Homestead Blog

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!

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!

Many of you have already heard of the Homestead Connection, a site started by a Homestead member as a helpful resource for people using SiteBuilder and other Homestead tools to build their websites. To quote the site, it’s a place where “you’ll find tips, FAQs and other useful information to assist you in presenting your site in the best possible light.” We thought we’d invite the head of that site to introduce it to readers of the blog. Hope you find it helpful! - Rochelle

The Homestead Connection Forum is a community of individuals who use Homestead’s website design software. It is member-owned, and was started to offer “Homesteaders” a place to seek answers to questions, share knowledge and learn new ways of enhancing Homestead-designed sites. The driving force of the Forum is the willingness of members to provide answers to posts based on their knowledge and experience.

Members have access to information on everything from search engine optimization and site design to tools and tips. There are currently over 4800 posts on the Forum. This collection of knowledge and information, together with the ability to ask questions in “real time”, provides Homestead users with an extensive resource for obtaining solutions to common issues associated with producing a quality website.

HC members have the option of adding their site to the Member Directory as well as being able to add an active link to the site in their signature. These options help to increase search engine awareness of member sites.

The Forum is not intended as a replacement for Homestead’s Help Sections or Technical Support. HC is offered as an additional resource for Homestead users so they can get timely answers to questions, and to help new users become familiar with the programs.

There is also a Homestead Connection site designed to be a ‘partner’ to the Forum that offers helpful guides and tutorials. The HC Forum and website, together with Homestead’s tech support, give users access to a comprehensive foundation of information and assistance to help with building their Homestead designed site.

If you aren’t a member I encourage you to visit the Forum and join the active community of Homestead users who are succeeding on the WWW. This is an opportunity to learn new ideas and to share the knowledge you have gained with others. The door is always open.

Links:

http://www.readybb.com/homesteadconnection

http://www.homesteadconnection.com

In this post, Sam, a Homestead Product Designer, introduces the ability to hide your domain contact information. - Rochelle

We’ve introduced a new privacy feature that’s now available to anyone with a domain managed by Homestead. As some of you probably know, whenever you register a domain name your contact information is entered into an international public database, making it available to anyone doing a simple domain search. Unfortunately, some of those doing searches are spammers and telemarketers.

To help keep your personal information out of their hands, Homestead’s new domain privacy feature can mask the contact information associated with any of your domains and replace it with information from our domain registrar, Tucows. The box below shows how enabling privacy would affect a typical domain registry entry:

The cost to enable privacy is $1/month per domain. It is now an option on every domain you register or transfer to Homestead (except for domains ending in .name), and can be enabled for current domains through the Domain Manager as shown below:

We hope you like the new domain privacy feature. It’s a pretty simple way to reduce your exposure to some of the most common internet annoyances, like spam, junk mail and unsolicited telemarketing. It can also help guard against more serious threats like fraud and identity theft, and help you retain full control and ownership of your domain name.

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!

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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!