Homestead Blog

Most of you know we’ve recently added some new features to our site and in our tools. One of the features I’d like to highlight here is the ability to add some useful symbols to your text using the following keyboard shortcuts in SiteBuilder (sorry, this isn’t available in SiteBuilder Lite):

Ctrl + Alt + C = the copyright symbol ©
Ctrl + Alt + T = the trademark symbol ™
Ctrl + Alt + R = the registered symbol ®

  Here are those symbols shown in SiteBuilder: 

One of the reasons we put in these shortcuts is because Homestead member Karina posted a comment on the blog asking for an easier way to enter these symbols (special thanks to Carla for posting her temporary workaround). We regularly share feature requests we get from your suggestions with our Development team, and one of the developers thought he’d like to take this one on. And now you have it!

So please enjoy, Karina and Carla, and anybody else who has a need for these symbols. And please, keep letting us know what features you’d like to see, and we’ll continue our efforts to try and add them to our products.

There are lots of great new things in the pipeline at Homestead.  Here’s product designer Rina to tell you about our new tools to help you manage your PayPal sales - Rochelle.

If you sell things on your website using PayPal buttons you may have already noticed this, but we’ve just implemented new tools for you to use in managing your PayPal activity. The new tools don’t change the way your PayPal buttons function; they provide a new and improved way for you to add products and manage your transactions.

If you’re a Gold or Platinum member, when you log in to your website account you’ll see a new link in the menu on the left side of your website account. This link is called Selling Online, and you’ll now find all ecommerce tools and products (including PayPal button management) organized within it.

Underneath Selling Online you’ll find a link called Store Manager. Clicking that link opens the new Store Manager page. It contains the same functionality as the old PayPal page - it gives you instructions on how to get started with PayPal, a place to enter your PayPal email address, and links to the PayPal site itself. The new layout of this page makes this information easier to read and understand.

The Store Manager page also has a link that says Launch Product Manager:

Clicking that link will take you to the brand new PayPal Product Manager page:

This new Product Manager is organized into two columns, making it easier for you to look at your products. Using it is simple. To add a new product, click the Add new link in the left column and a form will appear to let you add your new product information. Click the Save button when you’re done.

Your product will now show up in the left column where existing products are listed. As you add more products, each will appear there organized alphabetically.

To edit a product, click on the product name in the left column and you’ll be able to edit its information in the right column. To delete a product, just click the Delete this product link at the bottom of the form.

We think you’ll find the new Store Manager and Product Manager make it much easier to use PayPal buttons on your site. Nothing’s changed about how those buttons work for your customers, or how you can place them on your site using SiteBuilder, but now you have an easy way to manage them!

Here’s Sam, a Homestead Product Designer, with a few words describing a new enhancement to a couple of our elements in SiteBuilder. - Rochelle

SiteBuilder fonts number just twenty nine
For some customers, that is quite fine
From Arial to Wingdings we have a good set
But what about Mangal, Batang, or Sevnet?

“Where are my fonts?”
People often will write
“I use them in Word…
I’d like them on my site!”

Well now they’re all there
Every font Word can show
Is in two of our elements:
Anti-aliased text and logo

We’ve made it so you can use any font
Custom logos and headers will look like you want
They render as images as you will see
So your site will appear as you meant it to be

Since visitors don’t have the fonts that you might
SiteBuilder makes images so your pages look right
But search engines cannot read them at all
And big images slow your page to a crawl

For large content sections, we would suggest
The text element will serve you the best
It uses the fonts, that all browsers display
“Your website is great!” people will say

Now you can use any font on your computer in the the anti-aliased text and logo elements in SiteBuilder!

For another in our series of posts on good design tips, I have my own favorite tool that you can use to make your site look a little more professional. Best of all, it’s easy to use!

A favorite feature of mine in SiteBuilder is the easy alignment tool. I look at a LOT of web pages as part of my job, and one of the things I see that can make a website look especially unprofessional is when the elements on a page don’t quite match up with each other. You may not even be able to pinpoint why it looks bad when the alignment is off by only a few pixels, but even that small amount can make a big difference in the way you feel about a web page. The reason may not be obvious, but sometimes you just feel when there’s something not quite right about a web page. Fortunately, those problems are easy to fix on your own site with SiteBuilder. Whenever you have elements you want to align, just select them and in the Properties Editor you’ll see where you can align them either vertically or horizontally.

Figure 1. Before aligning:

Figure 2: Elements aligned!

You can also use this tool to center elements! It’s a short and simple fix, but one that will make your pages look sharper and more professional. Give it a try!