For the last month or so, the e-mails that Office Live Small Business generates whenever someone fills out a Contact Us form have the following (or similar) tip at the bottom:
You can automatically save incoming messages and customer contact information by activating your Contact Manager. Activate today: http://home.officelive.com/settings/pages/inprogress.aspx?pkey=BCM&ctag=PrivateSite&purl=%23root%23%2FWebBCM%2Fdefault.aspx&pguid=Home.BCM.
Sincerely,
Your Microsoft Office Live Small Business Team
Granted, it's helpful. But the problem is that whenever I reply to that message, it confuses the hell out of the person reading the reply because he thinks His Microsoft Office Live Small Business Team was somehow involved in this exchange.
I'd be grateful if Office Live Small Business stops appending these tips.
It doesn’t appear that Googlebot (or other spiders, for that matter) index content inside an HTML module. I’ve always wondered about this, so I decided to test it with my site designerwebsites.org. Here's what I did:
- First, I typed site:designerwebsites.org in Google. That returned 11 pages – all pages on the site.
- Next, I searched within results for Building Web Sites with Office Live, which is the heading of the home page. I got back 7 results. The heading is in Zone 1. So it appeared in bold as the first of 7 results. The remaining 6 entries appeared because the search phrase happens to be in the tiles of those pages. So far so good.
- Then I searched withing results for AcxedeWidget, which is a phrase on the home page but, unlike the heading, is inside an HTML module. Google returned nothing!
I tried this exercise with several other sites, pages, and search phrases. Same result.
Moral of the story? Search engines can’t (or don’t) index content within Office Live Small Business’s HTML modules.
So much for making your pages prettier with HTML!
Save as template is a great new advanced desing feature in the latest release of Office Live Small Business. We've been asking for templates for a long time and finally Microsoft obliged. Without a doubt, it's a great first step.
The problem, however, is that the templates aren't much use. Wait! Before you send me hate mail, hear me out.
The biggest reason that templates don't measure up is that you can't reapply templates. Let me explain. Let's say you painstakingly bulild a web page and save it as a template called My Page Template. Then you go ahead and create 20 web pages using My Page Template. You're proud of your creation and pause for a moment to admire it in your browser. OOPS! you notice that you missed a minor detail. No problem, right? All you need to do is go fix your template and all your pages would reflect the change.
But there's a tiny little problem with your scheme - you can't alter templates. The Template Gallery is merely a place where you can change a template's properties or delete it altogehter. But there's no way to edit a template and reapply it. At least not that I can see. In other words, you've got to open each of your 20 pages and fix your goof-up manually.
This greatly diminishes the utility of a template. Of course, it's better than nothing, but not the feature I'd hoped it would be.
Office Live Basics supports only two levels. You can add "1st level" pages under the "root" level. You can also add "2nd level" pages under "1st level" pages. But that is as far as you can go. You can't make the navigation hierarchy any deeper. If you have "Essentials", you can add more levels with FrontPage 2003, but if you are a "Basics" user, you are out of luck.
In other words, you can only have a menu heirarchy as in
Products
Hardware
But if you want to add pages under Hardware as in
Products
Hardware
Motherboards
Memory
you can't.
With just two levels, you can only build simplistic sites. Naturally, I am adding the issue to my wishlist.
If you want to to select a page for editing in Office Live Basics, you have to click on a little control in the menu bar just above the Page Editor tab. This control displays page titles. So does the Page Manager. It is not uncommon to have multiple pages on your site with the same page title. The problem, then, is that it is difficult to find the page you want to edit. You have to click on the page titles one by one until you find the one you are looking for.
It would be great if the Page Editor's dropdown control showed page names instead. The Page Manager should display both the page name and the page title.
Another item for my wishlist.