Homestead Review
Detailed Reviews
The Homestead site builder is known for its simple and streamlined process of creating and hosting a site in just three quick steps. You just need to choose your domain name and a site template, design it, and publish. Unlike other builders, Homestead stands apart by offering thousands of professional templates belonging to different themed categories such as travel, business, and health.
Different Packages
There is no free plan, which might disappoint the beginners. However, you can choose from the three affordable plans: Starter, Business, and Business Plus. The most basic plan is the Starter that comes with SiteBuilder editor, custom templates, royalty free images, 30-day free trial, 25MB storage, 5GB bandwidth per month, support for five Web pages, web statistics, and tech support.
For having personal domain and e-mail addresses along with more storage, bandwidth, pages, and sites, the Business plan is ideal. The Plus plain is for those who also need logo design, support for creation of unlimited sites, more domains, and Web listings. The Store module, SEO services, and marketing tools are available as add-ons for these plans, which means you will have to pay extra.
Features
The Homestead builder comes with several features and tools so that you can build a custom site for your business. You can test their features via a free trial, as there is no free plan included! Let us look at some of the most useful features!
The Drag-n-Drop Editor
The easy-to-use site builder enables a beginner or an advanced user to design a new site in just a few minutes with drag-n-drop power. There are more than 2000 templates to choose from, each with the ability to adapt to your design preferences for text and images you choose from a big collection of royalty free images.
Customizing a template is as easy as modifying a document in Word because of apt instructions. You can take the benefit of robust multimedia support for including animation, video, and QuickTime clips for promoting your services. The editor also allows adding a blog as well as search and replace function. Apart from that, you can add several other widgets such as polls, forums, Facebook Like, maps, and guestbook. If you wish, you can even use do HTML coding.
Marketing Suite and Tools
You can create a professional online store by using an add-on and add up to 100 products with descriptions and pictures. You can even make product categories and sell the items on Facebook. The store can accept credit cards or PayPal and facilitate a secure checkout for your customer safety.
The builder also allows adding forms for gathering information from visitors for sending emails and newsletters via a third party. There are several marketing tools such as Web Listings, Traffic Booster, SEO, and Paid Search Ads; all of which are available as add-ons.
Conclusion
Homestead offers the required tools and features to the entrepreneurs for instant creation of a Web site. Although a few features such as mobile support is lacking, the current offers are powerful enough to make you feel satisfied.