If anyone has seen my Web site http://rare-tech.net the last few days this post title makes a lot of sense. I have finished off some projects recently and had some time to turn my attention to my Web site. When I set up the Web site I used Microsoft Office Live Small Business. It made sense I needed a presence for my business. At the same time I do not have any product I sell only myself. So I saw no need to go and host a Web site and spend thousands of dollars on design. However, I wanted something a little more feature rich than what the default “Office Live” templates offered so I decided to give Microsoft Expression Web a whirl. To me it was logical to make sure that the site was based on Internet standards as well. So this was a good choice (or so I thought). It took me a little time to get used to using Expression Web. Once I got it down I started designing a pretty good Web site and one I thought looked quite a bit better and less “out of the box” to me. When I was done I logged into Office Live and I changed the settings to allow me to use a third-party application for design. It asked me twice if I knew that I would be losing all the Web pages I had already setup and I chose OK. This is a Microsoft product after all and Office Live is a Microsoft Web site so it should work flawlessly right? It did not take long for me to start receiving errors that it could not upload certain files to the site. I let it complete what it could or would and then took a look at it. Most of the links off the home page do not work. All of the images are erased and in general it is a big mess. I tried to login to the Web site and see if I could correct the problems there, of course it does not allow any editing from the Office Live site (makes good sense) since I chose to use a third-party application. So I took it to the Web and checked the Expression web forum and found something interesting.
“It’s really not a good idea to use anything other than the Office Live Small Business site tools to work on an Offic Live Small Business Web site. It is not a regular HTML Web site, but a rather complex ASP.Net Web application. Like SharePoint, it is designed to work in a certain way, and to be worked on with certain tools. To go beyond that with such a Web site requires some fairly advanced .Net programming skills. If you want to have your own Web site, and work on it using Expression Web, you can get a hosted Web site somewhere that is straight HTML, and that would be easier (at least at first) than trying to work on an ASP.Net Web application.”
So basically, I have two choices take my site to another provider other than Microsoft or use another third-party tool for Web development (other than Microsoft’s). I don’t like either solution very much. So I will continue to dig around and see if I can get it up and running again this weekend. Until then RARE-TECH is “under construction” (wish I could find one of those cheesy graphics that Web developers used to put up back in the 90s) doesn’t matter though I wouldn’t be able to upload it anyway.
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