design detail

[Elly]

Hi,

I have uploaded my website (www.professionalcounselling.co.uk) , but at the
top left between the image and 'last updated' there should be a line showing
(top border on the 'last updated' text box). It showed in preview, but has
disappeared in the published version. How can that have happened? Should I
try uploading again?

Also, do I remember correctly that you cannot place anything in the
background? I have not done so, but it would save a lot of work if it can be
done.

Thank you very much in anticipation.

 

[DavidF]

Elly,

I am not 100% sure of what you are saying, but if you are saying that you
applied a top border only on the text box that contains the text "Last
updated...", then there are a couple different possibilities. For one, that
text has been converted to an image in IE. Try to left click, drag and
select the text...you can't because it has been converted to an image. This
suggests that since you are using Pub 2000, that you have overlapped that
text box with another design element. Try using the nudge tool to move the
text box so that it does not overlap anything, or turn on the snap to
function on under tools to help avoid overlaps. Pub 2000 shows a quick flash
of color when you overlap two elements. Run the design checker and it should
also show you the error.

Another possibility. I don't think you can apply just a border on the top of
a text box in a web publication in Pub 2000...or at least I have never been
able to. This may be why when you convert your page to html it does not
work.

Let me know if I am talking about the same thing you are.

Background? What you are probably thinking about is the advice given in this
group about not using the Master Page feature that is available in Pub 2003
and 2007. This feature is not available in Pub 2000. You can add a
background to your pages, but you won't be able to put a text box in the
background. Go to Format > Background to add a color, texture or an image in
the background. You will have to experiment, as some effects work better
than others. Gradients might be a challenge. Tell me why you think it will
make life easier...what are you trying to do?

I noticed that you have told people that your page is designed for IE, and I
assume that is because of the way the layout looks in other browsers. I
looked at your site in FF3.0 and the pages load ok, but the text spacing is
off. The reason for this is you have used special formatting such as
indents, columns or some such. You can get a Pub 2000 page to be more cross
browser compatible than the newer versions, and in fact that is part of the
reason I personally still use Pub 2000 for most of my work. If you put a
little effort in changing or tweaking your formatting, you can get your
pages to render well in FF, and thus in most other browsers. And given that
FF is now used by almost 40% of people, the effort would be worth it. Here
are some tips:

First of all, since you mentioned in your other post that you drag and drop
your web files using Windows Explorer, that also implies that you Save as a
Web page and direct your web files to your computer. If you have FF
installed, but IE is your default browser, then go to the index.html file
where you saved it on your computer, right click, and choose FF to open your
site. Now you can compare and see what you need to fix. If you don't have FF
installed yet, then I highly recommend that you do so. It is a relatively
small download as compared to IE, and as long as you opt out of making it
your default browser when you install it, it should not create any problems
for you.

Now, it appears that you are using some indents and such to layout your
text. Notice in FF, that your menu has lengthened and is overlapping the
text box below it. This is probably because of the way you have formatted
the text. Go to Format > Indents and Lists and make sure that you have
indent settings set at normal. Then click the Line spacing button. Make sure
that you have only 1 sp between the lines, and 0 pt before and after
paragraphs. See if that helps prevent the lengthening. If not, please
describe how you have formatted that text box, and I can tell you how to fix
it.

Are you using Columns or simple text boxes?

In the middle section I am fairly confident that you are using indents, and
that is what is creating the spacing problems. Bulleted lists, columns etc
are tough to use without creating this problem, but sometimes there is a
solution. First of all go to View > Show Special Characters. This will allow
you to see the spaces and more importantly the paragraph symbols at the end
of the lines where you have hit your enter key. Sometimes if you use a soft
return, a simple new line, you can get bulleted lists to work correctly. Go
to your middle column and backspace to get rid of the new paragraph symbol,
and instead of just hitting the enter key when you want to start a new line,
hold down the shift button as you hit the enter key. It will then show you
what looks like a left pointing arrow instead of the paragraph symbol. Do
this for all the indented lines and test in FF. Chances are you will get
the same spacing as in IE. You can also try this with your menu, and it
might fix that too.

This is all free advice, and you can forget it if you want, but you really
won't have to do much to change the formatting to get your pages to view
equally well in FF and IE. And if they look good in FF, then they will look
good in Apache, Opera and most other browsers, so in my opinion the effort
will be worth it. Let me know if you want more help in reformatting the
pages so they work in FF.

Good luck.

DavidF

 

[Don Schmidt]

No lines show up around the "Last updated..." when viewing your site.

This date can be automatically created if you wish.

In the text box type

Last updated:

followed by a space,

then select Insert, Date and time, select the format of choice and check the
"Update automatically box".
OK

 

[Elly]

David,

Thank you very much for your generously sharing your time and expertise, I
really appreciate your help.

I would really like it if I could place items, such as the navigation bars,
on the master/background, to save work when I make a change. However, I seem
to remember David Bartosik advising me not to do that. I could not find the
post to check.

