Review of Microsoft Office Live Basics. You can now register a domain name, create a professional website all for free. And that’s not all.

With Microsoft Office Live Basics, you can register a domain name, create a professional website all for free.

Just because I support open source applications, including the Firefox browser, a lot of people automatically assume that I hate Microsoft. The fact is,I don’t. My computer runs on Windows XP and I regularly use the latest version of Windows Explorer. I also have been using Hotmail (www.hotmail.com), the World’s first free web based e-mail service and owned by MSN since 1998. I didn’t give up on it even after most of my friends moved to either Yahoo mail (http://mail.yahoo.com) or Gmail (www.gmail.com) Google’s web based email service. Google’s product created a rumble in the “free” e-mail world by offering the unheard of gigantic 1GB storage space.

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Anyway, I couldn’t believe it when I was exploring the Microsoft Office Live page and read that I could get my “own Professional Web site for FREE”. It was almost to good to be true. Before you say, “that’s nothing new” let me inform you that the website comes with a free .com (or .co.uk for UK users), .net or .org domain name.

Three packages to suit your requirements

They actually have three products, namely, Office Live Basics (Free), Office Live Essentials ($19.95/month) and Office Live Premium ($39.95/month).

I was only interested in the free stuff and so I signed up for Office Live Basics. However, while setting up my account, I was asked for my credit card details. I nearly went “There’s your catch” but they pointed out that was to verify my identity and I was satisfied after reading their FAQs.

“Domain names are renewed on an annual basis. Microsoft will automatically renew your domain name for you, and you will not be charged a renewal fee, whether you subscribe to Microsoft Office Live Basics, Essentials, or Premium.”

Building the site

The Free Basic account comes with a domain name and Web hosting, with 500 MB of Web site storage space. I had to search around a bit before I could find a domain name, which had not been registered. However, Registration proved to be the easy part. I had to explore around a bit before I could start building my site.

Once you have signed in, you will be taken into the Page manager. It contains a list of all your Web pages and you can add new pages, edit the current one and even delete others. Once I got familiar with the tools, building my site was a breeze. It helped that I was already in the process of building my personal site and had all the content and images ready.

They give you a readymade template, which you can then edit on the Page editor/ Site designer. This opens up as a separate window. The tool is quite easy to use and you can choose from a number of themes and styles. My only complaint is that you can’t put anything on the sidebar apart from the navigation buttons, which means that all my link buttons must go in the main body. Positioning the images is also somewhat limited. You can also forget about fancy CSS layouts.

Apart from these minor details, I love it. I mean who gives you a domain name, web hosting, 25 company-branded e-mail accounts plus website reports all for free.

I have always admired Bill Gates. Now, I am beginning to like him.