FrontPage Themes

FrontPage Themes consist of unified design elements and color schemes for bullets, fonts, images, navigation bars, and other website components. A FrontPage theme gives the pages and navigational bars in your web an attractive and consistent appearance.

One of the best places to start looking for FrontPage themes is DPA Software, aka FrontLook. They have several award-winning package deals on themes, as well as the Super Themes Browser -- a powerful FrontPage add-in that lets you apply themes to an existing site.

In addition to their Super Themes Packages, FrontLook has many 'design effects' products available. These allow you to create cool effects, such as splash pages, mouse cursor effects, scrollers, slideshows, and all manner of cool image effects for FrontPage. So if you're looking to make your web site more interesting, the design effects products are worth looking into. Themes differ from Frontpage Templates in how they are used on the site, but the designs you can get with a theme or a template are pretty much the same.

General Price Range: Each Super Themes package starts at only $39.95 and comes with 4 designs in different color schemes.

FrontPage 2000 / 2002 Compatible; some variations are compatible with version 2002 only

Additional Products: Developer Tools, Customization Programs, Easy-to-use Program Effects Applets

Cautions About Using Free Themes / Shareware

One danger of using free themes is that they might include shareware or other hidden items when you download them. Since they are freely offered, usually in a zip format, people might download them and extract hidden trojans and viruses onto their computer without knowing.

Here are some sites about using shareware or downloading files from the Web, such as free FrontPage themes:

• Computers & Shareware - Information on using computers, the Internet, and shareware.
• Educational Sites - List of educational websites with links about shareware.
• Robban's List - Info on JavaScript, VRML, and using shareware.
• Computer Privacy - Protecting your privacy while using computers & the Internet.
• Using Shareware - Big list of shareware / FTP sites and how to evaluate them.

Examples of Pages Using Themes:

My business partner and I both use themes for our personal websites. Here is a link to our sites, the theme we use, and where we got them:

• Jon Norwood - Uses the "Polished" theme from ElegantThemes.com.
• Richard Thomason - Uses the "Fresh News" theme from Woothemes.com.