December 2002

By Katherine Nolan

Applies to
Microsoft Office FrontPage® 2003
Microsoft FrontPage® 2002

Every day, we are bombarded by advertisements in print, on TV, and on the Internet. Many are slick, professional, and beautifully produced, but it is increasingly difficult to make any message stand out from the crowd.

A sales representative's loose-leaf folder or a speaker's static slides will never match the impact of a vivid multimedia presentation. A CD-based presentation allows you to combine information with sound, video, and large graphics in a coherent manner. It will inform your audience, enhance your image, and sell your message.

This article focuses primarily on using the Microsoft FrontPage Web site creation and management tool to create presentations that will run on your computer—anything from demonstrations for a single client to presentations looping at a trade show to large-screen presentations for a conference. With a little thought and careful preparation, your message can be the one that customers notice.

What you need to know first

There are some important differences between creating sites for a CD-based presentation and for the Web.

Organizing and naming files

On a standard Web site, users browse using the navigation that you provide. However, on occasion you or other users may choose to go directly to a page on a CD-based Web site using Microsoft Windows® Explorer rather than with a browser. Making it easy to find files means careful organization of content into folders with meaningful names. It improves usability if the only files in your root directory are an Index.htm file and any files required for the functioning of the CD, such as Autorun.inf (see Step 8 below).

To ensure cross-platform readability, your files should be named according to the ISO 9660 standard. This requires you to use an 8.3 file name format (file name with eight or fewer characters plus a three-character file extension). Thus Ourproducts.html is too long; use Products.htm instead. FrontPage uses the .htm extension by default and allows you to change the names of files easily, so you just need to concentrate on thinking up meaningful file names of no more than eight characters.

This is not the Web!

Your computer is not a server so you need to avoid anything that requires FrontPage Server Extensions from Microsoft. You can quickly reconfigure FrontPage to prevent use of these.

To make options unavailable that require FrontPage Server Extensions in FrontPage 2002

1. On the Tools menu, click Page Options, and then click the Compatibility tab.
2. Clear the Enabled with Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions check box.

To make options unavailable that require FrontPage Server Extensions in FrontPage 2003

1. On the Tools menu, click Page Options, and then click the Authoring tab.
2. In the FrontPage and SharePoint technologies list, click None.

The result will be that options that require extensions no longer will be available.

You also cannot use PHP, Perl, or other scripting that requires server support. Because you may not have Internet access while running your presentation, it is important that all URLs are relative (for example, /images/image.jpg) rather than absolute (for example, http://www.example.com/images/image.jpg). This is not a big issue if you are creating your presentation from scratch, because FrontPage automatically uses relative links.

Nine steps to a great CD presentation

The following steps will help you create a great CD presentation.

1. Define a purpose and stick to it

What do you want people to learn, do, or remember as a result of your presentation? The answer should be simple and clear. Write it down in large letters and pin it up so that you can see it constantly as you work. If you are tempted to add anything just because you can, ask yourself if it is contributing to this purpose.

2. Research your audience

The audience for a CD presentation should be more clearly defined than the audience for a Web site. Use this knowledge in the design decisions that you make later.

3. Organize your content

With a CD, you are free of bandwidth constraints so plan to use audio, video, Flash files, animated graphics, or text animation effects where these will complement your message. Write a script, record voiceovers, gather video, edit copy, and research the source of any images you need.

When building the site structure later, you need to be clear on the various content types that you have to integrate and what each requires. It is very useful to create a detailed flow chart of the pages in your presentation, with notes about the content that will appear on each, and pin this flowchart where it will be visible as you work.

Also remember to sort out any copyright issues at an early stage.

4. Design a template

When designing a template for your CD, you may not need to allocate space to all those things that are essential on every page on the Web site, such as navigation bars and contact and copyright information. However, you do need to create a structure that can accommodate different types of content without varying too much.

When presenting and placing content on a page, remember that there are a number of useful FrontPage components that will work without server extensions. Use marquees, Dynamic HTML (DHTML) effects, or the FrontPage Banner Ad Manager to create slide shows where these will enhance the delivery of your message or the construction of your presentation. Throw your bucket at your template—add place markers in it for anything and everything you may need. You can delete the ones that you don't need as you create individual pages, but doing this will ensure that your structure is adaptable.

5. Create a structure

Create and name all the folders that you will need to contain your content. Use your template to create an Index.htm file in each folder, give the file a meaningful title in the header, and drag it into position in Navigation view to create a visual representation of how the presentation is constructed. Refer to your flowchart. As each additional page is created later, add it to Navigation view in the correct position.

One other page that you should create now is a site map page to act as a map of your Web site. With a link to this page on your template, the speaker can escape the structured flow of pages at any time.

6. Bring it together

Use the template to create each new page, remembering as you do to use the 8.3 naming convention, to give each page a relevant title, and to drag each to its position in the presentation flow in Navigation view.

Think about how the pages will be navigated. In most cases, you need only Next and Back links on each page. By placing your pages in Navigation view, you can add a FrontPage Navigation bar with Next and Back links to your template. Then you are free to reorganize your presentation later by dragging pages to a new location and allowing FrontPage to update the links.

Some presentations, such as those intended to run unattended at a trade show exhibit, need to run continuously without any intervention. In that case, you can dispense with the navigation altogether and add an auto-refresh metatag to the pages. The metatag <meta http-equiv=REFRESH CONTENT="30; URL=nextpage.htm> will move the user to nextpage.htm after 30 seconds. By refreshing the last page in the presentation to the first page, you can create a continuous loop.

7. Practice and test

It is easy to become too close to a project. The content and its organization may seem clear to you, the images relevant, the diagrams unambiguous, and the timing precise. But remember the adage "only a fool edits himself." You are the worst person to test your work.

If you are creating this presentation to accompany a speaker, this is the time to take a good look at the speaker's notes and ensure that the onscreen material is following a similar logic.

Have several people look at the presentation to provide feedback. If it is to be delivered as a sales demonstration or as part of a conference presentation, practice the delivery in front of an audience—even if it is only your dog! Make sure that the timing is right, the flow is smooth, and your message is crystal clear. For CDs that will run unattended, ensure that the pages do not move too quickly for the content to be appreciated or so slowly that people become bored.

8. Get ready to burn your CD

Before you burn the presentation onto a CD, you must publish it from its current location to your burn directory. The procedure is identical to publishing to a Web server; instead of typing a Web address to publish to, just browse to the burn directory.

While you can run a CD by simply browsing to the Index.htm file in the root directory in Windows Explorer, you may wish to configure your CD so that it runs automatically. Adding an Autorun.inf file to the root directory will allow this. You can create the file in Notepad. It is no more than a text file containing, at its simplest, the following:

[autorun]

open=start index.htm

Microsoft Windows NT®, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows 2000, and Windows XP will automatically run CDs that contain this file when they are inserted into the computer. In the case of Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP, the user will need to have administrator-level permission for the CD to run automatically.

It is good practice to add a Readme.txt file to the root directory at this point. This file should contain instructions for running the CD and any other information that the user may require.

9. Scan for viruses and burn your CD

All that remains is to run a virus scan on the burn directory and then use your CD authoring software to move the contents of the burn directory to a CD.

You are done!

FrontPage makes CD presentations as easy to create as an ordinary Web site, so it is surprising how few small businesses think to add this extra ingredient to their marketing mix. CDs are now a relatively inexpensive item and many people have access to a CD rewriter, so what are you waiting for? Get going and make a presentation that will wow your audience!

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Katherine Nolan, owner of the Ireland-based Web development company, InKK Design.

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