Home Page

Claris Home Page Assistants

Meet the Assistants

Preparing for Assistance

Using an Assistant

Finishing Up

About the Code

Conclusion

About the Author

Meet the Assistants

Home Page offers eight different assistants:

• Frame Assistant creates a frameset, which enables you to display multiple Web pages in a single window. Unlike the other assistants, this one does not create multiple pages. The only page it creates is a page full of links for use as a navigation bar.
• FileMaker Connection Assistant creates a Web site with all the necessary CDML (Claris Dynamic Markup Language) codes you need to interact with a FileMaker Pro database published on the Web.
• Newsletter Assistant creates a Web site with pages for displaying news and other information.
• Personal Site Assistant creates a Web site with pages for displaying personal information such as photos, favorite links, or family history.
• Presentation Assistant creates a Web site with pages to present information in a specific order.
• Report Assistant creates a Web site with a table of contents page and pages for reporting information.
• School Site Assistant creates a Web site appropriate for school programs, announcements, classes, or activities.
• Standard Site Assistant creates a general-purpose Web site.

Novices will find all of these assistants extremely helpful when creating Web sites. They all gather information about the pages that will be included in the site to build navigation bars that work flawlessly. They also offer design choices that apply templates to each page in the site for a consistent look.

The first two assistants, however, are particularly useful because they handle especially tough coding chores that many experienced Web designers struggle with. The Frame Assistant takes all the mystery out of creating framesets&emdash;you simply choose a frameset design, identify the pages for each frame, and let the assistant place pages in frames and build a navigation bar. The FileMaker Connection Assistant makes it possible to create a custom FileMaker Pro Web publishing solution without knowing a single CDML tag&emdash;if you've ever glimpsed CDML in action, you know what an achievement that is!