MS Publisher colour schemes

[Coldicote]

I use MS Publisher in many ways, including making websites, but have never understood the use of its so called colour schemes - look under Format. It's easy enough to choose your own background and change text colours. My problem is getting the right text colours for hyperlinks and 'followed' hyperlinks to suit a chosen background. There is a custom option but this never seems to give the expected result. Has anyone else had this problem and how do you deal with it please? What use are the colour schemes anyway?

[Lil O'lady]

I must admit I use publisher least of all, but I agree with your point abour colour schemes - it's similar to the various design options in powerpoint, which are SO identifiable (oh look 'Dad's Tie' again). This seems just to be a Microsoft idiosyncracy - you also get loads of yucky website templates if you use Frontpage (don't, if you have not yet).
I am interested to hear that you are using publisher successfully to produce websites - in my experience although this works technically, it results in over-large file sizes. Also, using all Microsoft products seems to quite quickly come up against the llimits of their design and your point about controlling the colour of hyperlinks is typical. I don't know a way round it, but if you eriously want to make good / even better websites you possibly need to start considering the industry standard, Dreamweaver, or a product such as Joomla - in other words, a software that is designed for making html websites.
You will find this far more satisfactory once you have got the basics.

[VHG]

The problem with using Microsoft products to create web sites is the awful HTML they generate.

Microsoft generate enough HTML so that if you want to convert the HTML back to Word or Publisher then there is enough HTML there to do that.

But that is FAR more HTML than you actually need to show it on a web site, resulting in bloated, slow loading web sites.

Just to prove the point, go into Word or Publisher, type one line of text, then save it as HTML, you will find it has generated about 200 lines of HTML.

[Coldicote]

Thank you Lil O'Lady. There is consolation in knowing that it's the software and not just me! I did in fact try Front Page (the Millenium 2000 edition) but abandoned it and went back to Publisher which I felt better able to use, despite its drawbacks. I've been told previously to try a 'real' website publisher, so thank for your suggestion about Dreamweaver - I'll have a look.

You mentioned over-large file sizes with Publisher. One of my interests is Neighbourhood Watch and a file I created for this is 2.24MB which doesn't seem too bad to me. If you'd like to have a look it can be seen at http://www.skeef.freeserve.co.uk/ringmerwatch/
Thanks for your interest.

[Coldicote]

Interesting point VHG. You mention converting the HTML back into Word or Publisher. I've never actually done that. I start by creating an 'editable' file in Publisher and save that so it can be re-opened and altered as needed. Then I create a new folder on the desktop and click on 'Publish to the web' which converts the edited file into html in the new folder (named the same as the previous one) and drag it up to the FTP client. Thanks for making this an interesting discussion,

[ChuckFickens]

2.24MB is huge for a fairly basic web page with only a couple of low quality images in it

[Lil O'lady]

Woa back chuck! I think the 2 mb is the whole site, which is not bad going under the circumstances. However, I would expect pages of this type to be much smaller in file size if created in a 'proper' web program.
It is becoming an academic argument as domestic broadband is so widespread, but back in the days of dial-up it would have been an issue as it would have opened quite slowly for users.

[ChuckFickens]

LOL, yes it must be the whole site, the page 127K

Which is surprisingly small for a publisher page. Though as you quite rightly say page size is not as important as it used to be, but it pains me that people use the excuse of everyone having broadband to write bloated sites (very much like MS use the excuse of faster and faster computers to write bloated OS's)

[Coldicote]

I guess I could do better, but that's true of many things in life. Thanks everyone and I'll sign off now.