When Office Live transitioned to Office Live Small Business, it stopped offering free domain names to new subscribers but continued to pay the registration fees of domains that were already registered when the service was free. The free ride is over.
I got an e-mail from OLSB about the change in their domain name policy stating that domains won't be renewed for free as of October 1 2009. So be prepared to cough up $14.95 per year going forward.
Once you reconcile to the fact that you'll be paying for your domain registration, the $14.95 deal isn't all that bad becuase the price tag includes private registration.
Simon Witkiss wrote saying that Office Live's Site Navigation Links show an underline inconsistently when you hover over them. If you've already visited the link, you don't see the underline, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Visited links don't show an underline
On the other hand, if you've never visted the site, the underline is displayed, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Links not already visited show an underline
While it's not a showstopper, it's certainly an irritant. Simon posted a fix in a comment, but here it is again as an official tip, with accompanying figures. Add the following style to your style sheet:
.MSC_PrimaryNavLink:visited:hover
{
color:#ffffff;
font-size:12px;
text-decoration:underline;
}
Thanks, Simon!
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.
Building a new web site with Office Live Small Business? Follow these tips to make it friendly to search engines:
-
Use Office Live's Built-in Site Name and Site Slogan instead of creating images for them. When you do so, Office Live renders them as <h3> and <h5> tags, which search engines attach importance to. If you use the custom header module, Office Live makes the values of these fields available in the xsl style sheets. Use those values if you can. If you can't (or don't want to) add your own <h3> and <h5> tags.
More...
The power of Office Live Small Business's advanced design features lies in the access they provide to the underlying data. Most people use the Custom header, Custom Footer and Custom Navigation modules to simply add static html. While that may serve the purpose, it involves a lot of work because you have to maintain all the links in your header, footer, and navigation manually. And God forbid, if you decide to change the site design, you'll have a major project on your hands.
By making use of the XSL style sheets that these modules offer, you can use the links and navigation you've set up in Office Live's site designer. Here's an example: I wanted to make a small web site for my company. I wanted it to look like Acxede.Net, but I didn't want to write all the code. So I created a template using the Custom Naviagation and Custom Footer modules. (I didn't need the Custom Header module because my header and navigation are lumped together in the Custom Navigation module). Then I adapted Acxede.Net's stylesheet and applied to my Office Live site. That's it. I didn't have to code the links manually. The modules picked up the navigation and footer settings from the Site Designer. Here's the result
www.acxede.com: go there.
As you can see, it looks just like Acxede.Net. By the way I didn't have to write any html or javascript for selecting the correct tab, highlighting it, etc. Office Live's built-in events and my stylesheets took care of it.