GETTING STARTED IN FRONT PAGE - IN FRONT PAGE

notes for CCA Seminar II: 2003

nb these are under construction and some pages are still blank

suggestions for additions where I have not been clear are welcome.

email me at          k.a.wardle@bham.ac.uk

Front page is one of the Microsoft suite of programmes and has many of the basic features of Word - many of the options look familiar and work the way you would expect. You can either write directly into the pages you open or paste in text prepared elsewhere. Links created in FP from one page to another will be updated when you copy the pages or publish (eg export them) to another context - eg from PC to Web or from PC to floppy. Links created in Word (which also offers web authoring possibilities) probably will not transfer correctly - so do not waste time doing this until you are ready to work in FP.

Prepare your texts (almost all the formatting will be preserved) in Word and draw a flow chart showing how you want your web to work. Remember to work out not only how to get from a general chapter to a detailed discussion or bibliography, but also to get back to a sensible point.

Tables, images, text can all be employed readily - look at other web pages to see what effects you would like to obtain, - and what kind of thing goes wrong - there is nothing more irritating than a message telling you a link has failed !

The 'default' settings - the normal typeface, typesize etc etc used by each computer/system - can sometimes cause unexpected problems in appearance when 'publishing' your work to the Web. For example, if your font is set as Arial as default and you publish to a system using Times Roman as default the text will appear in Times. If you set your font as Arial in the font box on the top line - mine says '(default font)' at the moment - then it will be preserved when you transfer the text etc. This sentence is written specifically in Bookman and should look different.

So how do you start? - go to next page.

(When you are surfing the Web, you point to the highlighted text and click to move to the new page. When you are working in FP you need to hold down the <control> key at the same time as you click and you will move to the next page you have set.)

The bold underlined text in blue has been turned into a hyperlink which takes you you to the next page by using its file name - in this case <OpeningFPweb.htm>