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Homestead Website Builder - Review Rating: 4 
Homestead is an excellent website builder which will get your website up and running in no time at all. Whether you are interested in a good-looking personal website, a small business website with limited ecommerce needs or a full-fledged ecommerce web store, Homestead is the one stop shop for all your requirements. If you are looking for a personal website and if you are tired of the limited, amateurish templates and tools that most personal website builders provide, you can use Homestead, which will provide you over 2000+ templates along with powerful tools for editing and designing. Homestead is designed to cater to the needs of small and medium businesses as they do not have to worry about the various technicalities that go into designing, developing, maintaining and growing their web store. Homestead actually goes a step further and assists business owners in deciding what kind of website they would like to build and how much of ecommerce capabilities they may need by saying ‘We’ll help you choose!’ Finally there is also a large range of marketing and promotional tools for personal and business websites that you can choose from. Its qualitatively superior design interface and effortless configurable options makes it a popular choice.
Thumbs Up
§ Choice of over 2000 customizable templates and 250,000 images
§ Assistance to user in deciding what kind of website is best for him/her.
§ Basic designing and editing tools come with drag and drop interfaces, making Homestead one of the most user-friendly website builders for beginners.
§ Possibility of gradual progression from personal website to ecommerce-enabled website to full-fledged ecommerce store.
Thumbs Down
§ Big businesses may not be very impressed with the basic plans. However, Homestead StoreFront should provide them with all the tools and services they require to set up a full-featured web store.
§ There is no easy way to change the look of the website as all the present text and images would be deleted if a new template is chosen.
User Friendliness
Rating: 4.5
The highlights of Homestead are its extremely user-friendly services. Often, website builders merely offer various tools to their users on the assumption that all their users know exactly what they want. However, most of the time when users are building their first website or at the least, their very first business website, they need guidance on what kind of a website they may need. Homestead takes this very assuring step of helping its users narrow down their requirements and then allowing them to select a plan that suits these requirements best.
Homestead makes it very easy to start building your website. Having identified a suitable package, you can sign up for an account, including selecting a personalized domain name, in three easy steps. Homestead then takes you to the Website Creation Wizard which lets you, in three simple steps again, to create your website and have it ready to go.
Once you have a website ready, adding a shopping cart to your website to sell anywhere up to 100 products, can be done in minutes. Somewhere down the line, as your online business keeps growing and you think you would like to expand your small business store into a full featured ecommerce store, you could use Homestead StoreFront for that purpose.
All the interfaces – designing, editing and adding ecommerce abilities are very simple and intuitive. They allow users to drag and drop images, add text, add pages, even add videos. Even after the initial setup, making changes to your site or selecting other options, including ecommerce or marketing features is possible with just a click of a button. With plenty of support options, Homestead can certainly be called one of the most user-friendly website builders in the market today.
Designing Tools
Rating: 4.5
The first step of the Homestead website wizard takes you to the Design Gallery. This huge gallery contains over 2000 templates divided into 100 different categories. Again, unlike many other website builders, these templates are designed by professional web designers and are complete, working web pages. With so much variety, you are bound to find a template that suits you best. Of course, you could always combine features from different templates to come up with your very own personalized design.
Once you have selected the design, you can customize various design elements in it like inserting your own logo or changing various images in the page. The design gallery is surpassed only by Homestead’s image gallery that contains over 250,000 images.
Homestead thus offers you professional looking templates that can be completely customized to fit in with the look that you would like for you business.
Editing Tools
Rating: 4.5
The next step in the Homestead website wizard is editing the web pages to customize them as you like. Since the web pages are complete working templates, they are perfectly usable, starting from the navigation to the text. If you wish, you can add your own images, like your logo for instance or you could select images from the Homestead library. You can edit the default text that appears on the web pages or just replace it with your own words. You can do many other things with the editing tools – you could add or delete pages, add or delete the menu items, add or delete links where you want. Depending on what aspect of the page you are trying to edit, tools will appear as you need them and then once you are done editing, they will disappear, as unobtrusively as they had appeared. Thus Homestead makes it possible for you to customize and update your site with utmost ease, to the extent you want to, with powerful editing tools.
