Creating a web page from scratch using Front Page 2003

Includes

Includes? What are they and how do they work? Before you begin working with includes, it is important to understand what they are and how they work.

The best way to describe an include is to say that it is a web page that you would like to have included as part of another web page. As an example, suppose you were going to build a web that had 35 pages and you want to put the same navigation bars and links on every page, what you would do is create a new page within your web that has only the navigation bar and links on it........nothing else, just the navigation and links exactly the way you want it to appear on all 35 of your pages. This new page would look something like the navigation bar directly below with the interactive buttons placed inside a single cell table with the borders set to 0 and hyperlinks all working. Once you have created this new page, you need to save it in the current web and give it a name that you recognize such as includenav.htm. Now that you have this new page saved, we need to install it on another page. Scroll down below the nav bar and we will check out how to do this using Front Page 2003.

As you can see directly below, we have our 3x3 table. The insertion point for the above include would be in the left column, middle cell


\| <<<<<<<<<<<<	your include will get inserted here

Once the cursor is set at the insertion point in the cell as you see in the table above, click on Insert>Web Component>Included Content>Page. Clicking on this option will open the window you see below.

After you have selected> Included Content> Page, click on finish and it will open a small window that will allow you to name the page that you want included on the current page you are working on. In this instance we will be including a page within the current web called includenav.htm

Once you have typed in the name of include page and click on ok, this include page will be placed on the page you are working on at the desired insertion point.

You can now copy and paste this include on any page within your web and in so doing, it will also copy and paste the links as well. Once you have all the pages set up the way you want them, you need only to modify the "includenav.htm" page and it will change the navigation on all of the pages in your web.

You are not limited to this single navigation item however. You may want the same logo on your page or the same copyright information or any number of things that you might want to have on all the pages in your web. The thing to keep in mind here is that your includes page or pages (you can have as many includes pages as you want) must be made up of small portions of the page so that you leave editable regions on the page it will be included on.

By using the Insert Web Component feature of front page, you can place the navigation content or other included content anywhere on the current page within a table and still have plenty of editable regions.

Copyright � 2006 gskywalkers