I have put a top border on the ‘updated’ text box, in the same way I have
put a bottom border on the title text box (format- line/border style—more
styles). I think you are right though that it interferes with the space taken
by the images. I use ruler line/snap to and nudges, but I will try to move
them down to see if that helps.

The navigation bar has no special formatting, just ‘enter’ for a normal line
and right align. I wonder now if I tried the shift and enter idea, whether
that would do the trick.

I found out that indents have a will of their own. So, I use text boxes and
snap against ruler lines. Also, I don’t like too many bullet lists, hence my
using bold for the first words. All this does mean that it is hugely time
consuming to make even a minor design change and be consistent.

I have a new laptop and not downloaded ff yet, I will now and work on
sorting things for ff, as I agree with you that it is worth it. So, I would
be really grateful if you could advise on the problem with the navigation bar.

Here are the browser stats from Statcounter for my site, fyi, for nearly 500
visits:
Perc. Browser Name Version 230 47.33% IE 7.0
102 20.99% IE 6.0
90 18.52% Firefox 3.0
19 3.91% Safari 3.1
9 1.85% Firefox 2.0
8 1.65% Safari 3.2
5 1.03% Mozilla 1.9
4 0.82% BlackBerry 0
4 0.82% iPhone 0
4 0.82% Safari 3.0
3 0.62% Opera 9.5
2 0.41% Chrome 1.0
2 0.41% Mozilla 1.8
1 0.21% Nokia 0
1 0.21% Default Browser 0
1 0.21% AOL 7.0
1 0.21% AOL 6.0

Thank you again.

Elly

 

[DavidF]

Elly,

Sorry I was not more clear about the master/background. There is no Master
Page feature in Pub 2000, so you do not have the option of putting your
navbar on a master page, nor should you do this in Pub 2003+. It breaks the
page in FF and other browsers and does not give consistent results even in
IE. Having a means to use the Master Page where you can put the navbar on
each page is certainly a feature that would be handy, but right now it is
not cross browser compatible.

Nor can you put a navbar in the background using Pub 2000. If you add a page
to your site, you can opt to duplicate a page, which will copy the
navbar...and everything else on the page. If I add a link to a manually
built navbar such as yours, I copy the new navbar, go to old pages, select
the entire old navbar and paste without deleting the old navbar first. It
usually pastes in the correct spot on the page without needing to move it.
Of course if you have something below the navbar, it could overlap and you
would need to move that design element down to accommodate the longer
navbar.

Border...well son of a gun, you are right. I learned something today. I
tried off and on for a long time trying to get a border on just one side of
a text box, and had never been successful. I always got a border around the
whole text box when I tried. But today when I tried it again, I was able to
do it. I am guessing that I just didn't do the steps in the correct sequence
before. Thanks. That opens up some design/layouts that I have wanted to do,
but couldn't before.

I am still guessing the reason the border isn't showing up on your page has
to do with not enough space for the text box. Just give it a bit more
distance from the image above and the text box below and see if that fixes
it...or better yet, try the following first.

As per the formatting of the text and the extra spacing between lines, I am
now thinking it and probably even the problem with your border can be fixed
another way. Publisher 2000 has a different html coding engine than all the
newer versions, and my experience has been that it produces code that is
cleaner, more basic and is much more cross browser compatible. It also has
the capability of producing two different sets of code. Go to File > Web
properties. On that dialog you will see two Target Audience options. You are
using the one for IE4 or netscape 4 or higher. Select the more basic code
option of IE3 or netscape 3 or higher. Now Save as a web page and look at
your spacing in FF. When I do choose the IE4+, I get the extra spacing. When
I use the IE3+ I don't. I also use unicode (utf-8) in case that makes any
difference. I don't know how this will affect the rest of your layout, but I
get a more consistent layout in both browsers. David Bartosik had told me to
use the IE3 setting to fix some other problem I was having at the time,
which I cannot remember now...

Speaking of the new laptop, here is another tip. Right click your display >
properties > to open the display properties dialog. Settings > Advanced >
and make sure the dpi setting is set at 96 dpi vs. 120 dpi. Publisher
outputs at 96 and if you have your display set at 120, you will get a page
where all the images and the page width are 25% bigger in FF, and it will
throw off your layout.

As per the browser stats, the people that use FF won't stay on your site
because it renders poorly, and that is at least part of the reason you don't
have a higher percent. Check out this page...FF is up to 44.4%....and more
people are using Chrome than Opera now:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

DavidF

 

[Elly]

Don,

I may be mistaken, but this feature is not available in Pub. 2000, unless it
is done with an html code?

Elly

 

[Don Schmidt]

I use it on my sites and I'm a Publisher 2000 user.

 

[Elly]

David,

I am so pleased I have been able to help you too!

Now I understand why visitors have steadily been visiting fewer pages – they
can't (and neither can I) bare the jumble in ff - it looks dire. At work
(though not on my laptop), even the top navigation bar looks completely
smudged. The 'designed for i.e' box looks as if there are two of the same
overlapping. I have done a 'soft return' on all the entries in the nav bar –
on preview: no improvement, actually the spaces are probably even wider. I
feel quite hopeless about sorting it and maybe I should invest in Dreamweaver
or so. If something as simple as a box with a coloured background is not
working, then maybe it would be more fruitful to redo the whole thing and
learn something new along the way.

