Packt Publishing published my second book, Microsoft Office Live Small Business: Beginner's Guide, today.
Part of Packt’s Beginner’s Guide Series, the book offers step-by-step instructions for building a small-business web site from scratch with Office Live Small Business. It emphasizes web design fundamentals and best practices along the way. It's packed with tips, tricks, and hacks for building an effective, user-friendly, easily findable, and highly usable web site in next-to-no-time.
The book's companion web site is at www.officeliveguide.com.
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.
A major item on my BlogEngine.Net wishlist has been the ability to customize the sidebar elements on a page-by-page basis. For example, I'd like to show the latest posts in the side bar, but not on the home page where the body of the page displays the posts anyway. Or I'd like to show the search box in the sidebar on all pages, but not on the search page which has it anyway in the body.
Extending the trend of thought, why not customize the sidebar on category pages? Wouldn't it be nice to fill the sidebar with information or links related to the category? And going a step even further, why not have the ability to customize the sidebar on any page or post as you can do with Drupal and Wordpress? More...
Packt Publishing will be publishing my second book, Microsoft Office Live Small Business: Beginner's Guide, in November 2009.
Part of Packt’s Beginner’s Guide Series, the book will offer step-by-step instructions for building a small-business web site with Office Live Small Business. It will emphasizes web design fundamentals and best practices along the way.
In the book, I'll build a web site from scratch. The site, www.officeliveguide.com, will also serve as the book's companion site.
Every popular web platform has concept of themes: something you can simply add to your web site and change its look-and-feel instantly. Themes usually contain hooks to style a web site's headers, footers, and navigation elements automatically. In addition, themes contain a style sheet that applies across the site as well as a specific styles for certain commonly-found pages or elements.
Although Office Live Small Business doesn't have a theming engine, it's possible to design themes for the platform using Advanced Design Features and tables in the Business Applications database. I've played around with the idea and it seems to work pretty well. I've even ported the popular NonZero theme (which I ported to BlogEngine.Net for this web site as well, incidentally) for my own OLSB web site at acxede.com. More...