Learn...

FrontPage Intro

FrontPage Editing Basics

Make a FrontPage Template

FrontPage FAQ

Dynamic Web Templates (FP)

Swish Basics

Articles

Product-Specific

5. Page Templates

If you have an idea for a specific page layout, you may want to create a page template. This will make it really easy for you to add more pages with the same layout. For our BabyBlue theme, we created two page templates -- one with the normal page layout and one with the photo album layout. You will most likely only need only one page layout, but if your web will be using several page layouts, you may want to consider creating more page templates.

BabyBlue Normal Page Layout

BabyBlue Photo Page Layout

To make a page template, start with a blank web page (File | New | Page and select Normal Page; or type Control-N) and apply your new theme.

Then, make a web page! (See next page for an in-depth example of how we created the BabyBlue page template.)

After you have your web page, go to File | Save As. Under Save As Type, use the drop-down menu to select FrontPage Template (*.tem). 

A dialog box will pop up for you to enter information about your page template. The Title is what will show up in your list of page templates (we called ours BabyBlue and BabyBlue Photo Album). The Name is the filename, so it should be one word with no special characters (FrontPage will automatically put the .tem extension on, so all we typed was "babyblue" and "babyblue_photo"). The Description shows up when you are selecting your page templates, so write enough so that you'll remember what this page template is about. We just wrote "This is the template for the BabyBlue Theme" for the normal page and "This is the template for the BabyBlue photo album" for the photo album template.

If you have images in your page template, another dialog box will pop up for saving the embedded files. All of the images will be listed as well as the path to the template folder. The default is that the images are saved in the same folder as your web page. We sometimes like to create a new "images" folder and save the images in there; it gets tricky because you need to find the page template folder first. You might be able to find it under Program Files | Microsoft | FrontPage | Pages; otherwise, run a search on your computer for "Pages" and you might be able to find it that way. After you've finished, click Save and you should see the file name at the top of the Page View screen change to look like yourpagename.tem/yourpagename.htm.

Test your page template! Go to File | New | Page and you should see your new Page Template show up on the list. Make a new page and see how it looks!

Troubleshooting:
Sometimes when you create a page template and use it, the theme is not applied yet. So when you save the new page to a web and add it to the navigation view, you'll notice that the buttons, bullets, rules, banners, etc. are all in text instead of the theme buttons, bullets, etc. Go back to your Page Template folder to open up your actual .htm page (as stated above, it might be under Program Files | Microsoft | FrontPage | Pages). Apply the theme to the page, and resave it. Hopefully that will work!

Next: Example
Back: Theme Fonts