Homestead Blog

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!

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!

We’ve added a new option to the rectangle element in SiteBuilder. Here’s Sam, a Homestead Product Designer, to tell you all about it. - Rochelle

Web designers are always looking for ways to give the websites they build a clean, modern look. A simple technique they use a lot these days is rounding off the corners of page elements like buttons, backgrounds and borders. Rounded corners can give elements a smoother, more natural feel.

You might think a web designer would choose to use rounded corners merely to improve a website’s aesthetic look, but there’s something more to this subtle design technique. We’ve found that smoothing out corners of individual elements actually makes the information that they present easier to read. Rounding your corners is a simple step, but it can do much to clarify your message. It communicates subtly to readers how your information fits together, and how each element is differentiated from other information on the page.

You can see how others have used rounded corners by checking out these websites: A16, Links to Your Heart and PromoCOASTERS.

So how can you add rounded corners to your site? Well, we’ve just added that capability to our most recent SiteBuilder software update! Specifically, we’ve added the ability to round the corners of rectangle elements; check out the new “Corner Shape” box in this screenshot:

You can play with the choices of a small, medium or large rounded corner to see which you prefer for your site. One thing to keep in mind is that when you view the corners in SiteBuilder, they might look a bit jaggedy (yes, I know that’s not a real word but you know what I mean). But once you publish the page, they will turn out as smooth as glass.

Personally I love the look of rounded rectangles, so I hope you’ll enjoy this new tool in SiteBuilder and take full advantage of it on your own sites. Have fun with it!

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.

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In response to your questions regarding our two website editing tools, Sam, a Homestead Product Designer, talks about the differences and benefits of SiteBuilder vs. SiteBuilder Lite. - Rochelle

Some of you already know this, but our newer members may not: Homestead offers two different ways of creating and editing your websites - SiteBuilder and SiteBuilder Lite.

SiteBuilder is our flagship, full-featured website editing tool. You download it from the Homestead website and install it on your own computer to use. SiteBuilder offers an expanded list of useful elements you can add to your website that you will not find in SiteBuilder Lite, including shapes, forms and web polls. With SiteBuilder, you can edit your website’s background, as well as add various advanced text effects. Also, with SiteBuilder you can work on your website without an Internet connection, and save your work on your computer until you are ready to publish the edits you’ve made to your site online.

SiteBuilder Lite, on the other hand, does not require a download at all: it runs in your web browser. After logging in, you just click to open SiteBuilder Lite from Homestead’s website. While online you can make easy changes to your site like editing text, images, the navigation menu and even your logo. You can’t save your changes without publishing them directly to your website, but many people find SiteBuilder Lite easier to use, particularly if they don’t need all the features in the full-featured SiteBuilder.

The cool part is that no matter which tool you use, and no matter how many times you switch between the two, your website will always be up to date. Any changes you make with SiteBuilder Lite will sync up when you open your website in SiteBuilder, and vice-versa.

Hope you’ve found this useful. If you have any suggestions, please let us know!

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