Building professional-looking websites can be challenging. While anyone can learn the basics of HTML and get an operational site up and running on the internet, making a site that looks attractive is another story altogether. The internet abounds with cheap-looking mom and pop sites that look like they were designed by a first-year HTML student. But it doesn’t have to be this way. With Microsoft FrontPage, you can easily create sites that look more professional. Here are five ways FrontPage can instantly make your websites look more professional.
1. High-Quality Photos And Clipart Collection
Few people actually know how great the Microsoft Clipart collection is. This collection of images, created and maintained by one of the richest corporations in the world, absolutely crushes any other collection on the internet in terms of quantity and quality of available pictures. Best part? It’s free for FrontPage owners! There are over a million clipart pictures and photos, all searchable by keyword. Adding some original looking, nice photographs to each page of your site can instantly take up space and add a professional look. This is better than simply having the affiliate link.
2. The Interactive Button Features
In Microsoft FrontPage 2003, there is a new feature called ‘Interactive Buttons’. You can choose from over 200 different types of ready-made buttons to use on your website. These buttons look fantastic and can be created and edited with 1 click. Before, you would have to pay a graphic designer or spend hours creating these types of rollover buttons yourself, but FrontPage 2003 does it all for you. Using these buttons can add a big dose of professional looks to your site in a matter of seconds.
3. Using HTML Tables
It goes without saying that the content of your webpages should usually be placed in some sort of HTML table. FrontPage makes it easy to create tables and add content, simply by using a button on the toolbar. You can use this to center the content on your page and create neat looking tables once you get the hang of it (it is easy). This way, your content isn’t scattered all around the page.
4. Included Content
This feature of FrontPage allows you to make changes to hundreds of webpages, simply by changing the content of one HTML page. For example, you should use the interactive buttons feature to create a navigation system. You can also ‘include’ this navigation system on all of your webpages with a special feature in FrontPage. This way, if you want to add another category or link to all of the pages on your site, you simply need to open up one webpage, the ‘navigation.htm’ page, and change the contents of that page. The changes will immediately be reflected on hundreds of pages on your website. You can see this is 10,000x more easy than going through and manually editing the links bar on each page!
5. Web Forms
Using the web forms feature of FrontPage, you can create a feedback form for your website. Not only do these forms look nice, but they also can help you to alleviate your spam problems. Many a webmaster has paid extravagant fees to other companies for form processing, when it has been available to FrontPage users free and easy for years. You can create any kind of feedback form in a matter of minutes, and have the results of the form submission sent to any email address that you choose.
To conclude, I have just given you five very valuable tools for creating professional-looking websites fast. Let’s say you spend $50 and get a nice looking banner graphic for your new affiliate website. Then you create a neat HTML table, paste in the banner, and use the interactive buttons feature of FrontPage 2003 to create a navigation system. You can use the same general template for each new page you create (for articles, and other information about the product you are promoting). After that, you top each page off with a nice looking photo or two from the Microsoft Clipart collection. Using these basic techniques, in only an hour or two you can easily put together a professional-looking website site.
