This is a template page for the old look of my Office Live site. Office Live is great in many ways, it's free depending on what country you live in and apart from a logo and web search bar it doesn't impose too many restrictions on the website you want to build.
One difficult thing about it however is the site designer.
The only option is to use the online web based Microsoft page creator and it has a lot of limitations. It only works with Internet Explorer. There is an upload limit of 1MB for images (Gifs have to be even smaller if you want them to animate) page elements can not overlap, the pages created are .aspx, not html and these seem to have slow load times to me, some pretty advanced workarounds called custom footers have to be used to display Google ads, etc., etc.
The upshot of all this is that putting a simple webpage together takes a lot of work.
This webpage has the following elements, reading from top to bottom;
a gif at the top acting as my site banner
a simple line of links acting as a site menu
an invisible custom footer setting the page colour to solid black, I hated all the colour scheme options with names like ocean or misty morning offered by the site designer
a custom footer hosting the first Google ads block, a site publisher is allowed three of these per page but in Office Live getting them to work is no simple matter
three jpegs forming the top of the first content frame, I don't have to put frames round the content but I kinda like the look of it.
two jpegs either side of the content as the sides of the frame
content the first block of actual content
three jpegs forming the bottom of the first content frame
a custom footer hosting the second Google ads block, I'm allowed one more after this
three jpegs forming the top of the second content frame, like I said I don't have to put frames round the content but it is pretty.
two jpegs either side of the content as the sides of the frame
content the second block of actual content
three jpegs forming the bottom of the first content frame
a custom footer hosting the third Google ads block, all done with the Google ads, now I just watch the money roll in, hopefully.
an invisible custom footer hosting the Google tracking widget so I can use their analytics site. Again with Office Live this is a tricky coding job that I was talked through on friendly websites not a simple cut and paste job as it should be.
So there it is, and these are just the basic elements I need for the page before I start actually coming up with content. So you can see how having a template page like this I can copy and paste from (as long as I keep the designer open, otherwise it doesn't work!) is a great aid in using the Office Live site designer
. 