Designing your website with Office Live

Here is a bit of an in depth look at how to create your web site with Microsoft® Office Live, a free, browser based site design tool .

Step 1.
After signing up you will be presented with this screen (this is somewhat cropped to only show the parts I want to show at the moment):

I have circled the link you need to click to get started with the design process.

At this point make sure you are not blocking poups because the design tool is in a popup window.

Step 2.
Next you will be presented with a design:


The options you have are:
1) You can upload a logo to go above the header. You have the choice of displaying the Windows Live search box above your header also.
2) The top corner image can be replaced with another 5 choices.
3) The header can have different positioning. For example the above image I mentioned can be placed on the left, right or middle, chosen from a number of presets.
4) “Welcome” and slogan can be customized and also moved around.
5) You can change the colour theme, choosing from 30+ predefined palettes as shown below.

7) Navigation can be moved to run along the top, the left only, or both the top or left.

These were the options in the “Site Designer” mode.
Next we switch to the “Page Editor” mode which gives us further options.

Step 3
In “Site designer” mode, you have the option of changing your content and it’s layout, adding images, hyperlinks, etc. You have “zones” to work with, each one individually editable and movable to be either next to eachother or under eachother. You can have one, two or three zones.

There is a list of “Modules” which include Calendar, “Contact us”, Slideshow, “Map and directions” etc. These are ready made widgets which you can add to your Zones. They can be done manually also but using these modules is very user friendly.

You can add a new page to your site by clicking on the “web pages” menu which brings up a list of predefined template pages you can choose from.

Here is the end result of my creation:

Overall my impression was that Office Live is very user friendly. It does a good job for those who need to get a simple business site on the web fast without having to spend any money or time learning HTML.

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  3. PSD to HTML

October 26, 2008 Visited 3760 times, 2 so far today | Filed Under Online Site Builders 

comments

6 Responses to “Designing your website with Office Live”

  1. SBL – Video Tagging on October 29th, 2008

    Thanks for the excellent content.
    Regards,
    SBL - Video Tagging Services

  2. MICHAEL on November 3rd, 2008

    VERY NICE BLOG

    ITS VERY USEFUL

    THANK YOU……….

  3. Luis Pastrulo on November 5th, 2008

    I’m not sure if this is the best tool for creating a good Web Design but is worthy to try.

  4. Dan on December 3rd, 2008

    I’ll be honest, I tried using it and unless you just want pictures and text on your website, it is garbage.

  5. Alex on December 17th, 2008

    I signed up for this, and found a way to disable the WYSIWYG, and be able to upload my own ASPX files. You get a free sub-domain too!

    So it acts like a web host, and it’s Windows Live, so it’s half trust able (I don’t like Windows).

    I’ve had a good experience with this. I didn’t like the WYSIWYG, because, I agree, the templates and editing tools are basically useless and unprofessional.

  6. VARUN on March 21st, 2009

    Thank you.Thousands of thanks to Microsoft officelive.Check out my site designed with officelive tools.
    http://dhivyarajashruthi.art.officelive.com

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