Creating a Multimedia Website

How to Use Site Templates in WebPlus

The following instructions will take you through how to open up a site template in Serif WebPlus. It will demonstrate the role of the page master, and how to make changes to the text and colour schemes that will affect every page in the site.

1. Open Serif WebPlus and select Use Design Template from the starting screen

2. Choose Natural from the gallery of available templates (or another if you wish) and click open. Select which pages you want to use from the sidebar.


3. Take a look at the layout of the page. The panel on the right hand side shows the different pages in the site. Double click on any page to view it in the main workspace

4. Click on Edit and Page Properties to see the properties for the current page. Change the page name and click on OK. Observe the effect this has on the navigation bar.


5. From the Site tab, double click on the page master to see all the common elements for every page. You can set up different site masters for different sections of the website. This website only uses one master for the entire site.

6. With the page master open, click on different elements – such as the page title, and change them. You should be able to edit text quite simply. Look at the other pages in the site and see how this change is copied across to all pages.

7. Reopen the Page master. Click the colour scheme designer button or click on Tools then Colour Scheme Designer to examine the colour scheme for the website.

Make changes to the colour scheme and then view the pages and see what effect this has. These changes will be copied across to every page in the site.

8. Open the page master and from the Text menu select Text Style Palette.
From this palette you can modify the styles of each different type of text on the site – from headings, footers, body text and bullet points.
Select a Paragraph Styles, Normal and then Body. Then click on Modify to change it. /
To change the text formatting for the selected style, click on Character and then Font.
It is then possible to set colours, font style, and any decoration such as underlining, bold or italics.
Make some changes to the body text – for example you could change the font to comic sans and change the colour to red.
Then click OK and then Apply. You might wish to undo this change afterwards! /
Once the styles are set up, it is a simple matter to change the style of a piece of text within a page by highlighting the text you wish to change and choosing a new style from the drop down menu.
The advantage of using the text style palette is that if your client decides that they would prefer a different font or colour for the text, you can make the change in the Style Palette and every piece of text that is flagged as body text will be changed instantly. This is much better than changing each page by hand.

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