Editing Pages

Open up the home page for editing now by double-clicking it's icon. The home page will open in 'Page View', as indicated at the left of your screen. Although other views are available, you will, as a novice, never need to use any except Page View and Navigation View.

We want to include on every page a 'page banner' displaying the title of the page and a 'navigation bar' consisting of navigation buttons that will allow visitors to jump from one page to another. Since we want these on EVERY page we will place them in a 'shared border' which is like a 'header' in Microsoft Word. Choose Format > Shared Borders (Format > Bordures Partagées) then choose 'all pages', 'top' and 'include navigation buttons', then press OK. A page banner displaying the page label and a navigation bar should appear above a dashed line that represents the bottom of the shared border. The page banner should say 'Edit the properties of this navigation bar to display hyperlinks here' so let's do just that - right-click the navigation bar and choose 'Navigation Bar Properties'. The most useful settings for the navigation bar are 'child level' with parent page and home page links turned on - make it so and click OK. The page banner and navigation bar will now automatically be set correctly for every page so a NEVER MAKE ANY MORE CHANGES TO THE SHARED BORDER AT THE TOP OF EVERY PAGE. Changes made in the shared border affect every page, so making a mistake in the shared border is a good way of spoiling your whole site!

Before you type any text into your home page, you might want to make sure that FrontPage knows that you are typing in English, especially if your are using a French version of FrontPage, so choose File > Properties > Language... English (Fichier>Propriétés>Langue>...Anglais). If you don't do this then FrontPage may use the wrong language dictionary when it checks the spelling on your page. Now you can add a few lines of text to your home page, being careful to type them below the dashed like that marks the bottom of the shared border, then save the page with Ctrl-S, just as you would do in Microsoft Word.

Your page probably still look very dull - just black text on a white background. Let's add a color scheme to our website. Microsoft calls this a 'theme' and it includes not only colors but also decorative features such as horizontal lines and background pictures. Choose Format > Theme and apply a theme to all the pages of your site. You can change the theme later if you want.

Let's have another look at the navigation bar in the shared border. You have configured the navigation bar to show links to the home page, to the parent page, and to the child pages, as defined by the navigation view that you saw earlier. You can't follow the links by clicking on them as in a browser, but you CAN follow them by using this simple trick: hold down the Ctrl key and THEN click a link (note that you can't jump from the home page to the home page, however!) Try it now! Another way to open pages, as we saw earlier, is to switch back to Navigation view and then double-click the page that you are interested in. Try it now!

Now let's work on the various pages in your website, being careful not to change anything in the shared border above the dashed line. Each time you finish a page, save it just as you would save a Word document, by pressing Ctrl-S.

	The Word page should contain the contents of a any of the Word documents that you created in my class, as a sample of what you did. Open the Word document in Word, select all its contents (Ctrl-A), copy (Ctrl-C) and then paste what you have copied into the web page labeled 'Word'. You may notice that the web page does not look exactly like the original Word document - you should type a couple of sentences at the top of the web page to say what differences you have noticed.
	The Excel page, like the Word page, will include a sample of your work. In Excel, open any Excel document that you created in this class and that contains a chart. Copy the chart by right-clicking it and choosing 'copy' then paste a copy of the chart on the Excel web page. Add a sentence to the web page to explain what you just did.
	On the School Work page, just type a paragraph to summarize everything you have learnt in this class, so far.
	The Hobbies page should be about your favorite hobby or hobbies - why do you like it or them so much and what do you know about it or them (try to make the page educational). Obviously you have a lot of freedom here - you are welcome to include a couple of pictures that you have copied and pasted from the internet. Although this is not a problem for your very modest web site which will not be published to the internet, you should know that most images on the internet are protected by copyright - you would certainly need to be attentive to this if your were developing a commercial site. There is more help with adding pictures in the next lesson.
	The Links page should include at least three external links i.e. links to pages that are outside your site. See the next lessons for help with this.
	The Welcome page should contain a hit counter (compteur d'access), a scrolling text 'marquee' and a photograph of your face which you will select from within a digital photograph of the class. You will learn how to do all this and more in the next two lessons...