FrontPage 2002 showed designers that tables could not only be used to present tabular data, but also create page layouts. After you get them down to a science, you will find that tables can help you design a pretty nice looking website with relative ease. If you have a FrontPage hosting package, this is a great way to organize your site and thus, make it easier for visitors to navigate.
Why Use Tables for a Layout?
Using tables for layouts may be a hard concept to grasp, especially if you have never worked with them before in Access, Excel, Word or other applications. In fact, it took some rather creative web designers to learn that you could place data into these spreadsheet-like fields along with text and graphics to create professional looking web pages. The nice thing about designing with tables is that the information is organized in a way that enables it to be easily imported into your other documents or pages. FrontPage can also use tables to produce dynamic templates which could save you a lot of time when creating new pages.
Creating Your Table
The easiest way to create tables in FrontPage is to select “Table” from the “Insert” menu. You also have the option to import a table or draw one of your own. Choose the page where you want the table inserted and it will show up. When setting up a table, FrontPage will ask questions about what type of table you want to actually create. The main options you have are the number of columns and rows. These cells are very useful as you can fill them descriptive text, your logo image, links to other pages and more. It will probably take you a little time to get a hang of the cell structure, but all you really need to do is figure how many rows and columns you need for your table. Remember, this isn’t a spreadsheet, so every cell doesn’t have to be filled. Just think about how you want the layout to look and creating your table should be much easier.
Customizing Your Table
After getting your columns and rows together, FrontPage gives you other options to choose colors and borders for the table. At this point, you can select the properties of each individual cell to create a more appealing look for your table. Once you save the table, you can then add text, graphics or even tables within those cells. This will take some experimenting but after a while, you are sure to get the hang of it and likely never rely on the task pane to design your page layouts again.
Conclusion
Using tables to create page layouts is just one of many tricks that can be performed when hosting with FrontPage 2002. Aside from a low cost hosting solution, you can easily create a well organized, highly functional, professional website that looks just as good, if not better than the competition’s.
