Book Image

Microsoft Office Live Small Business: Beginner's Guide

By : Rahul Pitre
Book Image

Microsoft Office Live Small Business: Beginner's Guide

By: Rahul Pitre

Overview of this book

Microsoft Office Live Small Business is an internet service that helps small businesses create web sites, and promote and market themselves. And you don't need to buy or install any new software to use it. All you need is a web browser. Office Live Small Business's WYSIWYG, browser-based tools make developing a web site a breeze. But you can't build good web sites with great tools alone; you also need a basic understanding of web design fundamentals. This book will walk you through Office Live Small Business's fundamentals, and then show you how to use its design tools effectively. While you may not become a professional web designer just by reading this book, you'll certainly be able to build a web site for your small business that will make your competitors envious and your friends jealous. This book is all you need for getting started and developing your web presence with Microsoft Office Live Small Business. From setting up and running Small Business for the first time to creatively using its tools, this book delivers everything you need to know. Microsoft Office Live Small Business is controlled from the browser, so all you require is an internet connection, and this book, to get rolling. Over the course of 10 chapters, and five appendices, this book will teach you to create effective content, organize it efficiently, and present it aesthetically. It also covers fine tuning, optimizing your site to be SEO friendly, and how to use the Reports that Office Live offers. This book is not about hard to build web animations or slick rollover effects. It's about providing concise, easy-to-find, and easy-to-understand information about your business on the web. Don't just build a web site - build a brand.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Microsoft Office Live Small Business
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
Preface
Signing Up: Opening a New Office Live Small Business Account
Submitting Your Site to Search Engines
Backup and Restore: Recovering From Disasters

Using a custom stylesheet


A stylesheet is a set of instructions that tells a web browser how to display the design elements on a web page. Normally, you'd have to create a stylesheet by hand when you build a website, but Office Live Small Business creates one for you automatically. As a matter of fact, almost every setting that you set in the Site Designer gets translated into the instructions that go in your site's stylesheet. When you set your site's default font to be Georgia, for example, Office Live Small Business created an instruction in your stylesheet.

Each such instruction is called a style. The good news is that you can tweak, or even over-ride, the styles that Office Live Small Business generates automatically for a more fine-grained control over your site's look and feel.

A complete course on stylesheets is way beyond the scope of this book, but I'll give you a taste of what you can do with custom styles.

Tweaking the navigation links

Building a website's navigation links manually...