Business is a growing part of the Web, and it is bound to get even bigger. Exciting developments down the road will make the Internet boom with activity. Now that the Internet is open to everyone and is coming alive with graphics and multimedia, more and more companies are jumping on the bandwagon-and doing it with style and purpose.
Think back to the days when a growing company had to design product brochures and pay for the expense of printing thousands of copies to distribute to potential customers. On top of the printing costs, the postage ate away at the budget. The Internet has changed all that. Now you can economically let everyone know that you are out there. You are telling not just your local community about yourself, but the world. There is beauty in that.
Unfortunately, the beauty is also a beast. Because of this vast accessibility, there is much competition. Therefore, you need to make the best impression that you can. With FrontPage's Corporate Presence Wizard, you get off to a rapid running start. If you choose all the options in the wizard, you can generate fifteen pages, including links, in five minutes. Then all you have to do is edit the content and fill in the blanks.
The Corporate Presence Wizard does not do all the work for you. You might want to get the following information ready before you start the wizard. You can edit it afterward, but it is much easier to do everything in one step. Take advantage of what the wizard does for you automatically. The following information is inserted into several Corporate Presence Web pages through the use of Substitution bots. They take information variables that you enter as you design your web and place them on your page in designated fields.
Think about the contact information that you place on your pages, especially the telephone and fax numbers. Start with only e-mail addresses, and add more contact information as necessary. Your assistant will thank you.
If you look up the word wizard in the dictionary, you see that it means a magician or a conjurer. The wizards in FrontPage perform magic, and they conjure up pages that might have otherwise taken you hours to produce. Though the pages are basic, you can customize your pages afterward. When you are pressed for time, though, wizards are the way to go.
You are probably already familiar with wizards. Many software programs use them. They make a tedious task simple by asking you questions. Based on your answers, different option screens appear, and you choose what you want.
To develop a web with the Corporate Presence Wizard, first open the FrontPage Explorer. Then follow these steps:
The first screen of the Corporate Presence Wizard contains some brief introductory text. It tells you that the wizard will ask you a series of questions. Wizards are good at that; it is their job.
Beneath the picture of the open door at the left of the screen, there is a status bar. The tick marks in the bar let you know how far along you are.
There are buttons on the bottom of the wizard screen. Here is how you use them:
Click Next to continue to the next screen.
In the second screen of the Corporate Presence Wizard, you choose the types of pages to include in your Web site. To choose your pages, do the following:
| NOTE |
The Search bot is a form handler. To use any of the forms that FrontPage generates, you need the FrontPage Server Extensions installed on your target server. If this is not possible, you can process the form with a custom CGI script or another scripting language. Refer to Chapter 24, "ActiveX and VBScript," for additional information and references. |
The third screen of the Corporate Presence Wizard asks what topics you want to include on your Home page. The Home page is, appropriately, the first page in your web. This is a page that should get people's attention. Tell them who you are and what you do.
Look at the example in Figures 3.2. It shows how a Home page appears for a large interior decorating company and displays all the options that you can choose.
To choose the content for your Home page, do the following steps:
If you elect to include a What's New page in your Web site, you select options for it in the fourth screen. Figure 3.3 shows the completed What's New page for the interior decorating company.
The following steps show you how to choose your options for the What's New page:
Articles and Reviews. When you choose the Articles
and Reviews option, a section titled Recent Media Coverage of
Company Name appears on the What's New page. This section features
a list of articles in which the interior decorating company is
publicized. Comments give instructions on what to change.
If you elect to include Products and Services pages in your site, you choose options for them on two screens. The first screen asks how many of each type of page you want to create.
Figure 3.5 shows an example of a completed Products and Services page. Brief descriptions of the products and services that the interior design company offers are presented, along with links to all the Products pages and Service pages.
Figure 3.5 : The Products and Services Page contains links to the Product pages and Service pages.
To designate how many Products and Services pages you need, do the following:
| TIP |
If you need to customize your Product and Service pages beyond what the templates offer, create one page. Make your general changes, and then save the page as a template. This saves you the bother of making all the changes on each product page. |
Based on your selections from the previous screen, you select the information that you want to include on your Products pages and Services pages in this screen. Different options appear for each.
Products pages tell visitors to your site about the various products that your company offers. In Figures 3.6 and 3.7, the interior design company advertises one of its furnishings. A section is provided on the page to describe the key benefits of the product.
