Possibility of creating a normal public facing website with Sharepoint Online?

Question

Our company uses Sharepoint Online and have a Office 365 public website which I have tweaked and bent to within an inch of its life.
Can we have a prober Sharepoint public facing website using Sharepoint Online or would we have to change to a different version of sharepoint?
I have tried setting up a sub site for a new public facing website, but can never get the backend to look like screenshots I see from other people and I am wondering weather it is possible at all?

Nina

Just added these 2 links for clarity:

This is what I have currently managed to do with Office 365 http://www.globalgateways.eu/Pages/default.aspx

This is what I wnt to be able to do!: http://www.carbonwarroom.com/

Answer 1

** This feature is now deprecated please use Azure to host websites **

** Please read the KB Article here for more information **

You can indeed create public site collections in SharePoint Online as you have done. Branding is another kettle of fish however and requires quite a lot of work.

Please watch this course on SharePoint Online branding as a starting point.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Office-365-Developer-Training-Kit-Labs/Session-8-Part-1-SharePoint-Online-Branding

For SEO however I would not suggest using SharePoint online as a website. The markup isn't very crawler friendly, on-top of this URLs aren't friendly and it is a lot of work to get the site to work.

Answer 2

as told above, branding is not easy specially for the public websites of the SharePoint 2010/office 365, however check this online toll where you can fully customize a skin for your SharePoint site in just a few clicks including the public sites, this works for 2010 and 2013 versions. http://bindtuning.com/