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.