Figure 3.8 : When users submit an information request form, they receive a confirmation page.
When users submit an information request form to your site, they receive a confirmation page. This confirmation page, shown in Figure 3.8, acknowledges that their request was received at your site. This information is stored in Web page format (inforeq.htm) in the private subdirectory of your web.
The following steps show you how to choose the options for your Product pages:
Service pages tell visitors to your site about the various services and capabilities of your company. A section is provided on the page to describe the key benefits of the company's products. Figures 3.9 and 3.10 show a service page at the interior decorating company's site.
To choose the options for your Service pages, do the following:
Figure 3.11 : The confirmation page for the Service page's information request form.
If you elect to include a feedback form on your page, you are asked what you want to collect from visitors when they submit feedback to your site. Figure 3.12 shows the feedback form for the interior design company. This form enables visitors to your site to send comments to you about your site, company, products, or services. Comments show you where changes are necessary on the page.
When users submit information to your site with the feedback form, a confirmation page is generated. Figure 3.13 shows the confirmation page for the interior design company's feedback form.
Figure 3.13 : The confirmation page for the feedback form.
To choose your options for the feedback form, do the following:
If you elect to include information request forms on your product data sheets and service description pages, you are asked how to store the information retrieved from the feedback form.
To choose how you want to store request information, do the following:
If you elect to have a Table of Contents page in your web, a screen asks what options to include in it. Figure 3.14 shows the table of contents that is automatically generated by FrontPage for the interior design company's site.
Figure 3.14 : The Table of Contents page displays a list of pages in your site.
The following steps show you how to choose the options for your Table of Contents page:
| NOTE |
Be sure to use the File | Page Properties command to change the title of each page. The Table of Contents bot uses the page titles when it generates the contents. |
Next, you select what should appear at the top and bottom of all your Web pages. To make your selections, do the following:
You are asked what type of graphics should appear on your page. A preview of each style appears in the wizard screen when you press its radio button. Figure 3.15 shows examples of the four styles from which you can choose.
Figure 3.15 : You can choose one of four presentation styles for your web.
To choose your graphics style, do the following:
You can customize the colors for the background and text. The choices that you make here are saved to your web in a file titled Web Colors (filename _private/style.htm). You can base the style of other pages on this one.
The following are the steps for customizing the colors for your background and text:
The wizard asks if you want to tell visitors to your site that it is under construction. The following steps show you how to make your choice:
Now you enter the location information that you gathered at the beginning of this chapter. This information is included in various locations on your pages through the use of Substitution bots.
To enter the company location information on your pages, respond to the following questions:
Next, you enter the contact information. This information is included in various locations on your pages through the use of Substitution bots.
To enter the company contact information on your pages, respond to the following questions:
The final screen of the Corporate Presence Wizard asks if you want to view the To Do list after the Web is created.
To complete this screen, do the following:
Figure 3.16 : The Corporate Presence Wizard places some tasks in your To Do list automatically.
Figure 3.17 shows the Corporate Presence Web pages displayed in the FrontPage Explorer's Hyperlink View. The pages generated with the Corporate Presence Wizard are listed in Table 3.1. Table 3.2 describes all the graphics included in the images subdirectory of your web.
Figure 3.17 : The Corporate Presence Web pages shown in the FrontPage Explorer's Hyperlink View.
