Customizing Themes

Microsoft FrontPage provides users with a very easy method of creating a functional site without the complicated programming skills needed to write it "by hand." In this segment of my tutorials, you will learn how to change an existing theme to match your site's look and feel.

Text

When you were looking at the themes, you noticed specific font styles for different page elements. To change these. Click on the text button. A new dialog box will open and provide a drop down box to choose which page elements you want to change. For example, you might want your Heading 1 to have a different font, or color. There are a lot of font choices in WINDOWS, just remember that not everyone has all of the fonts you may have. Sometimes a bit of a color change, bold, or italics will make a better choice that a font change. 

Colors

Clicking on the colors button will bring yet another dialog box. Again, you can choose page element to change. There is a color scheme panel that lists all the themes and the color combinations used. So that if you liked the colors of one theme, but the graphics in another, you can change the color scheme here, and have the best of both! 
You can also go to the custom tab and choose individual elements and change the colors. Just choose the element from the drop down, and choose the color in the color box. (This is a pretty standard WINDOWS operation.)

Graphics

If you are unfamiliar with what graphics are needed, or what to name them, you might save your theme after you customize the colors. Apply the theme to your web and close FP. Open the images in the themes folder (found in your web folder) in your favorite graphics program. Change them, or completely erase what's there and start fresh. Then when you close them, save the changes. This is particularly effective when you just want to change colors or add your logo to the banner. Don't forget to optimize you graphics!

You can change the graphics too! Themes can be as personal as you want them to be!

When you click the graphics button, again, a dialog box will come up. The familiar drop down box allows you to choose the graphic you want to change. The tabs give you the choice to change the font and the picture. 
Be sure when you are making changes that you are changing the correct theme. If the theme you chose is using active graphics, then active graphics must be chosen at the bottom of the dialog box. 

Open the items in your graphics software program to see exactly what you are replacing. When you choose to make your own custom buttons, make them generally the same size as the ones in the theme (they are standard sizes).

To make the change, click on the browse button and navigate to the correct folder. 

Saving The New Theme

When you are happy with the theme, click OK...you will be prompted through the saving process...give your new theme a name that will help you remember what project you made it for and what theme it was made from, if possible. Something like "Petersen Cactus." This tells me it is the cactus theme, as I customized it for someone named Petersen. 

Questions? Send me an email  Themes are so personalized, it is difficult to get too specific here.