MS FrontPage —

Saving Your Work

Don't let your new miniature Web site go unsaved. Actually, you already saved the site itself when you created it. After that, you'll always be saving your site contentlike pages and images. Should you try to close a site by selecting File » Close Site, FrontPage prompts you to save changes to individual pages one by one. You've seen these kinds of prompts before when you've tried to close a program that still has files open.

You're better off saving changes as you work. Saving frequently helps fend off the danger of data loss (and nervous breakdown) due to a computer meltdown. If you never lost work to a computer glitch, consider yourself one of the few and fortunate. Caution aside, you'll find that saving your pages regularly eases site maintenance.

If you have several pages open that contain unsaved changes, you can save them all at once by selecting File » Save All. FrontPage saves everything that's open and unsaved.

Saving a Web Page

In the course of working on your site, FrontPage frequently prompts you to save pages. Often that's because the program needs you to save in order to do things that you've asked it to do, like preview your page in a browser.

Start now by saving the edits to your site's new page. The tab for your new page still contains an asterisk, as illustrated in Adding Content to Your Web Site, which tells you that the page needs to be saved. Get rid of the asterisk with a simple click of the Save button on the toolbar. Or select File » Save (Ctrl+S). When the Save dialog box appears, FrontPage usually wants to name the page something like new_page_3.htm. Rename it so that the file name actually means something to you within the context of your site. As with a Web site name, don't include any spaces, capital letters, or special characters in the name, and keep it short. The process of saving this page also takes care of some basic site maintenance, as you'll see.

  1. Save the page.

    After you've named and saved the page, a Save Embedded Files dialog box displays. In the course of saving this page, FrontPage needs to know where it should save the image file you just incorporated in your site. (While pictures may look to you like they're part of a page, they actually exist behind the scenes as individual image files and must be saved within your site. Don't leave them in a random folder on your hard drive, or your Web server won't know where to find them later when you publish your site.) If you just click OK, FrontPage saves the image into whatever folder you're currently working in. As you create pages, the list of files associated with your site will grow quickly. It's important to organize these files intelligently. You'll get to site management later on in Building And Managing a Web Site, but right now, put your best foot forward by saving this image file where it belongs: in the Images folder that FrontPage has automatically created within your site. But first, you've got to name the image properly.

  2. Click the Rename button and change the name to something fitting and descriptive.

    As is, the image file name consists of some numbers and text that will mean nothing to you later on. Since you'll want to find the image easily in the future, rename it. Eventually you'll have a folder full of graphic files with names like explodingeggplant.jpg and cleanuptools.gif. You'll then be able to identify them without a hassle.

  3. Click the Change Folder button.

  4. Click the Images folder and click OK.

    The Save dialog box now shows the new location for the file. You can click OK, andpoof!the asterisk on the page's tab disappears.

  5. Select File » Close to close the page.

    The first page you createdwhich will be the site's home pageshould be displayed in your document window. You now need to save it.

  6. Save the home page.

    The Save As dialog box displays. Note that FrontPage has already entered a name for the file: Index1.htm. You should keep this name, as it tells the browser that this is the home page or first page the browser should open. FrontPage always designates the first page you create in a site as the home page. If you want, you can give the page a title, too (see Figure 1-7). (Building And Managing a Web Site covers everything you need to know about home pages, file names vs. titles, and site structure.)

  7. Within the Save As dialog box, make no changes and click Save.

Figure 1-7. If you click the Change Title button, you can give your page a title, too, which is different from its file name (like Index1.htm). Page title is for public display and appears to viewers in the title bar of their Web browser. (See Building And Managing a Web Site.)