The companion web site to my book, Microsoft Office Live Small Business, is now at http://beginnersguide.books.officelive.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.
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.
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