Font Sizes and a series of icons which will help edit your content.

We always use percentages for our font sizes as it is the recommended best practice for browser display. With a percentage font size in place, your Visitors may control the size in which they view text on your screen. For instance, in Internet Explorer, go to the menu and select "View" + "Text Size" and then play with the settings. Go from smaller, to medium, to larger and watch the fonts flex in size. This is only possible when fonts are set to a percentage.