| Filename | Description |
| index.htm | Home page |
| feedback.htm | Feedback page |
| news.htm | What's New page |
| pr01.htm | Press Release page 1 |
| pr02.htm | Press Release page 2 |
| pr03.htm | Press Release page 3 |
| prod##.htm | Product pages |
| products.htm | Products and Services page |
| search.htm | Search page |
| serv##.htm | Service pages |
| toc.htm | Table of Contents page |
| _private/inforeq.htm | Results from Form 1 of Prod01 or Serv01 |
| _private/logo.htm | Included Logo page |
| _private/navbar.htm | Included Navigation Links |
| _private/style.htm | Web Colors |
| Filename | Description |
| bfeed.gif | Navigation bar button, Feedback Form page |
| bhome.gif | Navigation bar button, Home page |
| bnews.gif | Navigation bar button, What's New page |
| bprdsrv.gif | Navigation bar button, Products and Services page |
| bprods.gif | Navigation bar button, Products page |
| bservs.gif | Navigation bar button, Services page |
| bsrch.gif | Navigation bar button, Search page |
| btoc.gif | Navigation bar button, Table of Contents page |
| bullet.gif | Bullets used for service description pages and product data sheets |
| div.gif | Horizontal bar dividers |
| hfeed.gif | Header graphic, Feedback Form page |
| hhome.gif | Header graphic, Home page |
| hnews.gif | Header graphic, What's New page |
| hprdsrv.gif | Header graphic, Products and Services page |
| hprods.gif | Header graphic, product data sheets |
| hservs.gif | Header graphic, service descriptions page |
| hsrch.gif | Header graphic, Search page |
| htoc.gif | Header graphic, Table of Contents page |
| logo.gif | Company logo |
| prodimg.gif | Product image for the product data sheet |
| smallnew.gif | New graphic for the What's New page |
| undercon.gif | Under Construction icon |
| texture.jpg | Background texture image that you choose |
Wizards are like magic. In a matter of minutes, you create fifteen pages, complete with links and graphic placeholders. This is especially impressive considering how long it would have taken you to accomplish all this using other methods.
In this chapter, you stepped through the Corporate Presence Wizard to create a corporate presence on the Web. The pages described your company and the products and services you have to offer. The wizard also generated pages that allowed visitors to interact with you from your Web site, through feedback or information requests. You learned how to customize your corporate presence site by choosing several different options available in the wizard. The pages you created were linked for you automatically by the wizard.
In the next chapter, you learn about the many page templates that are available in FrontPage. These templates can be used to add additional pages to your Web site. To continue with the pages that you created with the Corporate Presence Wizard,
| Q: | My remote server requires that I use a Home page with a name other than index.htm. Do I have to correct links on many pages if I rename my Home page? |
| A: | In the Corporate Presence Web, all the links to the Home page appear in the Included Navigation page. An Include bot places this navigation bar on several pages, which is why the pages have links to the Home
page.
If you need to rename your Home page, click the page title in Folder View of the FrontPage Explorer. Click again, and the page becomes surrounded by a bounding box, indicating that you can rename the page. Press Enter or click outside the bounding box to change the page name. FrontPage asks if you want to update the pages that have links to the Home page. Answer Yes. |
| Q: | Do I have to keep my files in the directories that were made when the web was created? |
| A: | No. New features in FrontPage 97 enable you to drag and drop files into different directories in your web and to correct any broken links as you do so. |
| Q: | What are all those other directories and files included in the web that I just created? It looks as though FrontPage created copies of all my files in other directories. |
| A: | Those additional directories include the FrontPage Server Extensions, where applicable, and information used by the server administrator. If you use some of FrontPage's advanced features-including some of the bots-you must keep all those directories and files in your web. The HTM files in the extra directories contain information for the FrontPage Server Extensions. |
| Q: | I cannot see the purple text of the comments when I open my pages in another browser. Why? |
| A: | The comments are designed for just that reason. They enable you to put notes on a page to remind you of what needs to be done on it and where. You can view the comments text from within the FrontPage Editor, but it does not appear in other browsers, such as Internet Explorer or Netscape. Likewise, if you place a comment on a page to remind yourself of something, you should add the item to the To Do list at the same time. This helps you keep track of things much more easily. |
| Q: | Where do the Substitution bots get the company information? |
| A: | The Corporate Presence Wizard places the company information that you entered into the Web settings. You can find it if you select Tools | Web Settings and then choose the Parameters tab of the Web Settings dialog box. |
| Q: | The responses from all my product and service pages are going to one file, inforeq.htm, on my web. Can I separate the responses into different files? |
| A: | When you initially create your web, all information request forms on the products and services pages store the retrieved information in the inforeq.htm file. If you want to create individual retrieval files for each page, for example, you need to edit the Save Results bot on each product and service page to point to another results file. Simply copy the inforeq.htm file and save it under the names you select in the Save Results bot for the results file. See Chapter 22 for more information on this procedure. |
| Q: | How do I replace the logo image in the Corporate Presence Web? |
| A: | Open the web's Included Logo page (logo.htm) in the FrontPage Editor. Use the Insert | Image command to add your logo to your page. This enables you to import a wide variety of graphic types. These procedures are explained in more detail in Chapter 10, "Sprucing Up Your Pages." |
