Incorporating into an Existing Website
Incorporating into an Existing Website
Although the files created by RoboHelp look fine on their own, they don’t always look consistent with the rest of your site. You don’t necessarily want a user to click a link within your site and go to a frameset that looks inconsistent with other pages, lacks primary navigation, and so on. There are a few ways to easily modify the generated files so they fit within your existing site. First of all, you could modify the frameset page and increase the height of the top frame, and then add your logo and navigation within the frame. However, that might not always be the best solution, because it depends on how the rest of your site is built. For example, if your site is 600 pixels wide and centered, having a frameset that goes 100% of the page would look out of place.
The second option for incorporating the RoboHelp pages is using the <iframe> tag. The <iframe> tag creates an inline frame that lets you use any sort of existing header or footer that you’re already using throughout your site. You just need to add the RoboHelp generated pages in the middle. The best part is your site can be any width or layout, and RoboHelp integrates nicely. When using <iframe>, you just provide a width and height for the inline frame and the URL of the page to load.
Create a new file in your HTML editor and add the following code:
<html>
<head>
<title>{title goes here}</title>
</head>
<body>
<iframe src="{filename of the frameset page}" width="720" height="400"/>
</body>
</html>
Note: An easy way to find out the frameset page’s filename is to view the primary layout (or regenerate the layout if needed), and then copy the filename from the address bar.
Save the new file in the same folder as the generated files, and open it in a browser. You should now see that the RoboHelp files appear within a small frame. If you have a header or footer that you built in a language like ColdFusion, PHP, or ASP, you could use that as well and your site remains consistent throughout.
Conclusion
RoboHelp is a fantastic program that enables you to quickly and efficiently create a professional help system or online documentation. It organizes the information intuitively, and offers stylistic control over how that information is presented. This article just scratches the surface of what you can do with RoboHelp. There are many other interesting and efficient ways to use RoboHelp, so have fun exploring the software and discovering new ways to present your documentation!
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