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(DAVIS, CALIF.) - March 16, 2009 - With few Web designers worldwide capable of delivering template or custom Web design solutions to accompany Microsoft's Office SharePoint Services 3.0, Vivid Office has established itself as the primary creative design engine and industry-leading source of 'skins' and Master Pages, or Web templates, for SharePoint product.

Vivid Office, with years of experience on Microsoft projects and the SharePoint platform, has invested in staff training and development to focus on expanding upon its successful history with standard HTML/CSS Web templates to building high-quality Skins and Master Pages for multiple versions of SharePoint. Vivid Office has since gained support within the development and design community as a trusted source for SharePoint Skins, which delivers to users low cost, high value solutions that allow SharePoint users to match its internal sites with overall corporate branding.

"Working with SharePoint 3.0, we found new, market scalable opportunities to build more templates and designs than were possible in previous versions," said Jason Reckers, chief executive officer of Web-template purveyor, PixelMill.com, parent company of Vivid Office. "Our development strategy fits ideally with the rapid growth Microsoft is experiencing with SharePoint, and Microsoft's new Online Services' Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) and we can now efficiently build both mass market and custom designs that work across WSS (Windows SharePoint Services), MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Services), and BPOS.

Vivid Office SharePoint Skins combine a minimal Masterpage design with a theme or linked style sheet to provide a quick, attractive makeover to the out-of-the-box SharePoint site without affecting any SharePoint functionality. PixelMill currently offers similar products for public facing sites with content management features built on top of WSS. These products are called SimpleCMS SharePoint Templates and they're used for Small Businesses who want a Web site with the power of SharePoint behind it.

Vivid Office has also coupled its in-house design expertise with increasing demand from enterprises both large and small to deliver a new suite of custom solutions services for SharePoint users.

"Interest within the community for this unique niche has grown quickly, we've adapted, honed our expertise, and now we're consistently selling SharePoint Skins on the mass market through PixelMill," said Reckers. "With this product exposure we also found a growing need for custom design work specifically focused on applying a design to SharePoint. We now also provide custom services for global enterprises, including a major pharmaceutical, Shell Oil, and increasing numbers of mid-size and small businesses."

Custom solutions and design implementation services provided by Vivid Office assist businesses which posess specific brand designs already created by their graphic design department, but require additional support to apply it to SharePoint. Vivid Office's new Custom Solutions program launched, in part, to respond to the fact that most companies' in-house web designers don't have experience with SharePoint design.

Launched in 2002 under parent company PixelMill.com, Vivid Office (www.vividoffice.com) packaged and developed a number of complementary products, design templates, and instructional guides featured in the Microsoft Right Tools Toolkit. Vivid Office then also developed effective strategies to help users implement these designs into their Windows® SharePoint® Services Web sites. Vivid Office previously built designs and templates for both the first and second versions of SharePoint, which were provided for free download from sharepointcustomization.com.

While supporting SharePoint's first versions, Vivid Office anticipated newer versions of SharePoint would soon enter the market. In 2006, PixelMill's Reckers began developer and design training with the PixelMill team to deliver Web design solutions that enabled client companies to ensure brand consistency. Previously, the market size for SharePoint templates was limited because of the upfront building expenses required for each pre-built template. Earlier versions were simply not built in a way to make mass market capabilities feasible and required designers to have access to the server to apply specific elements.

At PixelMill we're always looking for ways to better serve our customers and the web building community. One of the ways we hope to do this is through our new PixelMill Community.

The PixelMill Community will be a hub of support and ideas for web site builders and design professionals like yourself. The web building community has seen a number of changes over the last few years and these changes only continue to accelerate as software providers and online companies build new and better solutions every day. We have seen our core customer base of small, independent business web consultants and professionals hit the hardest by these changes. The PixelMill Community is designed to focus on helping our customers communicate and share challenges and ideas with a supportive group always willing to provide valuable guidance, encouragement, and advice.

We chose Ning as the platform for our community, because of its quick and easy ability to launch a community and the simple to use interface. We felt that this was a good way to introduce the idea of online communities to you (our customers), who may see value in creating one for yourself or your clients. There are a growing number of options on the market, but we felt Ning was the right solution right now.

Join the PixelMill Community today!

Are you an existing PixelMill customer? Provide your PixelMill username (which will remain private) during the sign up process, and we will add a $10 store credit to your account for your next purchase.

It's Friday night and you have committed to cranking out a finished Web site by Monday. You are not only on a short deadline, but a tight budget as well. You don't need anything complicated, just a simple site. Where do you start? Two cups of coffee and you still aren't inspired.

With your images and copy ready to go, all you need to do is nail down the design and you can have your job cranked out in a few hours. The perfect solution is at hand: one of PixelMill's under $50 Web templates. It's all of the design work you need for a lot of simple Web projects.

The Intensive Business One-page Web template is a great example. Built using Table-less CSS and compatible with any HTML editor, this template is a great value at $34.99.Click here to take a look.

PixelMill has a wide variety of Web templates priced under $50. From XHTML 1.0 table-less CSS templates for editors like Microsoft Expression Web and the Adobe Dreamweaver CS series to classic tables based templates suitable for legacy editors like Microsoft FrontPage there are hundreds of designs in a myriad of styles and colors to choose form.

Take a look at all of the great PixelMill Web templates available for under $50. Click here to see how you can build a Web site for less than you thought.

Not sure if you placed the Google Analytics code into your site properly?

SiteScan provides you an audit of how well you have applied Google Analytics to your site. I have only run the tool on a few sites, but it seems to provide good results and has pointed out a few pages where we missed adding the code.

This tool is referenced in the Google Analytics help documents, but not 'officially' recommended. Definitely worth a try to help ensure you're getting the most out of Google Analytics.

www.sitescangs.com

While finishing a WSS site for a client, I had to make some final changes to a page that used data views. The page almost done and when I went to open the page to work on it again, SharePoint Designer crashed. So I tried to open the page several more times, and each time I did, the program crashed. Then I decided I would rebuild the page and just add the content again, thinking it was just a fluke. When I got to one particular part, which happened to be a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP), it happened again. Now I found the culprit, all that was left was to figure out why the CEWP was causing SharePoint Designer to crash. In the end it wasn't anything really big. Once I opened the CEWP in the browser and looked at the source code (on the original page). The CEWP had a Link <a href="yoururl.com">Link Text</a><a href="yoururl.com"></a>. This was the only thing I found that seemed odd, so I removed the second link with the empty title, saved my page, reopened my original page in SharePoint Designer and everything worked like a charm.