Shared Borders
By using shared borders you can save yourself a lot of
work when designing your web. With shared borders you can design the top,
bottom, left and right borders to share the same content without having to
add it to each individual page. I am sure you have noticed that the Ask
Maggy Mae website has certain parts of the pages that are identical.
Although I did not use shared borders, I use a template instead, you can
achieve the same effect by using shared borders.
To
begin click on Format in the Main menu and choose Shared Borders, a window
will open as shown in the screenshot on the right. First you want to choose
whether this shared border will be for all pages or just the current page.
Next you want to tick each border that you want included in your pages and
if you want them to include navigation buttons. Click the screenshot on the
right to see that I chose top, left and bottom borders with the left border
including the navigation buttons.
Click
on the Border Properties button to choose the background properties for each
shared border you have chosen. See the Border Properties screenshot on the
right. Use the dropdown box marked Border to choose the border you want to
edit then either choose the background color or choose a picture for the
background. Once you are done editing the background information for each
click OK, then click ok again in the Shared Borders window and you should
have a page set up similar to
this
screenshot. As you can see with the screenshot I have used the
background for top and left border the same as used on this website. Next it
is time to add the content of each shared border. For the Top border I just
inserted the Ask Maggy Mae banner and centered it, giving it a vertical
spacing of 20 in order to leave space above and below the graphic. In the
left border I added a navigation bar and chose a style to which I thought
went well with the colors already in the page. And finally in the bottom
border I put the Ask Maggy Mae copyright information, and link to the
sitemap. This sets up the web very similar to how I have this website. Once
I was finished setting up each of the shared borders my page appears as in
this screenshot. And
finally I created
one more
page to show how the graphics change when changing pages. When
choosing the style of the navigation buttons I also chose vivid colors and
active graphics.
In order for the navigation bars to work you will need
to set up your navigational structure, this is discussed in the next
lesson.
* Please note that in order to use Shared Borders on
your website FrontPage Extensions must be supported and turned on.