I could not find any reference to dpi.

Under view - go to background/foreground - is that not the same as a master?
Anyway - by the by if I can't use that anyway.

An hour later:
Solved the whole ff problem by setting to: for explorer 3 and above – would
you believe it!!! If you were here I would kiss you! Perhaps this was the
'minor' detail that DavidB had told you, but you had forgotten. ;-)

Further challenges - I now cannot access my ftp folder for some reason, two
day ago I could on my old laptop, now I can't on either. Despite a state of
the art laptop and state of the art wireless connection, it took 20 min to
download ff. Oh well, I have a few days off next week, so time to sort it all
out.

Elly

 

[DavidF]

Elly,

Good news...I think. I looked at your site and saw no difference in FireFox,
so I presume that you have not been able to upload your new code. More about
that later...

You can invest the time and money in Dreamweaver or perhaps the new MSFT
Expression Web, but plan on investing a lot of time. With Expression at
least, you will need to learn basic HTML coding and CSS...the learning curve
is pretty steep and long. And even with those programs you will have to sort
out what you can and cannot do. With that said, with either of those
programs or other web editors, you are not so limited with what you can do.
I think the question is whether you can accomplish the goals you have for
your site using Publisher. If what you want to do is beyond the scope of
Publisher, then yes, you should move to a program that is specifically
designed for web design. Thus far, I have been able to accomplish everything
I want to do with Publisher, but others will not. I would suggest that you
lurk and read the Web Expression newsgroup for a while to decide...and
perhaps a Dreamweaver group. Personally, I think that once you get your
layout sorted out, your site looks and works fine, and it is hard to beat
the convenience of using Publisher.

No, the options under Arrange in Publisher 2000 are really only applicable
to print documents. If you layer a text box over an image, or any two design
elements, they will merge into a .gif image that combines both elements, in
a web document. In 2003 and 2007, you can layer design elements without that
happening, plus you will find the Master Page option, which once again does
not work in a web...or at least not consistently. My hopes are that
eventually MSFT will make the master page work in a web. It would save some
work. Be careful about moving to Pub 2007 thinking that you will like it
better for web work, or even print documents. While it does have some more
features, it has some bugs that need to be worked out. If you do install it,
make sure to keep Pub 2000 as you will probably want to go back.

As I said, it sounds like you got the spacing issue worked out by changing
to the more basic coding option. It also sounds like you ran up against one
of the newest problems or "challenges" of using Publisher to produce your
website....not being able to use FTP uploading protocol as you did. I am
guessing that your new laptop is using Vista and IE7 versus XP and IE6, and
with that change you can no longer FTP in the same way. I will give you a
reference to read about how to use FTP uploading with Vista, but your best
solution is download and use FileZilla, a free dedicated ftp client. It
works much as you are used to with Windows Explorer, you will be able to
drag and drop files, and it won't take you that long to learn. First the
reference:

Prepare, publish, and maintain your Publisher Web site:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/publisher/HA100947601033.aspx
It is written for Pub 2007, but if you are using IE7 instead of IE6, then
the directions for using Vista would apply. FTP uploading has changed with
the introduction of IE7. Pay particular attention to the instructions for
FTP uploading in Vista. There is a + sign you should expand to read the
directions.

And your better choice: http://filezilla-project.org/ It also is not a
large file, so I hope it doesn't take too long to download. It is less than
4 megs. Also peruse this page:
http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/documentation/ to learn how to use it.

Good luck.

DavidF

 

[Elly]

David,

Filezilla did not help access to ftp in the end. Low connection speed was
part of the problem - I had exceeded limit of my contract with isp. So Vista
problem not solved, yet, but I have uploaded the site with my old laptop and
hey presto: all is working well and looking well - except the amazon widget
on the homepage, which did not come up in i.e. - hence my missing it and it
not looking right in ff.

I have done some more work, but hesitate uploading untill all is done,
otherwise contract becomes even more expensive (assuming that uploading was
part of the drain.)

I have looked at all the resources you sent me a link to - more to read later.

Thank you very much for your help!

Elly

 

[Elly]

Don,

I had scanned your posting when I was tired; I later looked at it again and
found how to do dat/time auatomatically - thank you so much for pointing that
out to me. It's so useful.

Elly

 

[DavidF]

Elly,

Thanks for posting back. The site looks fine in FF and the spacing issues
and border issue seem to be resolved.

As to Vista and FileZilla, I don't know what to tell you. If it isn't a
problem with your ISP, then it might be some problem with a Vista security
setting of some sort. Be sure to study the support documentation for
FileZilla and perhaps if necessary go to the FileZilla forum to get some
help with Vista: http://forum.filezilla-project.org/ I have not heard of
anyone else not getting FileZilla to work with Vista so it might be
something small.

Good luck.

DavidF