Frontpage Tables
Tables is the most important function in all of Frontpage, and don't let anyone tell you differently.
Let's start by making a table...
You do this by clicking on the table menu, than selecting Insert Table. Once you've selected this, you should get this:
Amazing looking isn't it? With this you'll create your first table. For experimental purposes, let's just make a 2x2 table, with 1 as a border 0 for cell padding, 0 for cell spacing, and 100% as width.
Your page should now look like this:
Looks pretty crumey thus far and I'm betting you're about to just go to the Frontpage junk. But wait, this was just an example of how to make a table.
Now, let's have some fun with this four celled table, let's make it beautiful. In order to be beautiful it needs make-up.
So now I want you to go into the cell properties, simply right click with mouse hovering over the cell
Once you've done this, this cool little menu pops up with a whole bunch of options for you. Also notice when you select table properties you get a similar menu. The main different is in the vertical alignment, table properties only offers float.
So to make this table of ours beautiful from the cell properties menu. Look at an option that reads Background Color. I want you to select that and make it Navy, which is a shade of blue. Your table should now look like this:
And now your page has navy make-up on, okay, so it looks pretty craptacular thus far, so keep on reading and don't turn to Frontpage junk. You can change that cell to any color you want. If you go back you'll notice you only have a few options for colors. Click custom. Once you click custom an option should pop up like this:
Looky, a color picker, means you don't have to worry about HEX codes since it generates them for you. Now get out of the color picker and go back to your cell properties. You may notice an option to use a background image. This is nice to use in cells if you have a nice background image. Sometimes people don't have good ones. If you head over to LWO you may notice that their lay-out is made using some background images.
Something many people tend to look at are the border, light border, and dark border. There are actually three rings around each cell, and three around each table. The border is in the middle, the light is on the outside, and the dark is on the inside. This doesn't mean that you'll get a table with all three colors visable, they're actually very thin, here's a table that has red, blue, and green:
Can't see red can you? The middle border is very difficult to depict, but the border softens of darkens the other colors. Most people when using this either make them all one color, or make them close shades of each other. I wouldn't suggest using a pile of radical colors for this.
Now, let's move on to alignment. If you look back at your cell properties, you'll notice two types of alignment, horizontal and vertical alignment. When trying to remember, think of the horizon where the sun sets is horizontal. The more important one is the vertical alignment. If you have two cells, with data in each cell, if there is more data in one cell than the other, the vertical alignment is automatically set to center. This means some data will be floating in the center, for the most part on a site, this looks bad. So right click, click Cell Properties, go to Vertical Alignment. Select top.
Now, let's play with the tables width. Right click and select Table Properties. You'll notice an area which reads specify width. If it's not checked already check it and input 80%. Your table should now look something like this:
Looks like we have a problem with this table, it looks dumb to the left side like that. I suggest we set the horizontal alignment of the table to the center, and it will be centered.
Now I want to make one cell, turn into two columns. To do this right click with your mouse over the cell and click split cells. Select Split Into Columns and press okay, from this you'll get two cells from one. To add cells, simply go to The table menu, and select Insert Rows or Columns. From here you can add in what you need.
Now that we've learned all the context of how to use these operations, we're going to make an actual web site template to be used by other sites, or yours, what ever you want.
First create a table with two rows and one column with a width of 80%. Click the table properties and center the table. From here, split the bottom row into two columns. Now click on the left cells properties, set the width to 20%. Make sure the other cell's properties is set to 80%. From here select both of the bottom columns and right click, click cell properties and set the vertical alignment to top. Now, make a table in the left bottom cell. Make the table with a border of 1, and have 1 row and 1 column. Now right click and select cell properties. Make the cell have a black background. On top of this put navigation. Now under it place any 8 links, pressing Crtl+Enter after every link is placed. Now move into the bottom right cell. make a table here with 4 rows, and one column, have the border at 0. Now make a table within each cell, and put some words in each. Color them up anyway you wish. Now you may be wondering what to do with that top cell, stick a picture in there, make sure it has a height of 250 pixels, and a width of 80%. You've now made a simple template. Most designers use several tables within their designs. Learn small HTML tricks and start adding them together on your site. Tables is the base of it.