Learning to Use Frontpage

Using frontpage to create a website

FrontPage is a WYSIWYG web creation program. WYSIWYG = What You See Is What You Get. It is geek speak for point and click. As such it is basically a point and click environment. The assignments for learning to use FrontPage focus on exploring some of the features the program offers. It is important to play with the program so that you may learn where the various tools are and understand how to use them.

Think about learning to drive. Once you learn to drive, you can quickly learn how to drive any car, assuming that you have learned to drive both automatic and standard transmission cars. Now that you have learned to write xhtml code, learning to use a WYSIWYG program to make websites is more about learning where the controls are than about learning how what the code does.

You already know what the code does. When in doubt with one of these programs, dig into the code and try to control the display on the web page through the code

Some important things to remember about working in Frontpage

• Create a new website from the empty website template rather than creating only a new page
• When creating a new website from the empty web template, browse and direct the computer to save it to a specific folder on the shared drive

ASSIGNMENT 1 Due Date: 5/20/08

Submit web pages created with FrontPage that demonstrate your clear understanding of how to use the following features of the program. Clearly indicate on each page what parts of the assignment are demonstrated. You will have to submit more than one page to accomplish this.

1. Formatting text: font size and type, bold, italics
2. Importing documents into a web: create a link to a document that has been imported into the website.
3. Creating multiple pages in the web
4. Creating Hyperlinks: to another website, to a place within the same web page, to an email program, to another webpage within the same website.
5. Using graphics in the website
6. Using a table in the site
7. Create an external style sheet and link web pages to it.

ASSIGNMENT 2 Due Date: 5/28/08

Keeping in mind our discussions of good and bad web design, create a website using FrontPage.You may want to consider this effort for your community service project. Be sure to choose a different subject and audience for this website than you have previously used. For example, if you have already made a site about sports, choose a different subject. The web design evaluation checklist will be used to evaluate this web site.

Criteria for this website:

• Go through the process of clarifying the audience, brainstorming their needs, and creating a storyboard/sketch of the site.
• Submit the written explanation of who the audience is and what their needs are and the sketches before beginning the rest of the work.
• Name the first page index.html
• Organize all files for this site into its own folder
• Create an images folder in the website folder and put all images in it.
• Use tables to create the layout
• Use external style sheets to style all pages in the site
• Be sure all links work
• Include alternate text for all images
• Include an email link
• Navigation should be easily accessible and simple to manage
• Organize your html code so that it is easy to read
• Include comments in your code to explain what each section is about