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Part I ✦ FrontPage Essentials
Before diving into the nuts and bolts of creating a Web site, the following section
briefly defines some of the basic elements with which you will be working.
FrontPage Webs, Web Sites, and Web Pages
From the vantage point of a Web designer, you work on two basic levels when you
create a Web site: Web design and page design. Unless your Web site is only one
page, you have two related jobs. You must design a Web structure that visitors can
use to navigate from page to page, and you must design the Web pages themselves.
To use an analogy from architecture, your job is to design both a building (your
site) and individual rooms or offices (your pages).
The streamlined interface in FrontPage 2003 makes all of this very intuitive. You can
easily jump to views that enable you to see an overview of your entire Web site. You
can also zoom in to an individual page, and edit the content and look of that page.
Although the FrontPage interface enables you to shift back and forth seamlessly
between Page view and Site view, having a basic sense of what’s happening “under
the hood” will help you while you put your Web site together.
FrontPage Webs and Web sites
FrontPage Webs are organized collections of files associated with a Web site. Unless
they are very simple, one-page sites, most Web sites are composed of many Web
pages, and almost every Web site (even a one-page site) will have many files —
HTML Web pages, media files, images, and so on. To visit a Web site, you enter a
Web site address, known as a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), into the browser.
The browser locates and displays the Web site.
Just to complicate things, FrontPage has its own use of the term “Web.” A Web, in
FrontPage’s lexicon, is a set of Web pages and associated files organized in a single
folder or directory structure. In general, your FrontPage Web is your Web site,
although you can create multiple FrontPage Webs on the same Web site. That is
because FrontPage uses the term “Web” to refer to the folder or directory struc-
tures that hold Web site files. More than one of these Webs can be attached to a
single URL or Web site.
The practical implication of all this is that the first step in creating a Web site in
FrontPage is to define a FrontPage Web. This chapter jumps right into that process;
but first, let’s take a quick look at the other main elements of Web sites.
In most cases, a FrontPage Web and a Web site are the same thing. The two terms
describe what is going on from different perspectives — Web site being the external
appearance, and FrontPage Web being the underlying file structure. Unless it is nec-
essary to make a distinction, this book refers to FrontPage Webs as Web sites.
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