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Want To Help Me Develop Themes For Office Live Small Business?

Posted by acxede on August 28, 2008
4 comments

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.

My web site's theme

Here's another theme I've worked on:

Another theme I've played with

I now propose to build a set of several themes and release them under MSPL for the community. Each theme would have:

Hooks to pick up header elements (Site name, slogan, etc) from Site Designer settings automatically
Hooks to pick up navigation items from Site Navigation automatically
Hooks to pick up footer text and footer links from Site Designer automatically
A custom design for web pages
A style sheet that applies across the whole site
Pre-designed FAQ and Contact Us pages

Now I'm basically a developer. I understand how the web works and how to write applications for it. I make a living off developing web applications and advising people on how to do it. However, I'm no CSS expert. I usually hire CSS experts to work on my projects. These folks, naturally, expect to be paid.

Since my proposed themes-for-OLSB project is strictly a not-for-profit activity, I don't really have a budget to pay these folks. Therefore, I'd like to find volunteers who'll give their time for fine tuning style-sheets or coming up with site design that I can turn into themes and release to the community.

If you're interested, please reply.

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