FP98: How to Design Your Own Themes

This article describes how to design your own themes and how to modify and customize the appearance and properties of the professionally designed themes that ship with Microsoft FrontPage 98.

Installing Theme Designer

To install Theme Designer, quit all programs and then do the following:

1. On the Windows Start menu, click Run.
2. In the Run dialog box, click Browse.
3. Select the drive that contains the FrontPage 98 compact disc.
4. Open the \SDK\Themes\Designer folder and double-click Tdsetup.exe.
5. Follow the instructions on your screen.

Starting Theme Designer

After the Setup program has completed, start FrontPage Explorer and start Theme Designer by clicking Show Theme Designer on the Tools menu.

Theme Verification Assistant

When you install Theme Designer, another utility called Theme Verification Assistant, is also installed. To run this program, open Windows Explorer and double-click the Thmveras.exe file in the \Program Files\Microsoft FrontPage\Bin folder. You can use this program to verify that the custom themes you created meet the basic requirements to work well with FrontPage. Because it analyzes one or more theme folders and creates a report that can be saved or printed, it is very useful if you create your themes without using Theme Designer.

Design Elements in Theme Designer

Theme view in FrontPage Explorer only shows partial theme elements. Theme Designer, on the other hand, shows you all of the design elements of a theme, including the following:

• Theme name
• Banner
• Top-level navigation buttons
• Horizontal navigation buttons
• Vertical navigation buttons
• Body text
• Regular hyperlink text
• Active hyperlink text
• Followed hyperlink text
• Horizontal rule
• Table border colors
• Headings
• Navigation buttons (Home, Up, Previous, and Next)
• Horizontal alignment of elements
• Vertical alignment of elements

When you rest the pointer over a theme element, the pointer changes into a hand and the element's name appears in the status bar. If you want to change the properties of an element or see a dynamic preview, you can open the element's Properties dialog box by double-clicking the element or right- clicking the element and then selecting the appropriate command on the menu that appears.

Design Elements in FrontPage 98 Themes

FrontPage 98 themes define elements and settings for the following categories:

Selecting a Font for Your Theme

Unlike a word processor, you cannot specify fonts in point sizes in the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). The Web browser that is used to view the page, not the author of the page, controls this. There are only seven settings available. The following table lists the seven settings and their respective values. When you select a font for a theme, you should select a universal font--one that is likely to be installed on the computer from which your page will be viewed. Selecting a font that is not likely to be installed on the browsing computer will be a poor choice. To specify one or more alternative fonts, separate each font with a comma, like this: In this example, Verdana is the primary font used by the theme. If Verdana is not installed on the browsing computer, Arial will be used. Because Verdana and Arial are both Windows-based fonts, you can specify a third font, such as Helvetica. Helvetica is available on Macintosh computers.

The following fonts ship with FrontPage. You should select one of these fonts when you design your theme.

Choosing Colors for Your Theme

All colors that you want to use for your theme should be in the 216 color safe palette for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator Web browsers. These colors result from all RGB (Red/Green/Blue) combinations of 0, 51, 102, 153, 204, and 255.

Saving a New or Modified Theme

When you have finished creating a new theme or editing an existing one, click Save As on the File menu to save the theme as a new theme, or click Save to overwrite the original theme with your changes. Note that you cannot overwrite the original FrontPage 98 themes that are shipped on the FrontPage 98 compact disc. These themes are read-only.