External Style Sheets are a great way to
control the look of your web from a central file. External Style Sheets
contain Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) commands used to control the
formatting of web pages. Many templates now use external style sheets.
Here a starter tip on how to add an external style sheet to your web site
and how to attach it to your page or pages.
Step 1: Add a style sheet to your web
FrontPage 2002 and 2003 comes with a small set of style sheets for you to
use and learn from. To add one of these style sheets to your web, select
the "File->New..." menu in FP2003 or "File->New->Page or Web..." menu item
in FP2002. The "New Page or Web" panel will appear on the right. Click on
the "Page Templates..." or "More Page Templates..." link, the "Page
Templates" dialog will appear. Then click on the "Style Sheets" tab and
select one of the predefined style sheets.
Page Templates->Style Sheets dialog
Press the OK button and a new style sheet
page will appear in the FrontPage editor.
Step 2: Edit your Style Sheet
The new style sheet will contain a set of style commands like the
following:
a:link
{
color: rgb(0,102,153);
}
a:visited
{
color: rgb(0,153,102);
}
a:active
{
color: rgb(0,102,102);
}
body
{
font-family: Arial, Helvetica;
background-color: rgb(204,204,153);
color: rgb(0,51,51);
}
Subsequent tips will discuss
the style sheet commands, but here a couple of resources on CSS that we
found very useful:
You can use the
eyedropper tip to help determine the color numbers needed for many of
the color commands.
Step 3: Apply your Style
Sheet to one or more web pages
To attach a style sheet to a page, bring up the page in the FrontPage
editor, then select the "Format->Style Sheet Links..." menu and press the
"Add..." button, a open web file dialog will appear. Now locate the new
style sheet and press the "OK" button to add the external style sheet to
the page.
Link Style Sheet dialog
You should be able to see the affect of the
style sheet in the FrontPage editor. The FrontPage "Normal" or "Design"
mode is pretty good at rendering basic style sheet commands, but we
recommend that you always preview the page in your set of target browsers
before publishing the web to the server.
Note: If you have a FrontPage Theme
applied to the page, the FrontPage theme will take precedence over all the
basic style parameters.
And That's it
