May 17

Please Wait…

Too often, people post in the Office Live Small Business Community asking for help because a page won’t load or the site designer won’t.  There are a few things that can cause a lot of problems when using the Office Live page editor and avoiding them can save you some headaches…

Pasting code directly on the page

Despite the directions you may read in other places, you should avoid pasting code on your Office Live page.  At best, it won’t work.  It can wreak havoc on your site and cause your page to freeze.  At the worst, you won’t be able to open the Page Editor at all and will have to delete your page from the Page Manager.  You can still use html code on your site.  In the Page Editor, under Modules there is an HTML module.  Any code should be pasted in the module.

Pasting formatted text directly on the page

Another possible cause of sorrow.  Pasting formatted text (changing the font, color, size, ect) can cause an increase in the kb size, slow loading and possibly not loading at all.  Use the Office Live editor to type and format your text.  If you don’t want a work in progress to be seen by visitors, you can keep the page off of the navigation until you have finished it.  Click on Page Properties and remove the checkmark next to ‘show this page in the navigation bar’.  When you have it all done, go back into Page Properties and check the box to put that page back into the navigation.

If you really prefer to use something else while you write or don’t want to have to work online, use Notepad instead.  You can format the text after you paste it onto your page.

This may not be the cause of all problems you may encounter but by avoiding these things you and Office Live will exist more peacefully together.

3:53 PM GMT  |  Read comments(0)

April 30

Live Spaces Blog Module

If you are using the module on your Office Live Small Business website to display your Live Spaces blog you may have noticed that it stopped working this week.  Mine isn’t working either, the blog just isn’t displayed at all.  Many have asked about it in the Office Live Small Business Community.

I contacted Support about mine and they said they know about it and are diligently working to get it fixed, they don’t know how long it will be but expected it to be soon.  I’ve got my fingers crossed that it is easy to fix.

In the meantime you can put a little message on your site and provide a link directly to your blog.  A little inconvenient but it will allow your visitors to read it - which is the main point.

* This has been fixed and the Modules are working again.

5:23 PM GMT  |  Read comments(0)

April 16

Windows Live Writer Episode…I’ve lost track : )

I think I completed my tour of the right menu, so onward to the other areas of the screen.

On the bottom of the screen we have some information about whether or not the Draft has been saved on the bottom left, with the date and time it has been last saved.  On the far right is the name of the blog which is helpful if you have more then one (that also appears at the top of the right menu).  There are few things down there that are useful too.

The Edit tab is the one that is active when you are adding text and content.  Preview will show you what it looks like on your blog.  You can check how things will look and toggle back to edit.  Source shows you the text and some of the bits of code that magically make it work.

Set category allows you to choose and add the category you want your post to go under.  There are many default ones you can choose from or you can add your own.

On the bottom right is also Set publish date.  Clicking it brings up a calendar to choose a date from.  Your post can appear to be published on any date.  You can also change the time.  Today is April 16, I am going to change the publish date to April 17th and see what happens when I click publish…

Well, I got a message saying Posts on this blog service can’t be saved for future publishing. It will publish but will be available for viewing immediately.  Guess you get to read it today : )

There isn’t a lot on the bottom of the screen, so it looks like I am done.  The top menu bar has quite a bit up there, so I will leave that to next time.

6:23 AM GMT  |  Read comments(0)

March 03

Customizing Colors in Office Live

The recent Office Live Small Business updates give us more options for customizing our websites.  A very interesting change is the ability to use colors other than the theme colors.  We can now customize the colors for the background, content area, header, footer and navigation!

Click on the color icon in the Site Designer and on the bottom there is a link for Custom Color Scheme.  Click on that and you will find all the different options that are now available.

 

Under Header you can change the colors used in the Header themes, depending on what style header you are using there will be 2 or more colors that can be changed.  The Body gives you Site background and Content background.  Navigation gives you the choice to change the Button and Button pressed, Text and Text pressed and the Navigation background (the color that shows below the left navigation).  The choices for Footer are background and Link Text (the regular footer text color can be changed with the Footer icon in Site Designer).

If you don’t find the color you want in the basic Office Live color palette, click on More colors.  You can experiment by sliding the color selector around or you can enter the hex number for a color of your liking.  It is easy to return to the basic color palette by clicking Fewer colors.

Overall, this wonderful change and is very easy to use.  It takes a little playing around with to see what the color changes do to the various header themes.  It is a nice feature to be able to match the colors with an image or logo that you already have.

Have fun experimenting with all your new color choices!

7:34 AM GMT  |  Read comments(1)

February 27

Windows Live Toolbar

I recently added Windows Live Toolbar, which is, well, a toolbar for the top of the browser.  Just now I was actually looking at it for the first time and was wondering just what some of those icons up there do.   I discovered a couple of nifty ones, the translator which will translate any web page into a number of different languages, that will come in handy the next time I visit a site to find it in a language I don’t speak!

Most importantly for us Office Live Small Business folks is one that you can add – Office Live!

Now, no matter where I am there is access to my web site, no need to look in my Favorites, right there nice and handy.  To add it click on the little icon to the right.

8:27 PM GMT  |  Read comments(1)