Homestead Blog

“So,” I hear you say, “about those posts by Brian on user testing: does that stuff really work?”  Well, yeah!  Here’s Sam to tell you about how we use it ourselves, and what surprising things you can find out with it – Rochelle.

SiteBuilder Lite is the award-winning software that helps people easily create beautiful websites and connect with their customers, friends and loved ones in ways that they never could before. Homestead members have used SiteBuilder Lite to create websites for charitable organizations, non-profits and family photo albums. We’re proud of the way this little tool has touched so many lives.  We’ve put a lot of effort into it, and we were pretty proud of how it worked.

And then we tested it.  And here’s what we found.

We know you’re looking for clearly labeled buttons that are easy to understand, and that you want to add and delete entire text blocks without hunting all over the screen for the right button before giving up and calling customer support.

We know you want to add personal images – the elements that bring websites to life – to your websites and place them anywhere you like, so that your message, your vision, can be broadcast to the world.

What else do we know?

We know that you didn’t find those things.  At least, not in the way you wanted them.  That’s why we test our tools with real people like you, so we can find out it if we’re building things you really want.

SiteBuilder Lite could do some of those things before…but, the question was, could we make them better?  It turns out that yeah, we could, and now we have!

First of all, we improved the look of the element buttons to make their function clearer:

Before:

After:

Next, we made it easier to see how to delete a text element by adding a little button that says, well, delete:

Before:

After:

And we’ve given image handling the same sort of treatment.  We added replace and delete buttons right on the border of your image elements.  You can also drag and drop images easier now.  To move an image, just “grab” the image anywhere you like – you’re no longer limited to the top border:

Before:

After:

In addition to these changes, we’ve improved the “import image” window in SiteBuilder Lite so that it is more straightforward to import an image from your computer and preview it before adding it to your website.

Hope you like the new changes!  We’re still on the lookout for ways to improve SiteBuilder Lite.  Again, that’s why we test – we realize that you, our members, have a lot of time and effort invested in your websites.  The success of your businesses depends on your sites, so we are constantly on the lookout for ways to make things easier for you, either by adding new elements or improving existing ones.

We have a lot of our own ideas in discussion and in the production queue, but if you have any of your own please let us know.  Stay tuned for more to come, and thanks again for using Homestead!