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A theme is a unified set of design elements and color schemes that you can apply to your web pages to give them a professional look. Using a theme is a quick and easy way to make sure your web pages are visually consistent and appealing. Microsoft FrontPage includes many complete themes that you can use right away, or you can create new themes based on existing ones.
You can apply a theme to one or more pages or to an entire web site. If you apply a theme to all pages in a web site, the theme becomes the default theme for that web site. When you create new pages, the default theme is applied automatically. If you change or remove the default theme, the change is applied to the entire web site.
The following example shows a plain web page, and then shows how the same page would look with different themes applied:
A plain web page.
The same page with three
different themes applied.
A theme affects all aspects of a page's appearance:
Customizing themes
You can customize a theme in a variety of ways to create a new theme. For example, you can use your own colors, graphics, and font styles.
Changing colors
You can change the colors that are used in a theme. For example, in the Artsy theme, active hyperlinks are green — you could change them to red. You can also change the colors of other page and text elements, such as body and heading text, banner text, link bar labels, table borders, and the background. In addition, each theme has two color sets — normal and vivid. You can specify the colors to use for both sets.
Selecting a color is easy. You can choose a color from one of the FrontPage color palettes, or you can define your own custom colors.
Changing
graphics
You can replace the graphics that are used in a theme with graphics of your own. For example, in the Blends theme, you could replace the background picture used with a graphic you created.
You can also change other graphical elements, such as the page banner, bullets, navigation buttons, and horizontal line. In addition, you can also specify the font to use for graphical elements that are displayed with text.
Each theme has two sets of graphics — normal and active. You can specify the graphics to use for either set. The active graphic set uses animated page elements, such as hover buttons instead of plain buttons on link bars.
Note Active graphics are not available for some theme items.
Changing styles
You can change the styles that are used in a particular theme. For example, in the Capsules theme, you could change the font for the body and heading styles from Arial to Times New Roman. To change the font displayed on a graphical element (for example, the font used on page banners), you must change the graphic.
Using templates
A page that has a theme applied to it can be saved as a template. Any pages created using the template will either use the web site's default theme or a specific theme, depending on how the theme was applied to the original page. For example, you create a template from a page that has a theme applied to it, then you create pages in a web whose default theme is Artsy. If the page template used the web default theme, new pages will use the Artsy theme. If the page template used a specific theme, new pages will use that theme.