Promotional Tools
Rating: 4.0
Homestead offers three good promotional tools in its SearchLight package. The Homestead Local Listing will submit your site to Google Maps, Yahoo Local and YellowPages.com so that your website reaches all local customers. In addition you could go in for paid search results on top search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc. You could also take advantage of the large number of visitors to Homestead by getting listed in the Homestead Directory. Thus, whether you want to reach out locally or globally, Homestead has a marketing solution for you.
E-Commerce Tools
Rating: 4.5
Homestead does not rush you into making any decision about your business website. You could start with a website just showcasing your products or services. If later you decide that you would like to start selling a few products or services online and receive payments for them, you can easily add a PayPal Shopping Cart to your website. Your customers can buy multiple products and services with just one payment.
However, as your web store grows, you may feel the need to have a full-fledged ecommerce store. Homestead again offers you two options – Homestead QuickStore and Homestead StoreFront packages.
These packages will provide you with basic ecommerce tools like shopping cart, online catalogs, real-time transaction processing, PayPal payments as well as advanced ecommerce tools like real-time credit card processing, a high-end inventory management feature or a well integrated supply chain system. Homestead thus provides its business owners well integrated ecommerce tools and services needed to establish and grow their online business presence.
Other Features
Rating: 4
Advanced users could make use of the Page and File Manager feature, to upload their customized pages or images. Homestead also offers their SiteBuilder software in a downloadable form. Though getting to know and use this software could take some time, it offers you far greater control over the design of your site.
You could customize your site in various ways by using some of the additional functionalities that Homestead allows. For example, you could easily add forms to your website and collect information from visitors. They could then be kept updated about your product, services and various promotional offers through emails and newsletters. You could add a guest book to collect and display comments from your happy customers.
In addition to these tools, Homestead has also tied in with a number of other solution providers so that you can efficiently manage your store and grow your business.
Homestead thus offers advanced users and growing businesses all the sophisticated management and support tools that they need, to help manage and expand their online store.
Support
Rating: 4.0
Homestead has a fairly good support system and customer service in place. To start off, you could view any of the training videos to understand more about how any particular aspect of the website builder works. There is a well-documented help center and FAQs section. At places where Homestead thinks more explanation is necessary, there are little help icons, which you click and the information becomes available.
If they face any problem, users can always send an email to the Homestead support staff, who respond within one business day or they could speak to one of the customer service representatives over the phone.
Technical Details
Rating: 4
Homestead offers you a variety of website plans, from which you can select the right kind of package for your website. You could choose a starter package with just 25 MB of storage and 5 GB data transfer, which should suffice for most personal websites. Else you could go for the high-end Platinum package which gives you 30 MB space and 25GB data transfer with 50 email boxes. The ecommerce website packages offer a maximum of 50 GB space with a data transfer of 200 GB per month, to enable you to sell an unlimited number of products. While the default space, data transfer, email boxes and other technical provisions in each package should suffice in most cases, where desired, Homestead offers add-on facilities for extra space, bandwidth, email boxes, etc. It has carefully tailored technical specifications for each of the plans, based largely on the general purpose of the plan.
Overall Value
Rating: 4.0
Homestead has been growing in reputation as a website builder that is easy to set up, easy to manage and most importantly, easy to grow your business with. The 12 million odd websites designed with Homestead attest to its popularity. Without pushing the user to decide on pricey packages, Homestead gives them the freedom to start as small as they want, even with a personal website while offering all the powerful tools and services to them as well. As their business grows and requirements grow, Homestead lets them make the move naturally, to packages with more advanced features. With a variety of powerful designing and editing tools, marketing and ecommerce tools and well thought out add-on features, Homestead offers the most comprehensive website building solution, popular across a large cross-section of people.
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