Creating Web Sites with Publisher

Microsoft Publisher is designed for creating print publications, but as the Internet has become more popular, more people are using Publisher to create Web sites. Designing Web sites is not simple, even with FrontPage. FrontPage users have to understand how to use tables and other complex layout tools, and they must have a rudimentary understanding of the limitations imposed by HTML. If you're a Publisher expert, learning all the ins and outs of Web development just might not be worth it.

Microsoft realizes that many people are very comfortable with the easy page layout tools of Publisher and want to put content on the Web without learning the complexities of Web development. For those people, Publisher provides the ability to save a publication in HTML format. That ability, however, does not come without a price. As you will see in this chapter, HTML files generated by Publisher can carry a significant amount of code, and they might not always display the way you expect them to.

Publisher's Web site templates (shown in Figure 42.1) are quite simple compared to FrontPage's templates. Depending on which template you choose, Publisher will create one or more pages in your publication. As shown in Figure 42.2, Publisher provides an easy way to navigate between pages using the Page Sorter. By right-clicking a page in the Page Sorter, you can add a new page based off of that page or any other page template. Figure 42.2 also shows the Web Tools toolbar, where all the Web-specific tools are located.

Figure 42.1. Publisher's Web templates are not as complex as FrontPage's.

Figure 42.2. The Page Sorter makes navigating between Web pages in Publisher an easy task.

Now that you know that Publisher can help you create a Web site, you might be wondering whether you should use it to create your Web site. The answer to that question depends entirely on what your needs are. If you are designing a Web site from scratch, using Publisher is probably not your best option. You'd be better off starting out with FrontPage and sticking with FrontPage because it is designed for Web site design. However, if you simply want to make a desktop publishing project available on the Internet, Publisher can do a fairly good job at making that happen.