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eXPerienceeXPerience

Current version: 2.3
Product last updated: 9/9/02

Installation

You probably have an .exe file that you downloaded. This is a program that will install the template files into the correct places on your computer.

First, make sure that FrontPage is closed.

To run the installer, double-click on the icon. Some dialog boxes will pop up and take you through the installation process. If it seems to go okay, you may then create a new web! Skip the rest of these installation instructions to find out how to use the template.

If the installation fails, there are a few things you may try. First, if the installer is on your desktop, create a new folder on your desktop and drag the icon into the new folder, then try running it from there. If this doesn't work, you can try extracting the files and placing them manually. Right-click on the installer and select "Extract to folder..." Extract to this temporary directory. Note: If you are using a non-English version, please see this info page at PixelMill.

In the fp2000 folder you'll find three folders called Pages, Themes, and Webs.

Open the Themes folder and there should be another folder called experience. Copy this folder to this location:

C:/Program Files/Common Files/Microsoft Shared/Themes

In the Webs folder there should be another folder called experience.tem. Copy this folder to this location:

C:/Program Files/Microsoft Office/Templates/1033/Webs

If you are unable to extract the files, then contact support.

Using the Template - Basics
  1. After installation, open FrontPage.

  2. In FP2002, go to File > New > Page or Web. (In FP2000, go to File > New > Web.) In FP2002, click on "Web Site Templates" in the right column.

  3. Choose the eXPerience template from your list of templates.

  4. In the right column, make sure that the location of your new web is correct. The usual default is a subfolder inside of your "My Webs" folder. You may choose a different name for the subfolder. You may also create a new web directly on your server by typing in the URL of your web site.

  5. Click OK and FrontPage will make your new web.

  6. When FrontPage is finished working, you should see the pages of your new web site in the Folder List. (If you can't see the Folder List, go to View > Folder List.) Double-click on any of these pages to open it and edit it.

  7. While you are working on the web site, go to File > Preview in Browser to see your pages as they will appear in a browser. Try not to depend on the "Preview" tab in FrontPage. You may leave the browser window open and refresh it as you make and save changes.

  8. To make more pages, simply take existing pages and go to File > Save As. Save the page as a new file name, and click "Change" to change the page title. (Notes: The page title is what shows up in your link bars and page banners. The file name should NOT have spaces or special characters in the name, but should look like either mynewpage.htm or my_new_page.htm.) Then, switch to Navigation View and drag the page into your navigation structure to add the page to the correct link bars. (Learn more.)

  9. To delete pages, simply right-click the page in your folder list and choose "delete."

  10. To publish your web site, go to File > Publish Web. Type in the location of your server, for example, http://www.yoursite.com. If you want to publish your web temporarily and "hide" it behind your existing site, publish it to a subfolder of your web, for example, http://www.yoursite.com/testfolder. Click Publish. You may need to enter your username and password. See our Server Issues article if after publishing, some things don't look right on your published site.
Using the Template - Specifics

Below are some specific issues and questions that you may have about the eXPerience web template. Please also look in our support index for answers to more general questions. We've tried to organize the support issues in a "top-down" format -- i.e., starting with the index page and the very top of the page, then continuing throughout the rest of the web site. If you find an issue that you think should be on this page or in our support area, please let us know!

Search engine text
This area allows you to put keyword-rich words at the very top of your page to get a higher ranking in some search engines. You will still need to add meta keyword tags to your pages.

Text Links area (black)
You may insert your own hyperlinks if you wish. When you do so, you will have to change the font color to be white. It's probably easiest to select each link and change the font color manually; if you're comfortable with style sheets, you may create your own styles. You may also create a "global level" navigation bar in this area.

Spinning globe animation
This is an embedded Flash movie animation. You cannot change the animation (see our additional Components or request custom work if you want a different color). If you move your pages into subfolders, the globe may disappear. You will need to click on the "empty" area and go into HTML and edit the reference to the movie. The HTML code will look something like this:

<OBJECT CLASSID="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" CODEBASE="http://download..." WIDTH="55" HEIGHT="50">
<PARAM NAME="movie" VALUE="images/rotatingglobe1.swf">
<PARAM NAME="quality" VALUE="medium">
<PARAM NAME="bgcolor" VALUE="#FFFFFF">
<EMBED SRC="images/rotatingglobe1.swf" QUALITY="medium" BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" WIDTH="55" HEIGHT="50" TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.macromedia.com/...>
</EMBED></OBJECT>

Change the locations in the PARAM and EMBED tags as necessary. For example, if your new page is within a subfolder of the main folder, then edit the location to be "../images/rotatingglobe1.swf."

Your Logo Here
The "your logo here" image may be replaced with your own logo. The easiest way to do this is to replace the image with one that is the same dimension (239x55 pixels) by dragging your image file (named "yourlogohere.jpg") into the images folder of your web and replacing the existing one. This will replace the image across your web site. If your logo file has different dimensions, you will have to edit each page. The most time-efficient way to do this is to: Select all the pages in your folder list, right-click on the select files, and choose Open to open all the page. On the first page, delete the "yourlogohere" image, add your image and save the page, then click on the image and hit Ctrl-C to copy it. Then, go into each of your pages, click on the old yourlogohere image and hit Ctrl-V to paste in your new logo. You may either save and close your pages as you go, or keep them open and go to File > Save All to save all of them at once.

The template includes a "yourlogohere_blank.gif" and Photoshop file if you wish to use these to create your own logo.

