Branding your site with your company logo

A company logo uniquely identifies your company at a glance, from your letterhead and business cards to your company's Web site. Because a logo is simply an image, you can use Microsoft Office Live Small Business to easily customize your company logo and add it to your Web site for a more polished and professional look that your customers will appreciate.

If you don't have an existing logo, see Create your own logo for information about creating a logo. Or if you are interested in finding a professional to create a logo for you, see the Microsoft Office Live Small Business Marketplace.

 Note    Office Live Small Business supports the following image file formats: JPEG, BMP, GIF, and PNG. One advantage in using a GIF or PNG file for your logo is that both GIF and PNG files can have a transparent background, so your logo can appear without any borders or white space.

 Important   If you partially redirected a domain name to your Office Live Small Business account: Before you can make changes to your Web site after partial redirection, you must change the primary domain to your free Office Live Small Business domain that ends in .officelive.com. For more information, see Make changes to your Web site after partial redirection.

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• Add a logo

• Customize your logo

• Replace your logo

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Add a logo

You can add your logo to the header of your Web site; it then automatically appears at the top of every page on your site. You can add an image from two sources: your computer or the Image Gallery. The Image Gallery contains images that you have already uploaded to your account. To add a logo, do the following:

1. Sign in to Office Live Small Business. On the Home page, at the top, click Web Site.
2. On the Web Site Home page, in Page Manager, on the actions bar, click Design Site, and then, in the drop-down list, click Design site.
3. On the Site Designer toolbar, click Theme, click Custom Theme Image, and then click New. The Insert Image dialog box appears.

   

4. In the Insert image dialog box, under Choose images from, do one of the following:
   • To use an image that is located on your computer, select My computer. Click Browse for an image, locate the image that you want to use, and then click Open. If you want to optimize the image for the Web, select the Optimize my image check box. Then click Insert image.

      Note   If you select this option, the image is converted to JPG (if it is not already in this format), and the JPG conversion quality level is set to 100%. The image is resized to a maximum of 640 pixels, maintaining its aspect ratio. These improvements help the image load faster in Web browsers.

   • To select an image that you uploaded to the Image Gallery, select My uploaded images. Select the image, and then click Insert Image.

  Notes  

• The My uploaded images page displays a maximum of 24 images per page. If you want to view more uploaded images, click the page numbers in the lower right corner of the page.
• For more information about the Image Gallery, see Add or remove an image.

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Customize your logo

You can customize the appearance of your logo directly in the Image Uploader. After you add your logo to your site, you can also change the style of the header to customize the layout of your logo.

Crop, rotate, or change the image brightness or contrast

When you select a file to upload to the Image Gallery using the Image Uploader, you can crop, rotate, or change the brightness and contrast of the image before you upload it. To do this, select the image to upload, and then click Edit Photos, as shown in the following image.

When you use these tools to edit your image, only the copy of the image that you are uploading to the Image Gallery is edited. The original image file on your computer remains unchanged.

 Note   These editing tools are available only when you use the Image Uploader to upload a file to the Image Gallery. If you add a logo to your Web site by inserting an image directly from your computer, you must use your own image-editing software to edit the image. In addition, you cannot use these editing tools to edit an image after the image is already uploaded to the Image Gallery.

Change the layout of your logo

After you add your logo to the header of your Web site, you can select from 20 available layouts to find the style that best fits the shape and style of your logo. To change your header style, do the following:

1. On the Office Live Small Business Home page, at the top, click Web Site.
2. On the actions bar, click Design Site, and then, in the drop-down list, click Design site.
3. On the Site Designer toolbar, click Style. Then click a style to select it from the menu of options. Your header layout updates automatically.

   

   If your logo is not the correct size for your preferred header style, resize it on your computer, and then upload the edited image.

Resize your logo

You can resize your logo in almost any image-editing program that you own. For example, if Microsoft Office is installed on your computer, you may have the Microsoft Office Picture Manager tool. To resize your image using Picture Manager, do the following:

1. On your computer, locate the folder where your logo image file is stored.
2. Right-click the file name of the logo file, point to Open With, and then click Microsoft Office Picture Manager.
3. On the toolbar, click Edit Pictures. Then, in the Edit Pictures task pane, click Resize.
4. In the Resize task pane, set the size you need, and then click OK.
5. On the File menu, click Save (or press CTRL + S).

     Notes  

   • Your Image Gallery cannot store two files that have the same name and file type. So before you upload the resized logo, either rename the file or delete the original logo file from your Image Gallery. To access your Image Gallery, in Office Live Small Business, at the top, click Web Site, and then click Image Gallery.
   • If you are resizing the logo to make it larger than the original, you may lose image quality depending on the resolution of the image file. If that happens, resize a copy of the original logo artwork in the program used to create the logo (such as Microsoft Office PowerPoint or a graphics program), and then save the picture file again.

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Replace your logo

To replace the logo that is currently in the header of your Web site, follow the steps earlier in this article for adding a logo. When you select a new logo from the Image Gallery or from your computer, the existing logo in your header is automatically replaced.

To use an image that is tailored to your type of business instead of your company logo, select an available image from the categories provided on the Theme menu. To remove the logo from your header without replacing it, on the Theme menu, select General (no photos).

Adding your own custom logo is a simple way to help your customers identify your company and to give your Web site a professional look.

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