Hello,

I'm in the last few stages of opening my Virtual practice. I'm using Freewebs at the moment and really want to switch over to something more professional. Freewebs was set up for me to have an online presence.

If anyone has had any experience with Microsoft Office Live websites, please inform me. I know it has to have more of a professional edge than Freewebs.

Thank you!

I use MS Office Live basic (the free version). It think it's a good service for what it is, although I haven't really tried any others. It is user-friendly for us non-techie types. It does have some quirks though. For instance, I add content, save it then view it. When I view it 1/2 the text has been re-formatted, it may be in bold, or italics, or the justification may be moved. Sometimes I have to re-format it and save it several times to get the changes to take. I've even had to just re-type a few pages.

If you want major customization then this isn't for you, if you want some basic templates then it's fine. I'm sure you could get more customization with the paid versions but I think they are way too expensive.

I don't know if anyone elese has had the problems I have or if I'm just the lucky one.

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Rebecka Melson ~ Virtual Business Services

My website is hosted at GoDaddy.com. The templates are pretty user-friendly and the website is part of the hosting fee of $4.95/month. It's a great start-up website 'course, I intend to win the IDEAL assistant contest so I can have Tess create an awesome replacement

Check out website tonight.com for the GoDaddy website info.

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Lily Chambers, The Virtual Office Goddess, LLC
Author "How to Do Your Own Small Business Bookkeeping"

I am currently using Office Live Basic for my website. My big problem is with the images. The templates are good, but if you try to move a picture, it completely messes up the formatting,such as text wrap. Also I have not figured out where I can do some HTML tweaking (possibly because I might have to use the Premium version[?]).

Another problem that I have is that the stats page for whatever reason does not work at all for me. I keep getting bizarre coding errors.

But since the site is still under construction, I am not too worried about it now. As soon as I get the Adobe CS3 suite installed on my computer, I plan on creating a Dreamweaver site anyway and move to another hosting service.

The short answer is, if you need something to get you up and running in a jiffy, Office Live appears to work very nicely.

Hope that helps.

Lisa

Thank you ladies. You have all been very helpful. I would also like to take the time to say that you have wonderful websites.

I did a little investigation of the Microsoft Office Live program and compared it to Homestead (another DIY template system) just to see what I could learn about one or the other being better or worse and although I've never used either It appears that Microsoft offers more features and flexibility.

Also, with Microsoft OL you can host it anywhere (if you want to move from their server, you can) With Homestead you tied to their server.

I know at least one member and two personal friends who are using Homestead and I've seen some nice sites come out of the program as each user is learning more about how to manipulate the 'pieces' to create a site - it just seems to be a bit less flexible than the Microsoft option.

I'm so sorry I can't be of more assistance on this one I'm spoiled what with the programmer husband

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Originally Posted by Tess

I'm so sorry I can't be of more assistance on this one I'm spoiled what with the programmer husband

Sure - rub it in :mad5:

I'm pretty happy with the Website Tonight setup - really user friendly and I don't think I'll have any problem switching to a new host. The website was free (ad supported) when I started setting it up and only went to $4.99/month to remove the ads. They also had an automated "coming soon" page that I posted as soon as I bought the domain. Nice feature!

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Lily Chambers, The Virtual Office Goddess, LLC
Author "How to Do Your Own Small Business Bookkeeping"

LOL... Even so, the first few websites we did were experiments (ie - not pretty) - it takes a while to develop your design style and find all the great resources but in the beginning my husband was using mostly straight HTML and I was using a *very* basic design program...

I know it seems like alot to learn but I would strongly encourage everyone to at least learn HTML and play around with whatever design program you have access to - you'd be surprised what you can come up with and develop over time - with even the most basic tools. As with anything, it gets easier with practice.

Sounds like GoDaddy's DIY is a good option!
I answered the thread b/c originally I rec'd this question via PM and promised to look into MOL to see what it offered...

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I am currently designing through ms office live. First let’s reiterate that it is completely Free! Because of that my expectations were low. But overall I am impressed. I have had a few hiccups, but been able to move through them all without killing my laptop. I don’t want a lot of graphics I like to keep it subtle and professional so I’m happy and the best thing is when I’m successful and ready to spend big bucks on a fancy site, I can take my domain name, for a fee of course. Sorry still very much under construction, I’ll share it later.

Now after reading all this I'm wondering if I would be better off using something like Microsoft Live ....currently I'm using a Wordpress blog as my website...which has been working fine for me and I have no ads....and its also free.

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Deb Frawley
Gem's Virtual Office