Page Editor's HTML module is indeed a good way to work around some of the limitations that Office Live Small Business imposes upon you. Nevertheless, what you must remember is that doing so is really a cluge. You should use html, but within limits. If you attempt to design an entire page with ForntPage and try to paste it in an HTML module, you are likely to be disappointed. At best, it may not show up on the page. At worst, it may mess up your page for good.
Here are a few tips about what kind of HTML you SHOULDN'T paste in HTML modules:
- Don't paste any HTML that contains a form. A regular HTML page can contain as many forms as you fancy. Not Office Live's web pages. An Office Live web page has a built-in form. If submits to itself.That is the ONLY form an OLB page will process. If you try to add additional forms, they will be ignored.
- You can't paste any html/javascript that tries to manipulate properties of the document object. The visual properties of the document object are controlled by a site-wide style sheet. Changing them with javascript will have no effet, because the css styles override whatever change you code.
- You can't paste html/javascript that needs to pasted in the <head> tag. By default, you can only manipulate the header information through the site designer. You can't paste code ot HTML there.
- Although ASPX pages can contain server-side code, Office Live will throw an error if you try to bring such a page up in the browser.
Using HTML is not a mindless task. Beyond the simplest code, you must have a clear understanding of how the Request/Response process works, how html is generated from an aspx page, and how aspx pages are processed (the processing is different from plain HTML pages). You must also have a clear understanding of HTML and javascript concepts.
If you insist on copying HTML or code from somewhere and pasting it into an HTML module without understanding it, you'll only make matters worse.
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.
I've been testing Office Live Workspace Beta for the last couple of days. My verdict? Office Live Workspace is terrific!
Now that may echo what you've read on other posts on the Web in the last couple of days. But then, I'll venture to say that many people don't really get what Office Live Workspace is all about. Really.
One post I read said something to the tune of Office Live Workspace, the long awaited online version of Microsoft Office.... Stop right there. Workspace is NOT an online version of Microsoft Office. The post's author lamented that you still needed to have Microsoft Office on your desktop. All I can say is read the specs before signing up for the service.
Another post said something like But it doesn't come anywhere near Google's apps..... Again, don't go any further. Workspaces, or Office Live Small Business for that matter, is NOT an online office suite and therefore the often-made comparison with Google Docs and Spreadsheets is essentially meaningless. Comparing Workspace's features with Google Docs and Spreadsheets is as silly as comparing Google Docs and Spreadsheets with Word and Excel. Try writing a book with Google Docs, if you don’t believe me.
(Frankly, the only online word processor that comes anywhere close to Word is Adobe's Buzzword. Of course, you can’t really do an apples-to-apples comparison; Word and Buzzword server entirely different purposes. Still, give Buzzword a shot if you haven't yet. It's nothing short of stunning. It redefines what you can expect from online applications. Its flash-based interface is vastly superior to Google Docs' dinky HTML/CSS based interface.)
Before you start sending me hate-mail, let me clarify that I'm not anti-Google. In fact, I like Docs and Spreadsheets. They are great little tools for quickly jotting down thoughts or figures and I use them often. Rather, my point is that you can't really compare them to Office Live Workspaces as so many people seem to be doing.
So what exactly is Office Live Workspace? It's difficult to summarize what it does in one sentence. If you haven't used SharePoint or have no clue as to what it is, you can think of Office Live as an online database and document repository. The database allows you to create custom lists, which basically are Access-like tables. The document repository is only a storage space for documents. At present, only Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents are supported. A word processor or a spreadsheet to manipulate those documents is NOT built-in.
If you've used SharePoint, you'll have an easier time understanding Workspaces. You can think of Workspace as a custom, lightweight version of SharePoint services. You can create Document or Meeting Workspaces and share them with anyone who has a Windows Live ID. Your workspaces can contain lists or documents. There are three built-in, or pre-provisioned, lists : Task List, Contact List, and Event List. Then there is the generic List. You can customize all lists by adding and manipulating columns just as you can in SharePoint. The Contact List can integrate with Outlook contacts on your desktop. Workspaces has built-in workspace templates for a job search, planning a trip, household to-dos etc. Templates are simply a group of related documents and lists created as a unit. They are customized versions of SharePoint's Meeting and Document Workspaces.
The other SharePoint-based feature of Workspaces is document management. You can store Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents in document repositories. As with SharePoint, you can store several versions a document. And again, like SharePoint, you need Word, Excel, or PowerPoint on your desktop to edit those documents.
Workspaces also has a Wordpad-like basic word processor, Notes. It CAN'T edit Word documents and it's not meant to. Notes is simply for jotting down quick notes without having to fire up a word processor. As a matter of fact, I'm writing this post in Notes. If you want to compare anything in Workspaces to Google Docs, it's Notes. It's an online word processor like Google Docs.
One nice feature or Workspace that you won't find in SharePoint is sharing your screen. You can invite upto 15 people with Windows Live IDs to view you screen along with you using Microsoft SharedView Beta, which is free at least for now.
If you've used Office Live Essentials or Office Live Premium, you'll find Office Live Workspaces very intuitive. It's very similar to the workspaces in those premium versions of Office Live Small Business. Come to think of it, my Office Live Basics account, together with Office Live Workspaces looks a lot like Office Live Essentials. But it's FREE and I like it!
Want to know how your web pages look in different browsers on various operating systems? Try browsershots.org.
When you go to the site, you'll see the page shown below:
Enter the address of a web page on your site, usually the home page, and then select the browsers and/or operating systems you want to view your web pages on. Submit the page.
Your request goes into a queue and you can see the estimated wait in the queue. It's a good idea to go back the next day. Go back to the site and click the Search link. Enter the web page address and click Go. Your site will appear in the results as shown below:
Click on the url and you should see the page like the one shown below.
It will have thumbnails of your pages in the browser/OS combinations you requested. You can click each thumbnail to view the results online or click the link alongside to download all images in one shot.
Remember that your screenshots aren't stored for ever. As the figure above shows, I didn't go back for 4 days and 12 of my images were scrapped.
If you've fiddled around too much with your site - added JavaScript, html modules, and what not - you'll probably find that it won't look good in many browsers!