Homestead Blog

Adding to our series on good web design, customer support manager Jon is here to share his favorite element with you, the Site Navigation Menu - Rochelle

Do you want to make navigating your website easier, or create some consistency with your links? The Site Navigation Menu Element is the way to go. It’s been around for a while, but I think a lot of members probably aren’t familiar with it, which is a shame. Simple text links or single buttons have their place, but if I have more than a few pages to link to, I always reach for the Site Nav Element.

It’s there at the top of SiteBuilder, looking like a little compass, beside the Rectangle Element. The Site Nav Element has a lot of options in it, but don’t let that intimidate you, it’s still easy to use. And I think it’s the best way to add links to your pages.

Let’s start with the high points. The Site Navigation Menu Element is what we call a “global” Element. That means that when you use it you’re creating a menu that can be used on several different pages without having to re-create it every time. It’s sort of like a QuickSite design for your link menu; once you create and name a Site Navigation Menu, you can add that Menu to different pages.

Also, any changes you make to it are global. If I create a Site Navigation Menu and call it “JonMenu1″, I can add that “JonMenu1” menu to any page on my site including, let’s say, my Index page, my Contacts page and my Testimonials page. Now, if I change the color of the “JonMenu1″ on my Index page, that color change will also take place on the menus on my Contacts and Testimonials pages. That’s what we call a global change.

And because the Site Navigation Menu is a single Element, you don’t have to worry about aligning individual buttons every time you move the menu around. Moving the Site Navigation Menu moves all of the links in that Element as a unit, neatly and cleanly.

One of the most powerful things about the Site Nav Menu is that you can add a mixture of different links to it. Email links, links to existing pages or files in your Homestead account, or external links… just because they’re all in one Element doesn’t mean that you’re restricted to a single type of link. You can also specify that some links will open in the same window, while others open in a new browser window. That’s particularly useful if you want your homepage to remain open when you provide your guest with a link to an external website!

I think that once you get a taste of the Site Navigation Menu Element, you’ll be hooked. It’s easy to learn how to use it. The best advice I can give is to just jump right in with both feet and experiment with it. Once you create your first Site Navigation Menu, you’ll see how easy it really is, and how valuable a tool it can be to your website design!

Hi folks, most of you have probably already heard the exciting news: Homestead is going to become an Intuit company!

This is especially great for us because the people at Intuit believe in our product vision and are eager to help us achieve it. Their small business expertise is a perfect complement to our goal of giving you, our customers, the very best in website and online sales tools for small businesses.

There are a lot of reasons why Intuit wants to aquire Homestead, and they mostly boil down to this: they want us to keep doing what we’re doing, only more so. I can tell you that everyone here on the Product Team at Homestead is absolutely thrilled with the news. Being taken under the wing of a larger, innovative company will give us access to more resources and additional expertise, which will help us accelerate our plans for new and improved products. At Homestead we’ve always had more product ideas than we’ve had resources to develop them. Now, although I’m sure there will always be more ideas than time in the day to build them, we’ll be able to deliver more to our customers at an even faster pace.

Personally I’m very excited about joining up with Intuit, and I hope we can give you some idea of just how exciting this will be for you, too. We’ll still be the Homestead you know and love: same people, same mission and, once we’re part of Intuit, all the commitment to our customers and focus on quality products that both those names represent.

You can read more about the upcoming deal on the official press release. Stay tuned for more news, and as we roll things out we’ll be sure to let you know about them right here in our Product Blog.

“Homestead and Intuit”; we like the sound of that, hope you do too!

- Rochelle

Homestead has a lot of good resources for you to use when building your website that you may not know about. Here’s Bryan from Quality Assurance to tell you about one of his favorites. - Rochelle

Did you know that Homestead has a library containing tens of thousands of free, public-use images that you can add to your site? Need some pictures of food for your restaurant’s website? Search for the word ‘food’ in the Homestead image library, and you’ll find approximately 12,618 food-related images to choose from! Think that your babysitting website could use a few pictures of kids playing? Search for the word ‘playground’ and find 109 playground-related images that are free for you to use. For pretty much any type of website that you may be creating, the Homestead image library has a number of high-quality images that might meet your needs. To access the Homestead image library, simply add an image element in SiteBuilder or SiteBuilder Lite, then follow the instructions and click the Our Image Library button. You can search for whatever type of image you’re looking for; it’s fun to browse and easy to use! Try it on your own: a few high-quality, relevant images can greatly improve the look of your site. Enjoy!