Homestead Blog

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!

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

Would you like to be notified when we post something new to the blog? Why not subscribe to the blog so you get the new post delivered to you? There are two easy ways to subscribe: email delivery and RSS feed.

The simplest and most familiar method for many of you will be to receive blog updates via email subscription. Simply click on the “Receive email updates” link in the upper-right of this blog above “About Us”, and enter your email address. Once you verify your subscription you’ll automatically receive new posts direct to your email as soon as they’re posted.

We also publish an RSS feed of this blog, which can be used with popular feed readers such as My Yahoo, iGoogle, and Google Reader. To learn more about RSS feeds and how to use them, check out http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/feed101 by FeedBurner.

Either method you choose, you’ll get the latest post delivered directly to you. We think you’ll like the convenience, so why not give it a try!

What would you say if we said you could add a photo gallery to your website, a forum or maybe a blog? It seems that many of our members would say “when can I have it?”, and I’m happy to answer: sooner than you think! You spoke, we listened, and soon we’ll be rolling out PHP scripting support to a small group of users for a controlled beta test. Here’s Gordon, a manager in our technology development group, to tell you a little bit about it. - Rochelle

There’s been a small but steady buzz from members asking for the ability to add dynamic content to their websites with PHP scripting. PHP allows you to add pages to your site that change whenever the underlying data changes. It’s an excellent way to manage data that changes frequently, like lists and pictures of products, or comments from your customers in a user forum. A PHP application organizes your data and displays it in a crisp, professional way that can really enhance a website.

For the controlled beta test we’re enabling PHP support for four of the most popular applications: WordPress (for blogs), phpBB (for user forums), Image Gallery (guess what that’s for) and MediaWiki (the engine that makes Wikipedia work). Other apps are under review; if you have a specific recommendation, please let us know about it.

We’re excited about the PHP program and would like to get started quickly, so if you’re interested in participating in the beta test please visit us at http://phpsupport.homestead.com Fill out the form you’ll find there and tell us what your interests in PHP are, and how you’d like to use it. For those who aren’t yet ready but would like to know more about PHP and dynamic website content, give us a call, we’ll be happy to help you.

Thanks!