Front Page Express is an editor used to update Hypertext Mark up Language files. FPE is what you see what you get application. What you see when you look at Front Page Express is what you get when you look at your personal web page when you have finished it. It is identical to the editor used in Front Page.

Figure:Front Page Express

FPE is considered to be one part of the Internet Explorer application. It is an easy, quick way to create web pages without requiring HTML programming skills. Creating a web page in FPE is as simple as creating a document in a word processor. Although FPE is a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) style editor, still there are a few drawbacks of using it. The editor needs to make choices as to how to display information on the screen when converting what is typed and inserted on the screen to what is written in the HTML code. Often these choices are not what you wanted for your page. This is the benefit of knowing HTML, you can edit it directly using “View-> HTML”

Most of the steps in creating a webpage using FPE appears to be very familiar to you after using other windows applications, many icons on the toolbars, the menus or keyboard shortcuts are the same as those used in Microsoft Word. There are many good HTML editors besides Front Page and FPX. To choose the right editor for you, you must have an idea of what you will be doing with it.

• A simple website just a few pages.
• A complex site with many pages.
• Just plain HTML.
• Cascading stylesheets, advanced DHTML, or scripts.
• What kind of web server will host your web pages.
• Some advanced FrontPage features require special software on the web server. Often the same features can be created with scripts, if your web server allows them.

FPE is almost identical to the editor used by FrontPage except that it is used as a stand alone application to create and update your HTML files.

Figure: FPE and HTML Files

Thus, we will need to use another program to upload the files to the Personal Webpage server. This kind of program is called an File Transfer Protocol Client.

Figure:FTP Client

To start FPE: The following steps to begin or to work on FPE.

• click on start
• From Start > Programs
• From Programs > Internet Explorer
• From Internet Explorer > Front Page Express.

Components of FPE

Toolbar: The toolbar contains the various tools that enables the one to give your application a better look.

Text: Entering text into a webpage is much like entering text into a word document. Simply type the text & use the following steps.

Layout: The Text on your webpage doesn’t have to all be in paragraph blocks. Then do the following.

• Line Break: When you press ENTER at there end of the line of text, the cursor drops down two line sand starts a new paragraph. The only way to get text directly underneath the first line of text is to finish filling up the line and letting word wrap to the rest. But sometimes you want to go to the very next line after only a few words. Use a Line Break. To create a line break simply hold down the SHIFT key and press ENTER.
• Alignment: You can align text and pictures to the right, center, or left of your webpage. To do this, highlight the text or image you want to move and click on either the right, center, or left buttons on the toolbar. If you haven’t started typing the text, just click on either the right, center, or left buttons and the cursor will move to that part of the page.
• Indents: You can indent blocks as text as well. To indent some text, click Increase Indent Icon on the toolbar. To unindent some text, click the Decrease Indent Icon on the toolbar. When you indent or unindent a block of text, the entire paragraph that the text is in is indented or outdented.
• Lists: Lists are indented or denoted and are especially good for outlines. There are two major kinds of lists, the numbered lists and the bulleted lists.

Attributes: FPE allows you to make all the same attribute changes that you can make in Word. The first step in changing text attributes is to highlight the text you want to modify with the mouse. You can then make the changes, you can change its font type as Times New Roman, courier New etc. You can also change the font style as bold, italics or underline in Style Icons on the toolbar. You can also change the color of the text by Color Dialog Box. You can also increase or decrease the size of the text typed.

Images: You can insert images (*.gif, *.jpg, *.bmp) into your webpage. Keep in mind that you need to keep your images relatively small in size, otherwise your pages will take a long time to download. To insert an image, put your cursor where you want to place the image and then:

• Select the Insert Image icon from the toolbar.
• The image dialog box appears. Click the browse Button.
• Find and select the image you wish to insert and click OK.

The image should appear on the webpage. After you have placed the image on the webpage, you can change the attributes of the image by right clicking on the image and choosing Image Properties.

Links: Links create a connection between more than one of your pages. Links also can connect your pages to other pages across the World Wide Web.

To link to a Webpage other than your own, determine where you wan to link to. For example, you might want the viewer to click on the words “BCC News” and have them sent to. To do this, first highlight the text, picture or both, that you want to be linked. Next click the Create of Edit Hyperlink Icon on the toolbar. The create hyperlink dialog box should appear. Choose the World Wide Web tab. Then make sure the Hyperlink Type List Box is set to “http:” on the Hyperlink Type List Box. Lastly on the line titled URL type the address of the webpage. In this case, type out http://www.bcc.com. Click OK

To link  your own pages together, you first need to determine how the pages are to be connected. Example, you may want the viewer to click on the word “Games”, and have it to go to separate page of yours. To do this follow the directions: Highlight the text, Click the Create or Edit Hyperlink Icon on the toolbar. The create Hyperlink Dialog Box should appear. Choose the World Wide Web link. Next, select “(other)”  for Hyperlink Type:. On the URL line type the name f your other page. In this case, we would type “Games.htm”. Once that is done, you can click OK and you will have created a link to another one of your pages.

You may want to include an email link for your page.  For this click on your name and an email program will automatically start with your email address already in the send to line. To do this, you first need to highlight the text you want to link to your email. Click the Create or Edit Hyperlink Icon on the toolbar. The create Hyperlink Dialog Box should appear. Choose the WWW tab. Make sure the hyperlink type is set to mailto: on the Hyperlink Type List Box. On the line titled URL type the actual email address. Click OK.