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Office Live Small Business Web Designer Changes and Update

June 11, 2009

The Recent Office Live Update:

A few changes have occurred with the Office Live Samll Business site and page designer as of the date in the upper right corner.

 

Design Options:

A few new themes have been added for the header area. i.e. Scenic, Nature, Wildlife, etc.

 

New color sets have been added as well. While these color schemes are handy to use they often result in a less than desirable color scheme for your site and can be a rather overwhelming presentation for you viewer. The option exists in the color selector in the Site Designer to alter these color sets. Editing the color scheme to include less color and toning down the generic color sets is a good idea.

 

Header Customization:

The Logo selector is now contained in the tab "Logo" in the Header Selection in Site Designer. Be prepared to wait for the Header dialog box to load if you have a lot of images stored in the Image Gallery as that is now a part of the header options.

 

A few Styles have been added in the Style selector in Site Designer. A text only style is now available. (3rd up from the bottom) Header text is still not able to be manipulated in a way that can make it very attractive which leads to creating the entire header in a graphics program including the text to get the effect you may desire.

 

Video:

A Video Module has been included in the Page Designer. Simple to use and straightforward. Any video embed code can be used. I tested it with a Vimeo embed code and all worked fine.

 

Zone Format:

Zones can now be formatted with images and color fills including gradients. Borders for Zones can be included as well.

 

Site / Page Width:

A third and new option for site width is 980 as opposed to the previous two options of 780 and 100%. This is a handy change for those who are not using CSS to make overall site changes.

 

Domain Manager Changes:

This element of OLSB has always been confusing for customers. Haven't tested this yet but it does seem more straightforward. More on this later.

 

Customer Support:

Phone support will no longer be available. Email and Community support will still be there. As far as community support goes Microsoft is the beneficiary of some fine users who often have a greater degree of knowledge about the product than the Community MS employees. No disrespect intended but the OL users "use" the product and know its quirks. They often answer questions on the Community site.

 

Note: If we discover more changes we will post here. If problems and workarounds occur those will be posted as well.

 

Best, The Folks at Artotems Co.

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A Final Word - Excerpt from Louise Rasho's Blog post about the updates.

 

"For more than a year now, we've been running a promotional offer on domain name registration that provides the first year for free. Starting today, that promotional offer is no longer available on new domain name purchases. Instead, domain name registration will be offered at the current annual price of $14.95 per year (that's only $1.25 per month)."

 

"The domain name purchase still includes free private registration, to protect your identity in the public domain name registry, and 100 free email accounts with 5GB of storage. And you still get an awful lot for free when you sign up for Office Live Small Business, including:

  • Free Web hosting for your Web site
  • Free, easy-to-use Web Site design tools
  • Free Web Site reports
  • 5GB of free online document storage and sharing
  • A free fourth-level domain