Frontpage Problem - MORNINGPAPER around? or anyone familiar with Frontpage?

[looneytune]

I've been thinking really hard and can't think of an answer to this one.

One of the websites I've done in Frontpage is causing me problems. On my office pc, when I go to the www address, everything looks fine but when I do the same on my laptop, images are over writing etc etc. I've asked a few people to check the site and they are getting the messy version (images on writing, things not lined up correctly). What I'm trying to work out is why on earth my office pc shows it perfect????

Surely the web address should show the same thing for everyone!?! I know my pc has a nice big flat screen but that wouldn't make a difference would it? Both PC and laptop use internet explorer 7 so it's not that I'm viewing from something different. I'm just so confused.

ANY IDEA's????

Hmm you probably have your tables screwed up then. I'm a dreamweaver person so my knowledge of FP is old but I do remember that if your tables crash into each other this can happen. Click on one of the tables and cope the content, then delete it and see if this fixes the problem. If it does - then you know this is the issue and you can rebuild.

Cheers for that, I know I need to totally sort the relevant page out but have you got any idea why it would appear different on different machines?? I'm one of these people that just HAS to know these things!

Yep, different browser versions, different accessibility settings, a myriad of things.

different screen size / screen resolution also v important.

it'll always look fine on the pc you wrote the site on.

Oh, thanks for that I know my sites have always been funny in Firefox but because both of my machines were running explorer 7, i thought that couldn't be it - must be settings then!

Thanks for that, it was driving me mad last night!

So if I build the site on my PC but then saved it (from picking up on network) to my laptop and ftp'd it from laptop, it's still the PC that will show it right. Well, that's something else I didn't know!

Frontpage is really bad at showing different things on different computers - as others have said. The only way round it is to write from first principles using html (which isn't as hard as it sounds!), as then you can really tell the browser how to display the page. Pages written in this way tend to load up much quicker as well, as they don't have all the rubbish frontpage writes into it!

Thanks again.

How do i learn about html and how to use/understand it?

You could just get a book on it - it's not complicated - I learnt some just by doing some basic commands and then experimenting. You can also look at websites that have been done like this and look at view source, and you can find out what commands have been used. It's things like Hello

I'd definitely recommend writing your site in HTML (or Dreamweaver if you're not so confident with writing the code from scratch). Frontpage does weird things which mess up the code so its likely it won't work on other browsers/operating systems. If your site is going to be available to others you need to test it on everything you can - different browsers (older versions of IE, Firefox, Safari, etc) and on different resolution screens, test on Mac as well as PC too.

I've found this a good introduction to HTML www.w3schools.com/html

I loathe frontpage because you actually need to understand HTML to debug the errors it inserts into the code! I'd use Dreamweaver if I were you.

Is the site visible to the outside world somewhere?? Show us a link - I'm happy to take a look...

wow, thanks for responses - i'll try dreamweaver, been meaning to, just never got round to getting it!

my website is www.helenslittleangels.co.uk - the worst page is facilities and activities

Thanks SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much

www.helenslittleangels.co.uk

It's Frontpage and microsofts additional office markup (themes) that seems to be the problem here... ....it's a big mess at the html level... ..but basically frontpage has those individual blocks of images also stored as a combined images and is supposed to hide one or the other depending on the web-browser capabilities. But firefox (in my case) is completely ignoring the hide bit (actually an IF) and showing the individual graphics and the big combined ones.. ...so it looks a mess.

Not sure how to get around it without re-writing the page in nice neat markup... ...don't know if disabling the themes will screw the rest of the layout.. ..bloody front page... ...vi is the way forward... :-D

just realised my post probably didn't make any sense..

...if you're at all happy with editing html then I'd be looking to remove

but make sure you've got a backup so you can roll back if it screws something else.. ...if that works then look for more of the tags and chop them...

....I'm still in the land of xml/xhtml/css and good ol' vi for quick and dirty edits... ..none of this gui rubbish... :-D

Agree with HandyTrinkett - FrontPage has messed up the code big time! I'd definitely suggest using something else - Dreamweaver is much better than FrontPage but you may still need to tweak the code so a bit of HTML would be useful to learn.

Something you might want to change quickly - in Firefox on the Reference page your address is showing (the black box has moved position) - maybe you could make the black box part of the image so there's no risk of it moving?

It's really odd as it WAS all fine and then I got a new PC and some files get messed up and the next time I published changes, they were all wrong Not a lot I can do about that though.

thanks so much for letting me know about the black box in Firefox - luckily it's my old address anyway but still good to know that it's different and I need to check all these different web browsers.

i think I'll just remove all the images for now and when I get time, re-write it - god I wish I knew about all this html stuff - will certainly be looking at that webpage!

Wow, simple html is a lot easier than I thought, thanks for that!!

Now, can anyone help with this............my website was created on an old PC and unfortunately the files weren't tranferred to new PC (long story) so I've imported them from the web into Frontpage. Problem is, the navigation bar has been lost (no navigation structure on the navigation screen).

I'm trying to sort this out but having big problems - any ideas??

Can't help I'm afraid Looney as I don't know enough about Frontpage.. ..if you're looking to do this kind of stuff regularly and as a business I'd start to think about using a content management system and templates rather than doing everything in Frontpage.

The advantages you get from that are (strangely) ease of use and consistent look an feel (everything is generally template based).

There are plenty of open source CMSs around and some are really easy to use. There would be an initial learning curve to get your head around it but after that you'll be knocking out sites in minutes and only having to think about what colours, graphics, fonts you want to use.

If you're going to stick with frontpage then start learning HTML and CSS. The former describes the page and its content, the latter does all the fancy styling. Knowing how the page is constructed should help you work out what's not working with Frontpage.

If you don't want to do either of those then Dreamweaver might be the way forward - it's certainly a lot more comprehensive feature wise than Frontpage and the recent versions actually produce standards compliant code which means you've a much better chance of your websites working and looking the same on all browsers.

Hope at least some of this made sense. If there's a particular bit that's not working then drop a link and a description and I'll take a look if I've got 2 mins to spare...
Cheers,

A

YO

I use Frontpage to do websites

Your borders are lost (rather complicated) but basically you need the _borders directory. Importing into frontpage re-creates this, with blank borders (as you have found out) - this is if you do a simple import using FTP - if you import using the Front Page Extensions then you might get lucky and keep the borders - but normally people just use FTP, which is what I guess you are doing.

Check on your published website to see if there is a _border directory, and you will need the top.htm, bottom.htm etc. files from there. But they might not be there, in which can you will need to create them again.

I think FrontPage is a really useful web creation tool, as long as you know a bit of HTML and css (just really simple bits) to sort out any muddles.

HandyTrinkett - thanks for that, am learning a bit of html online I'm not going to be doing this regularly as I'm so busy with my childminding, I don't really have the time. I have done a few sites for other childminders after they begged me when saw my site on ebay. I made it clear I didn't have the knowledge of coding etc but that's why they got them very cheap! I do want to learn more but more as a hobby for now

MorningPaper - HELLO I didn't want to email you direct in case you thought I was being cheeky but am glad you have found me here (you may remember me as HellyBelly). I will have a look at my files and see about the borders. I didn't FTP the import - I did it via Frontpage but it did come up with a message at some point. I will try importing again and see what that message was.