Homestead Blog

A lot of you have noticed how you can modernize your site by using our rounded rectangle element. Here’s Chris, one of our graphic designers, to show you how to make rectangles with neat, rounded borders - Rochelle.

Have you ever looked at Homestead’s website and envied its rounded gray border? Well here’s a quick tip that you can use to give your site the same professional look.

Creating the pieces

The key to this technique is using two rectangle elements, one carefully layered on top of the other. Here’s how it’s done. First create a new rectangle with the rectangle tool above your page. Next, choose a rounded corner type and the color you want your border to be in the ‘Basics’ tab on the right of your screen. In this example I’ve chosen the Small Rounded option and the color gray to imitate the look of the Homestead site.

Now position and resize your rectangle to fit your needs. Once you are satisfied with your rectangle, write down its position and size information. My rectangle information looks like this:

Right-click your rectangle and select Clone.

You’ll notice that your new clone looks exactly like your original rectangle, which isn’t going to do. In the ‘Basics’ properties change your clone’s color to the color you would like your content to sit on. For our example imitating Homestead’s look, we’ll use white.

Sizing and positioning the clone to make a border

To create the border effect we will have to alter both the clone’s position and size information. First step, reset the position value: select your clone and add the thickness of the border to the left position value. In our example my rectangle’s left value is 25, and I want my border to be 1 pixel thick. 25 + 1 = 26, so I would change the left value to 26. Change the clone’s top position in the same way and you’re almost done!

You’ll notice that the clone is now too big for the effect you want. That’s easy to fix with the second step: adjusting the rectangle’s dimensions. Just take the thickness of our border, which for our example is 1, and multiply it by 2. Take that new number (2), and subtract it from both the width and height. That gives us new values for the dimensions of our clone, 748 wide and 728 high.

If you’re following along with our example your position and size values should now look like this:

That’s it! Your two nested rectangles now appear to be a single rectangle with a neat, rounded border, with everything lined up perfectly. Just drop your content right on top, and you’re done!

Here’s Amr from our marketing group to tell you about his favorite web marketing tool - Rochelle

You’ve built a great website and registered the perfect domain. You’ve filled your online store with hot products and services, so now you can just sit back and wait for the business to roll in.

Too bad it doesn’t work that way. Setting yourself up online is only part of the process; you also have to make sure people find your perfect site when they go shopping on the Internet.

That’s why a key part of any serious web marketing strategy should be getting the search engines to work for you. One of the most effective ways to do that is by placing ads on search results pages, ads triggered by words the searcher used. When the ads are clicked, the searcher is taken directly to your site. We have a service called Homestead SearchLight™ that does just that.

It’s an efficient way to deliver targeted buyers directly to your website or online storefront. We pick “keywords” that best describe your business or products, then use them to create small ads that will be featured on major search engines, including Google™ and Yahoo®. Then, whenever a customer uses those keywords to search for something they need, your ad can appear on the results page.

How often those ads appear depend on the popularity of the keywords used - whether other businesses are using them as well. The beauty is that it doesn’t matter: you only pay for the visitors who actually click on your ad and are taken to your site.

Monthly reporting is included that can be used to optimize the results you get:

The service does the work for you, and you get the visitors your site needs.

You have a lot of competition out there vying for the same potential customers, so getting the search engines to work for you is pretty important. When a customer searches for a solution to their needs, better make sure that solution is you!

For more information on Homestead SearchLight, just visit www.homestead.com and click on the Get Traffic tab at the top of the page.

Lloyd from the Product team has an idea for you that may help your site rank higher in those all important search engine results - Rochelle.

Once you have a website with good content and design, it’s time for you to think about how to let people know about it. And in the online world, that means letting search engines know about it.

You can raise your profile with search engines in a number of ways, including submitting your site address to them, listing it in one or more online directories or having people you know create links to it. But there’s simpler way to help make your site show up in relevant search results just by making a few simple additions to your “Meta tag” field using SiteBuilder or SiteBuilder Lite.

Search engines regularly scour the net for new and updated sites, and one of the characteristics of a site they look for in their search are keywords used in the site’s “Meta tags”. Meta tags live under the surface of websites where they can’t be seen by visitors, but they assist search engines in classifying a website. And they’re very easy to add to your site.

