Frontpage Frustrations :>(

  • Thread starter Thread starter EYE-lene!
  • Start date Start date
E

EYE-lene!

I am new to Frontpage. I put a site up for my friend. It's
only five pages but am having these problems:
The web address is: www.leaderthread.com
On the homepage for some reason I can't move the
text up. There's that big space in between the
animated spools & where the text begins.
I also tried to insert a small pink border around
each text/graphic on all the pages by going to
insert/borders. This worked fine on the zippers
page. But the rest of the pages gave me trouble.
Am I doing it the wrong way? And finally, I clicked
on insert/hyperlink for the email spool at the bottom.
But when I click on it I get an earthlink page instead
of a page to send an email. It's all very frustrating!
 
I hardly know where to begin. First, what you're designing is a web page, an
HTML document. It would really help you to learn something about HTML. All
that FrontPage does with regards to creating web pages is to write your HTML
for you. Regarding the first issue, let's have a look at the HTML in
question:

</td><td valign="top" width="24"></td><!--msnavigation--><td valign="top">
<p align="center"><img border="0" src="images/Big_Black_Spool_Fixed.jpg"
width="503" height="150"></p>
<p align="center"><img border="0" src="images/Big_Spool_Animation.gif"
width="148" height="244">
<p align="left">&nbsp;
<p align="left">&nbsp;
<p align="left">&nbsp;
<p align="left">&nbsp;
<p align="left"><span style="left: 99; top: 825; position: relative"><img
border="0" src="images/Homepage_SMALL_FILE.jpg" width="660" height="507"
align="right"></span>
<p
align="left">&nbsp;<!--msnavigation--></td></tr><!--msnavigation--></table><
!--msnavigation--><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"
width="100%">

Each of the <p> tags represents a vertical space. A <p> tag is for a
paragraph. It inserts a space below it, the height of the font used in that
paragraph. If no font is specified, it uses the size of the default font of
the browser. Now, your "Homepage_SMALL_FILE.jpg" image (ironic name for an
image of over 100 KB in size) is using relative positioning to be positioned
in the page. I suspect that this happened as a result of your dragging the
image to position it. Note: not all browsers support absolute/relative
positioning with styles. You should use tables to do your positioning, which
it looks like you started out to do, but got sidetracked somehow.

As for the images having borders, let's look at the HTML there:

<p align="center" style="border: 9 solid #FF00FF; padding-top: -1;
padding-bottom: 0"><img border="0" src="images/Zipper_Text_SMALLER_FILE.jpg"
width="631" height="393"></p>

Note that the border is on the <p> tag, not on the image tag. This puts a
border around the paragraph in which the image resides, not the image. Note
the "border" attribute of the image. That's what needs to be changed
(right-click the image and select "Image Properties" from the context menu).
You can change the "border" attribute, or, if you want colors and that sort
of thing, use styles for the image.

One final note: Almost every page has a large image (over 100 KB) in it,
with nothing but text in the image. This is a tremendous waste of bandwidth,
and will make your pages take a long time to load in many browsers, as the
images have to be downloaded. There is NO reason to use an image to display
text. You would do well to get rid of them.

Good luck!

--
HTH,

Kevin Spencer
Microsoft MVP
..Net Developer
http://www.takempis.com
Neither a follower nor a lender be.
 
I think Kevin and Stefan have addressed your immediate problems. If I may,
I'd like to offer a few other comments...

1. Nice start with the background. It gives a nice feel of oodles of spools,
which I think is good for your client. The challenge is putting things on
top of this background and making it look good. I suggest you place a table
with a white background on your page and put everything in it, allowing your
spools to be sort of a border

2. Using the spools as your navigation menu is a nice touch. However, they
look odd sitting on the grey rectangles. If they are to sit directly on the
tiled background, you need to create transparent gifs. If you take my
suggestion in #1 above, you could just use a white background instead of the
grey buttons. Also, they are too large, forcing the site visitor to scroll
down just to see your short menu.

3. Your text needs to be text! Right now it's a big image. This slows down
your page and hurts you with search engines.

This screenshot will give you a very rough idea of what I mean:
http://members.cox.net/daylightdesignstudio/show/leaderthread.gif

Victoria
 
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