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One of the key differences between an amateur and a professional Web site is consistency. Professional sites employ well-designed pages that are consistent across the site in their look and functionality.

When your site is consistent, you have a site that:

Looks professional   A professional site is well designed and consistent in its use of the design. Users are more comfortable with a site that's easy to navigate and easy to read.

Saves development time   When you take steps to include consistency in your development cycle, the number of tasks is reduced and simplified.

Saves authoring time Using templates, layouts, and themes can save time when authoring new files, letting the author focus on writing the actual content.

To give your Web site a crisp, professional look and feel, you can take advantage of the many tools available with Microsoft® Visual InterDev™. The larger your team is, the more effective these tools become.

  • The Site Consistency Process

  • Site Consistency in Visual InterDev

  • Putting it All Together

The Site Consistency Process

When you design consistency into your site, you typically perform some or all of the following tasks.

  1. Create style sheets to define how your pages appear.

  2. Design a common layout that meets your requirements for navigation and page appearance.

  3. Create custom templates for authors to create new pages similar to existing ones.

  4. Employ a theme that shares common graphics across your site.

Each of these tasks work together to provide a consistent look that assures users you’ve done a professional job.

Site Consistency in Visual InterDev

For each site consistency task, Visual InterDev offers you:

  • Pre-packaged solutions.

  • Tools to help you create your own from scratch.

Depending on the size of your site and your team, you might use solutions right out of the box or you may customize them a great deal. The Visual InterDev solutions for consistency include:

  • Cascading Style Sheets

  • Templates

  • Layouts

  • Themes

Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading style sheets (CSS) give you the ability to define a set of styles that override the browser's standard methods for rendering HTML. This lets you give your pages a unique and consistent design. Style sheets allow you to define the attributes of any tag. For example, you can adjust the font, line spacing, justification, and border properties.

You apply a style sheet to a page by adding a <LINK> tag in the HTML document heading - between <HEAD> and </HEAD>. A <LINK> tag referencing a CSS file would look like this:

<LINK REL="stylesheet" TYPE="text/css" HREF="YourStyles/COLOR0.CSS">

Therefore, you can have as many pages as you want referencing the same style sheet. Because all the style information is stored in a single file, it is easier to maintain and saves space on the Web server.

Visual InterDev includes a CSS editor that has an easy-to-use interface for setting style properties. You can use the editor's graphical interface so that you don't have to edit raw CSS text. For information on using the CSS editor, see Editing Style Sheets and the CSS Editor Window.

Not all browsers support the use of cascading style sheets. However, when cascading styles are used correctly, browsers that don't support them will ignore them and still render the page readable. You should keep this in mind when designing with styles to make sure that the appearance of your page degrades gracefully on older platforms. CSS 1 is supported by Microsoft® Internet Explorer 4.0 and Netscape Navigator 4.0. Internet Explorer 3.0 supports a subset of CSS 1.

The use of style sheets is endless - varying from the simple to the extremely complex. For a more detailed description of CSS, see reference and also see the World Wide Web Consortium's CSS specification on the Internet at http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/REC-CSS1.

Style Sheets in Visual InterDev

Visual InterDev comes with a variety of style sheets:

  • A standard template is used in the Add Item dialog box when you create a new style sheet, from which you can create and modify styles.

  • Approximately 60 themes come with Visual InterDev. Each theme contains one or more style sheets.

You can use any of these style sheets as a model for creating your own style sheet, or you can simply make a copy and customize it to suit your needs.

Previewing a Style Sheet

When you are editing a style sheet in the CSS editor, you can use the Preview tab to see how it would look if it were applied to any page, local or on the World Wide Web.

Note   If the page you are previewing already has a style sheet attached, Visual InterDev recognizes that style sheet as the primary style sheet and correctly applies the one that you are editing in a secondary position.

Templates

Templates can be an invaluable resource. Even though a template is just a master file from which new copies are made, you can use templates for HTML documents, ASP pages, CSS files, or any other text-based file. Because it takes time to create a well-designed page, the time you invest in templates pays off many times over.

By default, all templates appear in the Add Item dialog box. To add a template to the available list, add it to the following directory:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VintDev98\Templates\Web Project Items

Note   After adding a template to the "Web Project Items" directory, you must restart Visual InterDev in order to display the template in the Add Item dialog box.

Take a look at the directory to see the actual templates that ship with Visual InterDev.

Interactive Templates

You can use parameters in your templates to prompt a template user for additional information, like a theme name or a company name. This allows your templates to be more flexible. For more information, see Creating Custom Templates.

Layouts

Layouts define how the content of a page is visually laid out and how users can navigate among parent, children, and sibling pages by using a .

How a Layout Works

Layouts control how the regions of a page are laid out. Layouts are comprised from different possible regions of page. For example, most layouts utilize two or three of the following five possible regions:

Visual InterDev creates the regions by using HTML tables. The result looks something like the picture below. In the following picture, the Top, Left, Bottom, and Content regions were utilized.

The HTML table information is stored in a Layout Header section and Layout Footer section of the Web page. The header and footer Layout design-time controls bracket the content of your page.

Each layout is based on a unique HTML template. The template stores the layout information. When the layout is applied to a page, Visual InterDev adds the layout design-time controls to the page.

