- Go to Page Manager.
- Click the Save as template link under the Options column for the Home page. The Save as template dialog pops up, as shown:
- Change the Template title to Base Template.
- Change the File name to base.
- Type this Description: This is the site's base template. It has three columns side-by-side.
- Click OK. The dialog goes away and you return to Page Manager.
- Click the Template Gallery link in Page Manager's left navigation pane to go to the Template Gallery.
- The template that you just created appears in the list of templates in the gallery as shown in the following screenshot:
You created a template from your customized page layout. Office Live Small Business stored this template in a special area called the Template Gallery. You'll use this template as a starting point for all of the pages on your site. In fact, you'll build your first few pages using this template later in this chapter.
Just as the Page Manager helps you to manage web pages on your site, the Template Gallery helps you to manage your page templates.
Notice the familiar Options column with action links. Go ahead and view the properties of your only template. If you're up to it, you can delete the template and create it again.
Note
What happens if I delete a template AFTER I use it to create a web page?
Don't worry, nothing bad happens. When you create a web page from a template, as you'll do very soon, Office Live Small Business copies the design elements from the template to the new page. So, even if you delete the template after creating a web page from it, that web page will remain hale and hearty.
At this stage, most people want to view their spanking new template. Unfortunately, there's no way to do so. You can only create templates and delete them. You can't edit them. The only way to "edit" a template is to create a page using that template, make the necessary edits, and save it as a new template.
The home page is important to you because you perceive it as a way to introduce your business to a visitor. But to be brutally honest, a visitor isn't interested in reading a long mission statement or how your grandfather founded the business during the Great Depression. He wants to find something quickly.
What are the dimensions of that bookcase that you sell? How long does it take to get the delivery? How does the 'thingamajig' that you make compare to the equivalent 'whatchamacallit' your competitor makes? How can he get in touch with you? Do you have a toll-free number? That's the kind of information that a visitor seeks when he arrives at your homepage.
Note
Content is still king!
Okay, repeat after me: the purpose of a website is to provide the information that a visitor seeks quickly, efficiently, and intuitively.
Although good looks don't hurt, how a site looks doesn't really matter. What matters is the content that it provides and how easily a visitor can find it. No matter what anyone tells you, content is still king.
And yet, many site owners frustrate visitors by providing gobbledygook such as this, instead:
Our mission is to quickly engineer technologically superior products utilizing our unique high-quality intellectual capital while promoting personal employee growth and continuing to continually facilitate progressive allocation of capital to cutting-edge research which enables us to cut the time-to-market (TTM) of our groundbreaking new products by approximately half that of the industry average.
If they can't think of such profound nonsense, they resort to adorning their homepages with pictures of pretty women seated before a computer and talking on the phone, or of guys in pin-striped suits carrying briefcases against a backdrop of tall glass buildings. Such pictures only make sense on your homepage if you sell computers, phones, suits, briefcases, or, even tall glass buildings.
The moral of the story is that, contrary to your first instincts, a web page shouldn't be a place for stuffing pompous text or meaningless eye-candy. It should be a place that helps a visitor find what he's looking for, quickly and intuitively.
So, what should you include on your homepage? Here's an example: the site I'm building with you is about this book. This is what I'll have on the home page:
- Welcome small-business owners!
- This website is the companion site to my book, Microsoft Office Live Small Business: Build and Customize your Business Website, published by Packt Publishing. The book will help you to build a website for your small business with Microsoft Office Live Small Business.
- No, it won't morph you into a web-designer overnight, but it will show you how to squeeze the most out of Office Live Small Business to build an attractive, intuitive, and easy-to-use website without spending a penny.
- Don't own it yet?
- Find out what Office Live Small Business is
- Learn more about the book
- View the table of contents
- Read a sample chapter
- Buy it from your favorite bookseller
- Already a proud owner?
- View the errata
- Submit an errata
- Contact me
Each bulletpoint will ultimately become a hyperlink and lead to an information page on the topic it represents. And we'll add some eye-candy too. But for now, let's concentrate on the text.
My copy above consists of a brief statement of what the site is about, followed by information, which the two primary groups of visitors; prospective buyers and owners, are likely to want to know.
Okay, it's time to try your hand at writing copy.
- Write a short paragraph about your business. Remember, no long history or bombastic mission statements; just a simple statement of what you do.
- Group the potential visitors to your site into two or three major groups, just as I did for my site. Then, list out bullet points that describe the information that they're likely to look for.
Tip
Do you have marketing materials for your business?
Do you use brochures, advertisement copy, one-page write-ups, or other similar marketing aids to promote your business offline? If so, you can use them as the starting point for your copy.
The copy doesn't have to be perfect; you'll have plenty of opportunities later to improve it. Like Rome, websites aren't built in a day either.
Note
Use Notepad or a plain text editor for writing your copy. After you write the copy, you'll cut and paste it onto your Home page in the Page Editor. Recall that Page Editor acts as a word processor of sorts. Its styles may not necessarily be compatible with the styles of another word processor, such as Microsoft Word. Therefore, if you cut text from Microsoft Word and paste it on to Page Editor, its styles will overwrite the styles that you've set in Page Editor.
So, you should write your copy in a plain text editor, such as Notepad, which doesn't apply styles to text.