Style

This page contains the web pages "standards" for displaying our information.  It's important to maintain a consistent "look and feel".   Every page on this website, no matter how deep into the site a visitor may be, is going to affect their image of US SAILING and the sport of sailing.

In the past FrontPage and its ability to provide "themes" was used to control the look and feel of the site. As we move away from FrontPage it was necessary to develop a new way of maintaining the look and feel of the site. This is done by using ".asp" pages that are linked with a common "Navigation" page. You will not have to worry at all about things like the look and feel of the buttons,  or graphics in banners. The new template does all that for us. If you have a very large site with sub-sites you may need to ask for help in using the template and setting up the Navigation page. Usually the web master will assist in setting up new sections of the site. Simply turn in a request to webliaisons@ussailing.org

 Here are some key points to keep in mind.

• Layout

  As this page demonstrates, every page in the website has a standard style for the top, left, and bottom borders.  These are all managed by the "theme" contained in the template.

  All you as the mini-webmaster need to worry about is managing the overall tree structure and the "central" content area of a page.  Our professional webmaster will define, maintain, and apply the central "theme"

  
  

• Use of standard fonts and headings

  Try to stick to using the standard "styles" that are shown in the drop-down font box on the toolbar of FrontPage.  Then the overall webmaster can manage an overall look by modifying the "theme" at a global level.

  Avoid setting specific fonts, funky colors, blinking stuff... it tends to drive visitors nuts after a while, and it will make it more difficult for the webmaster to apply the site-wide theme.

  If you have imported content from Microsoft Word or Excel and it has brought its own fonts (and you don't like those fonts) you can "revert" to the theme's standard fonts by opening the page in FrontPage, selecting the text (or Ctrl-A to "select all") and then selecting from the menu:  Format | Remove Formatting.  That will "clobber" the pre-existing format and return the selected text to the theme defaults (this is a real useful feature)

  
  

• Use of images

  As they always say: a picture is worth a thousand words.  But as you probably already know, too many images and large complex images slow down the display of a web page substantially.   Don't avoid images, but use them sensibly and try to remember the following suggestions:
  

  • Try to keep the file size of the image under about 50K.  You can always make small "thumbnail" of the picture and set up a link around the image to the full size picture. 
     
• Site structure: "5 plus/minus 2" rule

  For overall tree structure, experts recommend a tree where you have between 3 and 7 branches at each level.  This is not necessarily a hard and fast rule, but we think you'll find that it provides a decent guideline for organizing your pages.  With FrontPage you can move the pages around so quickly it's real easy to explore different organizations to see what works best.