The Themes feature in Microsoft FrontPage and available in the Microsoft Office XP applications provides a gallery of professionally designed graphics, color schemes, and formatting rules that can be applied to Web sites based on FrontPage 2002. With these shared themes, you can create documents, Web pages, or an entire Web site with a consistent and polished look across all pages. Themes can be applied anytime—even to an existing Web site that was not created in FrontPage.

Although FrontPage 2002 comes with more than 60 standard themes, you can use FrontPage 2002 to customize many aspects of themes—including colors, graphics, and font styles—to come up with your own unique combination. You can also use different themes on different pages within the same Web site.

Using FrontPage themes with the shared borders and navigation tools available in FrontPage, you can add dramatic graphic designs to enhance your page banners and link bars. You can also continue to use themes created in FrontPage 98 and FrontPage 2000 with Office XP documents and Web pages.

Note   Web sites based on SharePoint Team Services from Microsoft must use themes from FrontPage 2002 or later. Themes developed in earlier versions of FrontPage or Office cannot be used on Web sites based on SharePoint Team Services.

Improvements in FrontPage Themes

Microsoft FrontPage Themes have been improved in FrontPage 2002 in several ways:

• There are more than 60 themes available with the product and another 15 themes available from Office Update.
• The themes are more businesslike than ever before. This change was a direct result of customer feedback; users want to be able to produce conservative and professional-looking Web sites.
• The themes in FrontPage are shared with Office XP; both Microsoft Word 2002 and Microsoft Access 2002 include a subset of the themes included in FrontPage and can use any of the themes created within FrontPage. In addition, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 includes new presentation designs that match the formatting provided by shared themes.