SharePoint Online's Public Website: The Heart of Darkness

The horror, the horror...

Having tried out SharePoint Online's public website functionality for several weeks now, and failing miserably to make anything even marginally worthwhile with it, I give up.

I understand Microsoft's position that the public website in SharePoint Online is not really meant to be a substitute for a full-blown hosting solution. And I understand that some functionality may change between now and the end of the Office 365 beta.

But this is ridiculous.

The style/theme/color scheme -based layout model is so limiting as to be useless. By the time I gave up I had so much hand-coded CSS in the Advanced Style Sheet that I would've been better off starting from scratch. Which you can't on the pages they give you, because there's no way to turn off the dumbed-down formatting interface.

Sure, you can paste in /_layouts/settings.aspx and get behind the scenes and create a site from scratch, but most things don't work for anonymous users. For example, lists cannot be accessed anonymously, which on a platform where just about everything is a list is a problem. Setting up a simple blog site works, as long as the anonymous visitor doesn’t click on anything. Clicking on the post title, categories, archives, or comments all lead to a login screen, making it useless for a public website.

In short, unless your site is simply a set of pages with nothing but text and images on them, you're out of luck.

Hello, Microsoft? The Nineties called, they want their website functionality back.