Text boxes--the only way to fly in MS FrontPage?

Factual Questions
1

I am NOT an experienced designer, so please don’t laugh. Plus, I’m doing this for a friend as a favor.

I was using Yahoo’s site builder, but it’s crap and I had FP on hand, so I started working with that.

As will nearly all MS Products (Excel being the notable exception), FrontPage is hell to work with. You can’t just slam stuff where you want it–NO, it could never be that easy.

As this is a photo site, there are lots of pictures to import. But if you just import a photo raw, it is almost impossible to use it: with the wrapping “function,” the text and just about everything on the page goes haywire in relation to the photo.

But I’ve discovered a solution, albeit half-axed: put the photo IN a text box, and, voila! you can then place that text box, freely, anwhere on the page.

Questions:

  1. Is this the only way to work with photos freely in FrontPage?

  2. Why can’t you place a photo on the page frelly, as with a line or rectangle, etc.?

  3. In fact, I put EVERYTHING in textboxes, since, if you don’t, you just have a big blank page, and that’s no good. Is this how most people work with this software?

  4. I have found working with the tables a nightmare. At first I was carving a table into boxes and sticking the photos in there, but as with all MS software, it eventually goes nuts and you have to scrap the whole thing. Any thoughts?

  5. What’s a better program for building sheets?

Thank you for your time and knoweldge.

2

Surely some ideas?

3

It’s not strictly a FrontPage issue: HTML has certain rules about how it displays pictures, and they make it very hard to place one exactly where you want it.

Easiest solution is to put the pictures in a table. Hide the lines of the table. I’ve never had any problems with this – just place the image into the table where you want it.

Tables can act in strange ways if you add and remove cells to them. Again, this is due to HTML, not FrontPage. Best bet is to plan out your design and keep the photos in rows and columns.

I’ve used Frontpage for years, and never used the text boxes; do you mean tables? In any case, the text flows pretty much the way it should given the restrictions of HTML.

4

Sorry, I don’t use frontpage (for the reasons you mention above, and because I don’t like its code output. ) If you know any html, you could try textpad, http://www.textpad.org, which I think is free for non-commercial use.

Tirial

5

Well I have never used FrontPage but I can give you some general design tips…

I have no idea what a TextBox is. Perhaps a DIV? In any case if you want to get text under a photo instead of beside it, try looking for a LINE BREAK or <BR> button and put it after the photo before the text.

Tables are really the way to go here. Basic tables like you need are REALLY easy to make. Here’s a little primer:

First line, open the table:

Next line, start a row:

Then, make a cell for each photo you want to include in that row:

(the valign=top will line the conents of each cell vertically to the top of the cell)

When you finish your first row of photos, close the first row:

Then start your next row and add the same number of columns:

Once you have all the rows you need, close the table:

Note that each row has to have the same number of columns. So if you find yourself with 3 rows of 3, and one last row of 1, still add the last two cells to the final row, but make them blank. Like this:

This project seems like something you can do in Notepad, or a more basic text HTML editor. Does what I wrote make sense?