Page #25 (1.5. Viewing Your Site)

Chapter 2. Working with Text

Of course, your Web site is going to look great, but what's it going to say? In spite of all the fancy multimedia whirligigs out therelike digital video, audio, and Flash animationstext is still the lifeblood of the Web. Just ask your favorite search engine.

While FrontPage looks a lot like a word processing program, you'll soon find that you're not in Microsoft Word anymore. Sure, your cursor is plainly visible in the document window, typing is a breeze , and you can center text and italicize just like you always have. But something very different is going on behind the scenes. Your options for organizing text on the Web are more limited than they are in programs designed to produce printed pages.

The first thing you need to understand is that the choices you make in FrontPage don't always appear intact once your pages get out on the Web. Your viewer's Web browser ultimately determines the appearance of your Web pages. For example, if a visitor to your Web site doesn't have a special font you included on your page, her browser will replace it with another font. Because the browser's in charge, you never quite know how your text will display.

Sure, the browser is powerfulbut so are you. There's a lot you can do to steer browsers in the right direction. This chapter covers everything you'll need to get your message down in writing. First, you'll learn to add and manipulate text. Then you'll move on to the finer points: making your words look great by using all the formatting tools FrontPage offers.