In this chapter, you continued building your site template. You chose a Theme, a Style, a Navigation layout, a Color scheme, and the site Font. All these settings apply to your website as a whole, not only to individual pages. Therefore, all your pages look consistent.
Office Live Small Business offers built-in choices for most of these options. But if you're not really happy with the available choices, you can customize some of the options. You can customize a color scheme, for example, and build a custom theme.
At this stage though, I advise you to stick to the built-in options with a promise that I'll introduce you to the advanced options later on in the book. The reason is simple: at this stage, I just want you to get comfortable with Site Designer and take small steps towards building your site. You'll have ample opportunity later to tweak individual settings without losing any of the work that you've already done.
To recap:
- Your website's Theme is simply a picture that sets the tone for your site. Office Live Small Business has a large choice of themes built-in.
- A Style determines how the picture on the theme is laid out in your website's header. You can choose one of several available styles. You can't layout every element with pin-point precision individually, but the available styles cover a good number of possibilities.
- Your website can have two levels of navigation: primary and secondary. The Navigation layout determines where the primary and secondary navigation links will appear on your web pages. I advised you to choose the Top layout, which places both the primary and secondary links at the top of your web pages.
- A Color scheme determines the colors of individual elements on your web pages such as the page background and the color of navigation links. Office Live Small Business has a wide range of professionally designed color schemes built in.
- The site Font is the base font for the text on your web pages. But you can change the font of any block of text on any page, just as you would with a word processor.
In the next chapter, you'll give the finishing touches to your site template.