Why Use Themes?

The basic idea behind FrontPage themes is a good one provide a means to easily give a Web site a consistent look and feel. It is easy for a Web site to look more like a collection of hundreds of different pages than a single entity when you have pages without a similar look and feel (see Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1. A simple Web page designed in FrontPage 2003.

A theme is a group of graphics, formatting, and color schemes that can be applied to one or more Web pages to produce a consistent and professional look and feel (see Figure 7.2). Themes are a technology that have been part of FrontPage since version 98 and are not available on other Web development products.

Figure 7.2. The same page with the Evergreen theme applied to it.

Themes can be applied on a page-by-page basis or to an entire site with the click of a button. Sites can also be set with a default theme so that all newly created pages in the site have the theme information already embedded in them.

NOTE

Historically, FrontPage themes have received a bad reputation in the Web development community. They were hard to use, were hard to implement, were Microsoft specific, and just didn't look very good. Some changes have been made to FrontPage 2003's integration of themes, but this issue should also be examined before arbitrarily applying a theme to a page or site.

If you are having problems with themes and have multiple Web development tools being used on your project, see "My Themes Got Killed" in the "Troubleshooting" section at the end of this chapter.