In SiteBuilder Lite, click on the Page Info button that can be found near the top-right corner. You will find entry fields for ‘Page Title’, ‘Description’ and ‘Keywords’.

When choosing keywords and descriptions, please consider the following points:

o Think about what keywords you want associated with your site.
o Use the best keywords in your Page Title and Description.
o Place the words most associated with your site first.

In SiteBuilder, you can add or edit your Meta tags by clicking on Format from the menu, and then selecting Page Properties.

When you select Meta Tags under your Page Properties as shown below, you will find the entry fields for Description and Keywords. When you’re done, you can apply your changes to every open page in your site by clicking the Apply To All button.

Give the search engines some time to do their indexing, and you should start to see your website showing up higher in the results pages when your keywords are entered. Happy Online Marketing!

========== Important Added Information ==========

Please remember that search engines like to see Meta tags that are specific to the page on which they’re used. For that reason, the “Apply to All” feature may be most useful when you’re first setting up your site and you have key words that you’d like to apply to all the pages on it. Using it early also means there’s less of a chance that you’ll accidentally overwrite any key words already there. After you’ve used it, however, you’ll want to customize each page individually to make sure each page is described uniquely.

Kim from the product team is here to tell you about a resource that can really help you if you run an online business – Rochelle.

For those of you who have found the product blog to be helpful, you should take a look at our collection of newsletters at http://hsnewsletter.homestead.com/. We publish two different kinds of newsletters, one devoted to websites, the other to our ecommerce product Homestead Storefront™. Both focus on tips and techniques that can help our members improve the way they use our products and services. Our goal is to give you advice that can make a real difference in your online business.

Both the website and the Homestead Storefront newsletters have new issues released every quarter. We are working to make them more interactive by encouraging members to give us feedback on their own tips so we can share them with other Homestead members. So if you’re interested in learning more about how to use your site to increase business, please take a look and let us know what you think!

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.

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!

In this post, Sam, a Homestead Product Designer, discusses options for selling products on the internet. - Rochelle

You’ve probably noticed that a lot of people are selling their stuff on the internet these days. What you probably don’t know is how easy it is to join them, no matter what your level of interest is. You can just sell a few things you’d like to get rid of, or have a hobby-type business on the side to sell consumer goods. You can even have a full-blown online store that you depend on for steady income. Whatever you’d like to do, there are some good solutions out there to help you sell goods worldwide over the web.

The quickest and easiest way to display your products and sell online is through existing websites like eBay or Craigslist. Craigslist is basically online classified advertising, and does not have any transaction capabilities built in. eBay offers many tools for sellers and buyers including PayPal integration, and the ability to track all your listings in your eBay dashboard.

Some of these sites have transaction fees, and require both the buyer and seller to have an account with them. You may not find the flexibility that you need to best describe your product or your business if you use one of these online services. And as easy as these sites are to use, one thing they can’t match is a branded shopping experience from your own personal Homestead website.

With Homestead, you have two options for selling stuff via your own website. Our Standard Website Packages come with our SiteBuilder tool, where you can add “Buy This” or “Add to Cart” buttons anywhere on any page in your website. You associate these buttons to your PayPal account, and your customers can buy your goods by paying you via PayPal. Once you receive payment notifications, you ship your goods to the customer on your own. You can manage your item list in SiteBuilder, but your transactions are subject to any fees that PayPal may charge. Once you have a PayPal account, setting this up in SiteBuilder is pretty quick and easy. We recommend this method for our customers who occasionally sell small volumes of items via their site, less than 10 items at a time for example.

For customers who sell more products on a regular or full-time basis we offer Homestead Storefront Packages. Storefront is a completely different product from our Website Packages, and it allows you to accept credit cards directly (with a merchant account) so your customers don’t have to use PayPal. Storefront also offers some very useful inventory management and shipping tools built right in. Storefront packages do not include access to SiteBuilder for building a standard website. Instead, Storefront walks you through a wizard where you choose a website design and layout, and then enter in all the products you are selling. The Storefront templates are customizable, but require a bit more time and technical expertise than SiteBuilder to really get a personalized look. We recommend one of our Storefront packages for people who sell many products at a time and consider their online store to be a regular business.

If you’d like some help deciding on the package you need, give us a call, we’d be glad to help!

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