To get a general understanding of themes, let's start with a Web page created using Microsoft FrontPage 2002 that contains no special formatting.

This document uses default headings and fonts. To change the design and apply consistent fonts and headings, you can apply a theme to the document. There are more than 60 pre-built themes in FrontPage 2002 . You can also create a custom theme in FrontPage 2002 that will work with Word 2002 and Access 2002 documents as well as Web pages.

Applying a Theme to a Web Page

1. From the Format menu, click Theme.
   
    
2. Select the theme that you want to apply and click OK.

In the example shown, we selected a custom-built theme called championzone. This theme has preset rules for formatting headings, body text, and hyperlinks, and it specifies which banner, bullet, and button images to use.

When you apply a theme to the document, all of the headings, body text, font styles and colors, bullets, and horizontal rules are styled according to the theme. Themes can include background images that appear behind your text and resemble watermarks on your pages.

Using Themes and Shared Borders on a Sample Web Site

Now that you have seen how to apply a theme to an individual Web page, let's take a look at how you can use themes and other features of FrontPage—such as shared borders and link bars—to apply a consistent look to an entire Web site.

The above page shows the desired result: a Web site with a consistent banner across the top of the page and vertical navigation buttons in the left border that link to the high-level pages in the Web site.

You achieve these results by using shared borders, a banner, and link bars.

• Shared borders are design elements that are placed along the top, left, right, and/or bottom edge of a Web page and are repeated consistently across every page in the Web site. Shared borders put common headers, footers, and left or right borders on every page—or selected pages—in your Web site.
• Page banners are graphical bars or images that display the page title at the top of each page.
• link bars are visual elements that link pages together. (In FrontPage 2002 , navigational elements are implemented in one convenient view—the Navigation view—so you don't have to set up navigation on each individual page.)

These three features can be used together to create an effective design for your Web site. For example, placing a page banner within a shared border allows you to add the corresponding titles to multiple pages in your site at one time. It is common to place a page banner that you want to show on every page inside a top shared border.

In the example, a top shared border contains a page banner (the championzone name). A left shared border contains navigation buttons. When designing a site, you can place these shared borders so that they appear on every page of the Web site or just on selected pages.

If a theme has been applied to the page, the page banner picks up the styles and graphics from the theme. In the example, the championzone name graphic on the top of this page was specified in the custom championzone theme we created.

FrontPage makes implementing a navigational system easy. When you first create a Web site based on FrontPage, you may or may not have a link bar (although many of the Web site templates that come with FrontPage 2002 automatically include link bars). Because you probably want the navigational elements to appear on each page, they usually are used in conjunction with shared borders. In our example, the navigation buttons appear in the left border in the graphic format defined within the theme.

You can designate the titles of your Web pages in the Navigation view of FrontPage. Each page's banner and the site's navigation buttons pick up the correct page titles from the Navigation view. When a title is changed in Navigation view, the revision is automatically implemented in the page banner and on any associated navigation buttons.

In the example above, the names on the horizontal navigation buttons came directly from the second level of our site—Products, Stores, Club Houses, News, Teams, Events, and About Us. If we renamed the page called Club Houses to Facilities, the navigation button would automatically be changed to Facilities throughout the site. Maintaining your site navigation in Navigation view is a convenient and automatic way to keep your site structure functioning well.