Home, Search, FAQ, Contact, Site Map icons
The Home, Contact, and Map icons are specially-made images with a Windows XP look and feel. You may delete the buttons that you don't want to use (you must edit each page).

Horizontal Navigation Bar
The horizontal link bar displays the "Child pages under home" in additional to the Home page. You may have up to four links on this bar so that they all fit on the page. (Any more and the row of buttons will break into two lines, messing up the table format.) If you want, you may change this link bar to a different kind of link bar, or create a custom link bar. Our suggested use is to use these links for "child pages under home."

Vertical Navigation Bar
The link bar currently displays your "Child pages under Home," but we advise that you change this to show sub-pages. For example, if you create a Press page and Privacy Policy page that you want to list under the "About Us" page, drag your two new pages under "About Us" in the navigation structure. Then, change the vertical bar on About Us to "child pages," and change the vertical bar on Press and Privacy to "same level" pages. If you are unfamiliar with how FrontPage nav bars work, please visit this tutorial on Using Navigation View. You can then learn how to edit the buttons (changing the names, adding more buttons, etc.) in our tutorial on editing link bars.

Page Title
On every page, there is a line of text with the page title. This is a FrontPage-generated component. You can change the text by changing the page title in your Navigation View. To learn more about how to do this, please look at our tutorial on inserting and editing Page Banners.

Print this Page button
This is a special image included with the web template. There is JavaScript at the top of each page with a function that allows the browser to call up the print dialog. If you don't want this button, delete it.

Add to Favorites button (home page only)
In FrontPage's Normal View, you won't see this button. Instead, you'll see a little flag icon. This is because there is JavaScript code that writes the HTML code for the button depending on whether or not the user is using Netscape or Internet Explorer. (Add-to-favorites works only in Internet Explorer.) If you don't want the Add to Favorites button, you will need to go into the HTML code and delete the code that looks like this:

<!-- begin bookmarking script --><A NAME="here"></A><SCRIPT>
<!--
if ((navigator.appVersion.indexOf("MSIE") > 0) && (parseInt(navigator.appVersion) >= 4)) {
document.write('<A HREF="#here" onclick="window.external.AddFavorite(location.href,document.title);"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="images/addtofav.gif" WIDTH="100" HEIGHT="23"></A>');
}
//-->
</SCRIPT><!-- end bookmarking script -->

Info boxes
The template comes with three different colors of info boxes. You may copy and paste these boxes or delete them as needed. To select an info box, click inside the box and go to Table > Select > Table. This will highlight the table. You may now delete the box or copy and paste the box.

Pop-up windows on About Us page
The About Us page comes with two employee bio pop-up windows. There is JavaScript code on this page that helps you do this. Each of the links opens up a separate web page that has the info about your employee. These two pages are "profile1.htm" and "profile2.htm." You will have to edit these two pages, and save copies of them to create more bio pages. Then, to create more pop-up links, simply copy an existing link and edit it. If you copy and paste the first Employee link, then select the link, right-click and select Hyperlink Properties, you'll see that the link looks like this:

javascript:pop('profile1.htm');

Simply edit the "profile1.htm" URL with the URL to your new employee bio page. For example, if you have a new page called "myemployee1.htm," then your pop-up window link should look like:

javascript:pop('myemployee1.htm');

Catalog page layout
This page doesn't come with ecommerce capability -- it's merely a suggested layout. You will need to find a third-party solution (PayPal, bCentral, etc.) if you want to have ecommerce on your site.

Accessiblity
The accessibility movement encourages web sites to be built to allow people with disabilities to view them. For example, one accessibility standard is that all images have "alternate text" and "long descriptions" coded into the HTML. This would be useful for software that reads web pages out loud for blind people. Even if they cannot see your images, the software can read the description of the image out loud.

There are two different guidelines often used when determining whether a site is "accessible": the US Government Section 508 Guidelines and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. 

This template was built to meet as many of those standards as possible. It meets all the Priority 1 standards of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and all of the Section 508 Guidelines. If you are concerned with accessibility, you will need to take responsibility to label all your tables and images and to avoid technologies or scripting that may not be accessible.

Some of the many ways that this template meets standards:

  • Table structure
    • Tables are built using relative sizing so that the page will resize to fit browser windows.
    • All tables have a "summary" statement that describes what the table is being used for.
  • Cascading Style Sheets
    • Table background colors/patterns and bullet images are defined using Cascading Style Sheets within the theme (instead of hard-coding them, which FrontPage will do when themes are applied without CSS).
    • Font colors and sizes are also defined with CSS, which allows the page to degrade functionally even if someone does not have CSS viewing capability.
  • Images
    • Images within the page layout have "alt" and "longdesc" set in the HTML. (To edit the long description, you must go into HTML view.)

Some of the ways that this template is not able to meet standards:

Please note that these are "Priority 2 and 3" checkpoints and that most of them are FrontPage Theme-related.

  • FrontPage Theme Issues
    • When you apply your theme so that the navigation bars have "Active Graphics" (i.e., change on rollover), you will automatically break some standards. FrontPage automatically generates scripting and code to make the rollover effect and you will have no control over it.
    • When you use image buttons, you will automatically break one of the standards that suggests a "spacer" (image or text) between navigation links.

If you want to learn more about how to make your site accessible, please take a look at our articles at PixelMill, in their support area.

Search form on Search page
This is a FrontPage web component. Your site must be on a server with FrontPage extensions for this to work.

Site Map
The site map is a FrontPage-generated component. To view the site map, go to File > Preview in Browser. To update the site map, you may need to open the page, click on the site map, and save the page.