Homestead Blog

We’ve had some good feedback about our post on centering your page content vs. left-justifying it. Kevin, JP and Andy have commented on the effects of centering when using an image as a background. I thought the answer might be worth sharing with the rest of you.

There’s an important thing to keep in mind when you are designing your page, and that’s the idea of “tiling”. You may be familiar with the concept from adjusting the background on your Windows desktop. When the image chosen is smaller than the background it needs to fill, it automatically multiplies to fill the space with enough identical copies of itself to fill the background. The finished background looks like it is made up of rows of tiles with your image on them, laid side by side.

Tiling is the default for Homestead SiteBuilder and SiteBuilder Lite. Patterns provided by Homestead are designed to look good when tiled to make up a full background, but most other images really aren’t suitable for that use.

There is, however, an easy way to use one of your images as the background on your page and have it look great: set your background to a solid color, and drop in your image as an Element in the center of your page. Remember, your page is like a collage, with each Element layered on top of the preceding one. If you choose a matching or complementary color to the background of your image, your image will float in the center as if it were framed there.

(more…)

When we first started this blog a mere month ago we thought that we’d only be posting about new features or services. Reading all your comments made us think that perhaps we should expand the “mission” of the blog to include talking about how the product works today. So, I thought I’d introduce what I’m hoping will be regular feature on the blog: “Good Design.” We’ll try to post some sort of design tip on a regular basis, in hopes of taking what the Homestead Product Team has learned here and sharing it with all of you.

The idea for the first topic in this series came because I’ve noticed that a few people (Donna, Nancy and others) have commented on the blog that their pages look fine on a smaller monitor, but they don’t like the way their pages can look on larger monitors.

One of the biggest challenges of web design is that it can be hard to know how your site is going to appear to people visiting your site, because they’re using computers that are different than yours. While you might have a large 21-inch monitor set to a high resolution, one of your customers might be using a 15-inch monitor set to 800 x 600 pixels resolution. To better illustrate this issue, I thought it would be fun to take a photo of the monitors used by a few of the people here at Homestead showing a site that I designed for some friends of mine using SiteBuilder.

This 15 inch monitor (resolution 1024 x 768 pixels) belongs to Amr in the Marketing Team.

This huge 21 inch monitor (resolution 1920 x 1200 pixels) belongs to Brian in the Product Design Team.

You can see that your site visitors can have a very different view of your website than you do, depending on the size and settings of their monitors.

In Donna’s post, she specifically mentions that she doesn’t like “large white space on the right hand side.” It’s really easy to change that in SiteBuilder simply by centering the content of your page in the browser window.

My friend’s website centered on Brian’s large monitor.

In fact, some of the most popular sites on the web, like CNN or ESPN, do exactly that. For fun, you can drag your browser window wider or narrower while looking at these sites to see how the space on either side of the content changes, but the width of their actual page doesn’t change. Most sites used to be left-justified for the most part, but lately more and more sites, professional sites like CNN and ESPN in particular, have moved their content to the center. At Homestead we’ve been reviewing that issue ourselves, and with our next software update (end of summer) the default setting will be for all new pages that are “built from scratch” to be centered instead of left justified. If you’re using a QuickSite, any new pages you create will continue to match the justification of your Quicksite.

In the meantime, if you’d like to center-justify your content you can follow these easy steps:

1) Open SiteBuilder
2) Click on the “Page Info” button in the top toolbar of SiteBuilder.
3) Click on the “Advanced” tab in the “Page Properties Editor” on the right side of the application.
4) Click the check box for “Center Contents on Page”

I hope this helps address some of the questions people have had with how their sites look on different monitors. If you have other suggestions for design topics to cover please let us know. Remember, if you have more specific questions you can always create a help ticket at our new help center.

I hope this was helpful!

-Rochelle