AcxedeFAQ uses the default styles of your web site to display questions and answers but you aren't stuck with those styles. The installation package adds a custom CSS file called AcxedeFAQCustom.css to your document gallery. It has three empty CSS classes as shown below:
.AcxedeFAQQuestionCustom { }
.AcxedeFAQAnswerCustom { }
.AcxedeFAQHRCustom { }
You can use these classes to add custom styling to the questions, answers and the horizontal rules that enclose the question links respectively.
Want to customize one or more colors in the colors scheme you've chosen for your Office Live Small Business web site? Try Acxede's ColorPalette.
ColorPalette lets you select replacement colors for each of the palette's seven colors and generates CSS that you can simply cut and paste in your web site's CSS editor.
AcxedeFAQ is a Office Live Small Business application that lets you customize the FAQ page on your web site. It lets you
- Add more than 10 questions to FAQ
- Change the order in which the qustions appear on the the web page
- Hide and show questions without having to get rid of them altogether
- Customize the styles on the Q & A, even though AcxedeFAQ automatically adopts the styles in the style/color/theme combination you've chosen for your web site.
Complete downloading, installation, and confiiguration instructions are here.
Don't want the hassles of monkeying around with Office Live Small Business's style sheet? Try Acxede's StyleBuilder.
StyleBuilder lets you select new attributes for a few common classes and generates CSS that you can simply cut and paste in your web site's CSS editor.
Presently, StyleBuilder generates styles for
- Customizing page background
- Customizing footer color
- Customizing footer links color
- Hiding Office Live Small Business Logo
- Reducing font size of the secondary navigation to match with that of the primary navigaion
You'll be able to customize many more styles in the coming days.
If you'd like to suggest CSS customizations to be included in StyleBuilder or have questions on StyleBuilder, please post a comment.
One of the characteristics of Office Live Small Business is that there no publishing involved while building your web site. Whatever you do on your site is instantly published and visible to the world. Now that's both good and bad. Good because it keeps things simple. Bad because your trials (and errors) are visible to everybody - there are times when you wish that you had an Under Construction page.
You can fix this problem, to an extent, by using Office Live Small Business's advanced design features. Here's the plan of action:
- Build a Site temporarily down for maintenance; please come back and visit us shortly or Under Construction page. Turn off navigation and footer for the page in the page's properties.
- Save this page as a template. Call it something like Site Down Page Template.
- Save your home page as a template. Call the template something like My Home Page Template.
- Whenever you want to bring your site down for maintenance, replace the home page of your site (default.aspx) with a new page that you create using Site Down Page Template.
- When you want to bring your site back online, replace the home page of your site with a new page that you create using My Home Page Template.
I said earlier that this scheme fixes the problem to an extent because it works only when people visit your home page. If someone has bookmarked and internal page, they will still be able to get to it. But this solution is sometimes better than no solution at all. And it comes in pretty handy when you want to make drastic changes to your web site and don't want people to visit your site while you're making them.
The other thing you've got to keep in mind is you need to update the My Home Page Template every time you make change to the home page.