Using the Standard Themes in .NET

Printing UPC-A Supplement 2 in .NET Using the Standard Themes

Microsoft provides a wealth of themes you can use to customize your Web pages When you don t find a theme you like, you can also obtain themes from third parties (some of which charge a fee for the privilege of using their theme) Unless you re a professional artist with Web-design experience, it probably pays to use these predefined themes to get an aesthetically pleasing result Even when you choose to create a custom theme, looking at these other offerings can provide ideas to use in your own design

Before you add a theme to an existing page, it pays to look at what the theme has to offer The only way to accomplish this task is to create a test page

that contains a series of design elements that let you see what the theme has to offer You want to use a test page that s small enough to see in the Design and Preview views, but offers a sampling of the design elements you use on a production page (although not necessarily the order in which you use them) Always concentrate on the design elements you actually use, and ignore the elements you won t use The SimpleThemehtm page provided with the source code on this book s companion Web site provides a list of standard elements you can try You must add the SimpleThemehtm page to your navigational structure to see the effect of the theme on the banner To add a theme to your Web page, follow these steps:

3 Customize your theme by using one of these three options:

Use the Vivid Colors option to modify the colors used for standard styles of content such as headers and links Use the Active Graphics options to intensify the colors of bullets, banners, and other foreground images Use the Background Picture option to add a background picture to the display The various combinations create eight versions of the same theme, so a single theme is more flexible than it first appears Theme changes aren t automatic you must apply them to every page that uses the theme on your Web site Whenever you change one option, you must reapply the theme to a page by clicking the theme entry in the Select a Theme window to see the effect of the change Look at the small picture provided with each theme in the Theme window The picture elements change to show the effect of a particular option The top line in the figure is the banner, followed by interactive buttons, headers, regular text, navigational bar, regular hyperlink, and followed hyperlink Figure 6-3 shows a typical theme with all options enabled

After you decide on a particular theme and set of customizations, you want to apply it to one or more other pages on your site to provide a unified look FrontPage doesn t force you to open each file individually to apply the theme you can apply the theme to a group of files To apply a theme to a group of files, follow these steps:

1 Select the files you want to change in the Folder List 2 Select the options you want to use with the theme 3 Hover your mouse over the theme entry in the Select a Theme window

In many cases, you want to apply a theme to an entire Web site so it has a unified appearance Applying the theme to the whole site means you don t have to worry about the appearance of individual pages they all use the same theme automatically Exercise care when you use this approach; it affects every Web page on your site except those that already have themes applied (older versions of FrontPage occasionally apply themes to all pages, regardless of current status) A whole-site theme change is nonreversible Although, after you make this change, you can apply other themes to the site or even tell FrontPage not to use a theme, you can t retrieve earlier customizations To apply a theme to an entire site, follow these steps:

1 Select the theme options you want to use 2 Hover your mouse over the theme you want to use in the Select a