This is a known issue with Publisher 2007, any design elements that are ‘grouped’ together, which includes the Publisher wizard built navbars, do not render when you view the web page in some web browsers like IE8 . The
fix in general is to ungroup the elements. There is both a manual fix to these issues and a Service Patch that has been issued to fix it for Pub 2007.
A manual solution of fixing this issue:
After making and saving any changes to your Pub file, and prior to publishing your website, make a copy of your publication by doing a ‘File > Save As’ and in this copy go to each page > Edit > Select All > Arrange > Ungroup.
This will ungroup the Publisher built navbar and disconnect it from the wizard, and the navbars will render correctly in IE8. ‘Publish to the Web’ from this copy of your publication. When you want to make further changes in your web, go back to the original Publisher file, make the corrections there, save your changes, and again make a copy, ungroup the navbars and produce new web files for uploading. The advantage of this workflow is that you will not have to rebuild the navbar if you choose to add a page to the navbar. If you do not need to add a page or section to
your site, you can leave the navbar ungrouped and skip the step of saving a copy.
Tutorials for Creating Websites / Webpages using Ms. Publisher
There are a number of videos on youtube on using publisher for website design. Here are some of them:
Microsoft Discontinuing Web authoring in Publisher
Unfortunately Microsoft decided to abandon the web building functionality in Publisher and started deprecating it in Pub 2010 and went a step further in Pub 2013 and stripped out the option to insert an HTML code fragment.
Opening an old Publisher web file is now the way to ‘activate’ the web tab and most of the web authoring functionality, in Pub 2010 and 2013.
If you don’t have one of your old web files or web templates from a previous version of Publisher, then there is still one template available online (the last time I looked). Perhaps you could download it and share it with your students. It should ‘activate’ the web tab in Publisher 2016. Microsoft has made it a bit hard to find:
Go to File > New > and under Available Templates choose Online Templates > scroll down under More Templates to the More Categories folder > under the Business Category click the All Business Folder > you will see about ten
templates and at the bottom a link to More Office.com Templates (152) > scroll all the way to the bottom of those templates and you will see one website template called Web site (Tabs Design), download that template and
save to your hard drive. This template will activate the web tab and you can work with it as you did all web templates in Pub 2007 and older.
There’s another Publisher web file in the CD content ZIP at the bottom on this page.
With all this said the handwriting is on the wall. You and your students should be moving away from building your site with Publisher. As I said, as of Pub 2013 they stripped away the ability to insert an HTML code fragment which is an essential tool to build anything but the most basic site.
Please read through this article where I explored alternative web authoring software you could adopt and use.
