Part 7. Using Borders, Backgrounds, Sounds, and More

Borders, Backgrounds, Sounds, and More

Choosing Background and Text Colors

With the page to which you want to apply a background color displayed onscreen, open the Format menu and choose Background .

The Page Properties dialog box opens, with the Formatting tab displayed. Click the down arrow next to the Background field.

Click the square containing the color you want to use (or click More Colors to choose from a palette that offers a wider selection).

INTRODUCTION You can choose any color for a page's background, or you can use a picture for a background (see the next task). While choosing a background color, it's smart to consider choosing text colors at the same time to ensure that the text colors are a good contrast to the background. (Text in a color that's too close to the background color is difficult to see.)

TIP Do It Differently If You're Using a Theme If you've assigned a theme to this page, you should change background and text colors from the Themes dialog box (see Part 2) instead of doing this task.

Determine whether the colored squares in the Text field and in the three Hyperlink fields contrast well with the background color (and with each other).

Use the list boxes to change text colors as necessary.

Click OK .

The background color (and any other colors you selected) is applied.

Using a Picture Background

With the page to which you want to apply a background picture displayed onscreen, open the Format menu and choose Background .

The Page Properties dialog box opens with the Formatting tab displayed. Click to put a check in the Background Picture checkbox.

To locate the picture file you want to use as the background, click the Browse button.

INTRODUCTION Instead of using a solid-color background, as you learned to do in the preceding task, you can use a picture as a background. If the picture is too small to fill the whole window in which the page appears, it is automatically tiled ”repeated over and over ”to fill the window. Tiling enables you to build a great-looking pattern out of the repeated image.

HINT Picture Backgrounds Trump Color Backgrounds An image background automatically supersedes a background color. If you create an image background, any selection you might have made for background color is irrelevant.

The Select Background Picture dialog box opens. Navigate to the folder containing the image you want to use as a background.

Click the desired image to select it. Click the Open button.

The path to the selected image appears in the field. Click OK .

The background image is applied.

Putting a Border Around a Picture

Click the picture to which you want to add a border to select it.

Open the Format menu and choose Properties . The Picture Properties dialog box opens.

In the Border thickness field, type a number or click the up or down arrow to set the border thickness (a higher number makes a thicker border), and click OK .

The border is applied.

Adding a Bevel

Right-click the selected picture and choose Show Pictures Toolbar in the shortcut menu that appears.

Click the Bevel button on the Pictures toolbar.

The bevel is applied.

Organizing Pages with Horizontal Lines

Click in your page at the spot where you want to insert the line.

Open the Insert menu and choose Horizontal Line .

The line is inserted in the spot you selected.

Changing the Look of a Line

Double-click a line you've inserted to open the Horizontal Line Properties dialog box.

To make the line shorter, type a value less than 100 in the Width field. Type a number in the Height field to change the thickness; a higher number makes a thicker line.

Choose an Alignment and Color and then click OK .

The changes you specified are applied to the line.

Playing a Background Sound

With the page to which you want to apply a sound effect displayed onscreen, open the Format menu and choose Background .

The Page Properties dialog box opens. Click the General tab.

Click the Browse button.

INTRODUCTION For a nice touch, you can make a sound effect or music clip play the moment a visitor arrives at a page. Only users of Internet Explorer 3 or later will hear the clip, so don't make the clip an essential part of understanding your page. Consider it a nice "throw-in" for the IE crowd .

TIP You Can Use Any Sound File Type Sound clips in WAV format (.wav) work best, but you can use clips stored in other formats. To use a non-WAV file, between steps 3 and 4, open the Files of type list in the Select File dialog box and choose the file type you will use.

Navigate to the sound clip file you want to use, and click it to select it.

Click the Open button.

Mark the Forever check box to make the clip play for as long as the visitor views the page. Or type the number of times to play the sound in the Loop field.

Click OK .

Adding Animation from the Clip Gallery

Click in your page where you want to insert the animation. Open the Insert menu, choose Picture , and then choose Clip Art .

The Clip Art task pane opens. Click the down arrow next to the Results should be field and click each check box in the list to uncheck it.

Click the + sign next to the Movies entry in the Results Should Be list to open the list of movie file types.

INTRODUCTION A special kind of GIF image file, called an animated GIF , plays a brief, simple animation when you view it in a Web page. You'll find animated GIFs in clip-art libraries online and on disk, and you can create them with programs such as Macromedia Flash. You'll find a bunch in FrontPage's clip-art library.

HINT Preview to See Your Animations Move Note that your animation won't play in Design view; to see the animation play in your page, preview the page.

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Check the check box next to Animated GIF to mark it.

Now use the Search for field and Go button to search for and select your clip to insert it, as described in the very first task of Part 6.

Using Graphical Bullets

Type the list items as ordinary paragraphs, pressing Enter after each. ( Do not click the Bullets button!)

Click to the left of the first item.

Insert the picture file you'll use as a bullet, any way you want (from a file, from the Clip Gallery, by scanning, and so on; see Part 6 for help).

INTRODUCTION In many bulleted lists you'll see online, the bullets are not symbol characters , but little pictures ”stars, suns, smiley faces, and so on. These "graphical bullets" are pretty easy to apply, and FrontPage's Clip Art Gallery includes a hefty collection of choices (check out the Web Bullets category).

HINT Themes Can Add Picture Bullets for You You can also add graphical bullets by choosing a theme (see Part 2). If you choose a theme, graphical bullets will be applied automatically to any list you format with the Bullets button.

Format the bullet picture as desired (size, shape, and so on).

To use the same bullet for other list items, copy the bullet (select it and click the Copy button) and paste it in front of each item in the list (click the Paste button).

To use a different bullet picture on each item, repeat steps 2 “4 for each item.

Inserting a Video Clip

Click in your page at the general spot where you want the video clip to appear.

Open the Insert menu, choose Picture , and choose Video .

Navigate to and select the AVI file you want to insert and then click the Open button.

A picture representing the video is inserted. Right-click the picture, and choose Picture Properties from the shortcut menu.

INTRODUCTION With a video capture card installed in your PC and a video source (such as a camcorder or VCR), you can create video files in Windows Video (AVI) format. FrontPage makes inserting those clips in your pages easy and presents them attractively as frozen still pictures in the page that play automatically or at the visitor's request.

HINT Inline Video's Not for Everybody FrontPage's method of showing the clip "inline" like a picture is viewable only through Internet Explorer 3 or later, and could degrade the performance of the page.

To play the video continuously, check the Forever check box. To play it a set number of times, type the number of times to play in Loop .

To play the video as soon as the page appears, click On file open . To play the video when the visitor's mouse pointer passes over the picture, click On mouse over .

Click OK .