About Office Live Small Business

Office Live Small Business is Microsoft's web-presence service for small businesses. It's part software and part service. In fact, Microsoft calls this strategy Software + Services.

The software component consists of several useful online business programs and tools. Among them is a set of templating tools for building and managing websites. The tools ask you to fill in some information about your business, choose a few options for deciding the look and feel of your website, and ask you to write the text of the pitch that you wish to make to your visitors. Based on the information you provide, the tools generate a website for you.

The services component provides domain name management, web hosting, storage, and other infrastructural facilities required to maintain a website. Office Live Small Business bundles all these services in a single convenient package. Together, the two components help you build a website quickly and easily.

Sounds improbable? Let me give you an example that you'll easily relate to. There's a good chance that you use accounting software, such as QuickBooks, to balance your books. Did you have to take a crash course in accounting before you began using it? No. All you probably did was fill out a questionnaire about your business, set up a list of people who pay you money, and a list of people you pay money to, entered your bank account numbers, and then began recording daily transactions. That's it! Now your accounting software figures out the debits and credits. It decides whether an entry goes to your balance sheet or your income statement, and also generates balancing entries when you cancel a transaction. In fact, it performs all the accounting summersaults that are necessary to produce the pretty reports that help you prove your honesty to the IRS at the end of the year.

If you think about it, the goal of the entire exercise was to produce those pretty reports. You had the option of hiring an accountant, learning accounting yourself, or buying accounting software to achieve that goal. You chose the latter, in all likelihood, because it didn't cost as much as an accountant and didn't take up as much time as learning to balance the books yourself. That left you more time to do what you do best: run your business.

What QuickBooks does for your accounting, Office Live Small Business does for your website. Using its site-building tools, you can build an attractive website for yourself without learning any new technology. You can have your proverbial cake and eat it too. Moreover, the icing on the cake is that your site won't cost you a red cent; all you pay for is your domain name.