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Project Twenty-Eight allows you to continue learning about frames. We have seen how inline frames let you display content in ways that can come in handy sometimes. With real frames, a page can be divided into sections which can have their own content, scrollbars, etc. Used wisely, frames have certain advantages, especially when it comes to establishing a consistent look and feel as a user goes from section to section of a site. You need to realize, though, that not all browsers do a good job rendering frames, and some browsers do not render them at all. They can be overdone.
Guidelines: For this project, you will redesign, update, and in some cases,
completely rewrite your school newspaper site and put it in a frames interface.
The page header or logo will appear in one frame across the top, the navigational
section will occupy a frame on the side, and the various news stories you write
will be displayed in the main, central frame. Remember to make a file to fill that
main frame when the page first loads. It should have the beginnings of your news
stories on it with links to the rest of the stories as we have seen on the real
newspaper sites.
The specifics of the design are up to you, but this layout will require at least
three frames. Done this way, after the main page loads, the
navigational section and the page header will stay right where they are and the
content--the various sections and news stories--will change on the large part of
the page as readers click links to call them up. Either way, you will have to
edit your previous pages pretty radically to get them to conform to a frames layout.
You will also have to construct a fairly complex style sheet--or maybe more than
one--to take care of the design chores like setting colors, widths, etc.
NOTE: Many students' first efforts at a newspaper were pretty weak,
and many were plagiarized from the school Web site. Once again, if it's on
the school Web site, it doesn't need to be in the newspaper. Your job is
to find out what is going on at school and report about it in some detail.
You will probably need some help from the tutorial sites for this project. Most of the
ones you've been using all along have a section on setting up frames, so the help
is definitely there for you. Try these and see which you like best:
This
tutorial might help get the idea of what is involved with frames. Try these
others if that one doesn't suit you:
WebMonkey
HTML Goodies
Web Design Group
The choice is up to you. Just remember that one file (index.html) does nothing but
set up the appearance of the frames. Each frame, then, requires a separate file to
fill it; that is four files, just to start with.
It is not a good idea to change or add a bunch of new features all at once because
if your basic setup doesn't work, you won't know why. Be methodical about it and
you'll figure it out much more easily.
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