Important   Do not manually alter the run-time text of the Layout design-time controls. If this text is altered, Visual InterDev might not be able to parse the information correctly. Also, when you apply a different layout, Visual InterDev deletes the current Layout design-time controls and replaces them with new ones.

Because the layout information is maintained within a template, it is easy to change which layout is applied to the page without affecting content. For step-by-step instructions on applying or customizing a layout, see Laying Out Pages.

Layouts Installed on Your Workstation

The list of layouts that are installed on your machine was determined when you chose the Typical or Custom option while setting up Visual InterDev on your computer.

Typical Install Option   ****The typical install option copies all 18 layouts to your machine.

Custom Install Option   The Custom install option lets you choose either of the following:

  • 0 layouts (no layouts)

  • Typical (18 layouts)

Directory Location of Layouts

Layouts reside in the "Layouts" directory, which is found at:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VintDev98\Layouts

The files that make up a layout are added to the master server automatically when you apply a layout so that the layout can be shared with other developers who might be working on the same project and need access to the files as well. Layouts are stored on the master server in a directory named "Layouts" in the project's top-level directory. These files are needed at design time, but not at run time.

Themes

Themes are comprised of a set of graphics and one or more cascading style sheets that control styles, font, and graphics. You apply themes to pages so that there is visual consistency shared across your pages.

You can set a default theme for an entire project so that each page you create in that project will have the same theme applied. Even if a default theme for a project, you can choose to override the default on particular files where you might want to apply a different theme or no theme at all.

When you set a default theme for your project, you automatically benefit from the theme's pre-packaged design. Another advantage of themes is the ability to easily switch between different themes, without changing content, to give your site a whole different look.

You can use one of the many themes that come with Visual InterDev, modify one of the existing themes, or create your own custom theme. For step-by-step information about applying and creating themes, see Applying Themes.

How Themes are Referenced in a Page

When you apply a theme to a page, Visual InterDev inserts <LINK> tags within the <HEAD> block. For example, the following text is inserted when the Artsy theme is applied:

<LINK REL="stylesheet" TYPE="text/css" HREF="Themes/artsy/COLOR0.CSS" VI98THEME="artsy">
<LINK REL="stylesheet" TYPE="text/css" HREF="Themes/artsy/GRAPH0.CSS" VI98THEME="artsy">
<LINK REL="stylesheet" TYPE="text/css" HREF="Themes/artsy/THEME.CSS" VI98THEME="artsy">
<LINK REL="stylesheet" TYPE="text/css" HREF="Themes/artsy/CUSTOM.CSS" VI98THEME="artsy">

In the example above, three <LINK> tags have been inserted because the Artsy theme uses three cascading style sheets.

Themes Installed on Your Local Machine

The list of themes that are installed on your machine was determined when you chose Typical or Custom while setting up Visual InterDev on your computer.

Typical Install Option   The Typical install option copies 17 themes to your machine. These 17 themes include:

  • New themes that were created for Visual InterDev.

  • Upgraded versions of themes that shipped with Visual InterDev 1.0.

  • Upgraded versions of Microsoft® FrontPage® 98 themes.

Custom Install Option   The Custom install option lets you choose one of the following

  • 0 themes (no themes)

  • Typical (17 themes)

  • Complete (all themes)

Location of Themes on Your Workstation

Each set of files that makes up a theme is maintained in a single directory. The directory name is identical to the theme name.

The theme directories are stored locally in the "Themes" directory, which is typically found at:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Themes

Note   In Visual InterDev 1.0, the theme files were spread across different directories. In this version of Visual InterDev, all the files that make up a theme reside in the same directory.

Location of Themes on the Server

Themes are stored on the master server in a directory named "Themes" in the project's top-level directory. The files that make up a theme are added to the master server automatically when you apply a theme.

When you deploy your Web application, include the Themes directory and sub-directories when you copy the files to the production server.

Sharing Themes Between Visual InterDev and FrontPage

You can access a master application on the server from either a Visual InterDev Web project or a FrontPage project. This allows team members to use their preferred tool of choice. For example, a team might have developers who use Visual InterDev's enhanced scripting capabilities to access the master application and designer and writers prefer to use the design features of FrontPage to access the same master application.

For information about the differences between Visual InterDev and FrontPage, see Using FrontPage and Visual InterDev to Create Web Sites.

Additional Graphics in Themes

Each theme comes with an assortment of additional graphics to complement the basic ones that are used by default. You can use these additional graphics to enhance the design of your pages. Look inside a theme's directory to see all the .GIF images that are available in a particular theme.

Tip   When you drag an image from the Project Explorer onto a page, Visual InterDev automatically inserts an <IMG> tag with the correct URL.

When you use images in the Themes directory, be sure to include the correct URL in the <IMG> tag.

Note   If you apply a new theme to the page, you will need to manually update the URLs of all images that you added by hand.

Putting it All Together

After you've decided how the tools discussed above interest you, you can use them to simply the process of creating and maintaining a visually appealing and consistent Web site. You can:

  • Use the Web Project wizard to create a new project. The wizard prompts you for a default theme and layout.

  • Apply a theme and a layout to an existing Web project or individual file. To select a project or file name in the Project Explorer, right-click, and select Apply Theme and Layout.

When a theme or a layout is applied, it is automatically copied to the master server so that it can be shared with all team members.

If you want to share a template with team members, make the master copy available to them. Each team member must then make a copy and place it in the Templates directory on the workstation.