Embedding Youtube Video In Homestead Website Design

With hot new entries like Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly to contend with, Homestead (starting at $5.99 per month) is pretty much the grandpa of do-it-yourself website builders, having first appeared on the scene back in 1996. Like most of the newer services, Homestead now lets you build your site with completely Web-based tools. Homestead has a clear, easy-to-use interface and good reporting tools, but it's pricier than the competition and, worse, falls far short of newer services when it comes to building mobile-friendly websites.

Pricing Considerations
Homestead offers three plan levels: The $5.99-per-month Starter plan gets you one site with a maximum of 5 pages, 25MB of storage (which seems awfully small given the current online storage market), and 5GB per month of bandwidth. The Business Plan ($20.99 per month) adds 5 email addresses and custom domain-name support, and it ups the number of sites to 3, the page limit to 100, storage to 5GB, and bandwidth to 100GB. The Business Plus plan ($60.99 per month) gets you unlimited pages and sites, 10GB of storage, 500GB of bandwidth, three domain names, and 50 email accounts. If you're not sure if one of these deals is for you, you can give Homestead a spin with a 30-day free trial of the Starter plan.

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These prices fall well short of what you can get from more-modern competition: For example, Weebly (Start for Free at Weebly) gives you more than what you get in Homestead's Starter plan for no charge at all. Weebly's full business plan is just $25 per month, and that includes a Web store with unlimited pages and products. Squarespace's Business plan is only $24 per month for unlimited sites, pages, and products, but that service doesn't offer free sites. The two newer services also offer unlimited bandwidth and storage.

Start Building a Homestead Site
Before you can do anything, you need to create an account, which involves entering your credit card information. Once that's done, you choose your domain name. Domain registration requires you to enter your name and address again. Thankfully Homestead makes the domain owner private by default at a reasonable $1 monthly fee, so people can't find your address by researching your website. The first couple of times I tried this, I got a server error, possibly because I was using a trial account. Later visits told me the registration was in process.

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You start designing your site in Homestead by choosing a template (just as you do in nearly every online easy site builder). Before you even do this, the service has created your site with a very basic template. The Websites Manager display tooltips to show you how to use the interface. The latter includes a settings panel at the right and toolbar of buttons across the top.

When you start working on your site, it's a completely bland and un-personalized one with the title Company Name, and placeholders for standard elements like a photo and your phone number.

Homestead Page Elements

To change the layout template, you have to go back to the Websites Manager page and click "Choose a different design." There are hundreds of possibilities, each with a set of available page types (photo gallery, About Us, Contact Us, etc). You can filter the templates you see down to very specific types of businesses—agriculture, entertainment, optometrist, legal—you name it! Many of them are pretty stodgy looking, unlike the slick ones you get with Weebly and Squarespace. You can also choose a Personality, Purpose, and Target Customers. I chose the Swirl template, one of the few that featured a full-page photo background.

Adding pages to your site requires nothing more than a simple click on the View Page button bar and tapping Add Page. You can then choose page types offered by your template. My choices include About Us, Products, Services, Photo Gallery, Blank, and a few others. After picking a page type, you choose how users will navigate to it, normally from a home page link. On the Page Settings menu, you can rename the page, add a description, change its width, link styles, and footer. Advanced page settings let you add HTML or JavaScript.

After you select a template that matches your needs, you enter your business name and contact info, and this prepopulates basic site elements. You then decide how many pages to start the site with and continue to the website editor—SiteBuilder Plus. My site was fixed-width, unlike the adaptive, responsive designs favored by the newer builders. More on this in a bit, but—spoilers—it's a big problem.

Adding Page Elements
I like the editing interface of Homestead; it's clear and finding what you need is easy. You can click on any area on the page to edit it, and a helpful button let's you make changes apply across all pages. Objects like text boxes are easy to resize and move around anywhere on the page—some builders are more restrictive in this.

The Insert button lets you add text, images, videos, social links, a contact form, store, map, and even custom HTML and forms. There are audio and video players, too—the last is something you won't find in many other easy site builders, but it requires QuickTime. An Image Upload dialog lets you add any photo from my PC, and the service offers to reduce the file size of large ones for faster page loading. You can also search for and use images from Homestead's larger collection. Unfortunately, you can only upload one image at a time, but I do like how Homestead keeps your photos in an online collection for you so you can use them again.

When you choose Photo Gallery under Image, it just adds a thumbnail size image to your page, rather than a full gallery. So a gallery in Homestead is just a grid of separate image files you can enlarge by clicking on them. That's not exactly true: You can add more images to a single element from the side panel. You can add a caption and resize the thumbnails, but you only get the one gallery style. It's not a bad one, but it can't display full screen. Another option is to use the Image Scroller element, which, as its name suggests, creates a moving marquee of the images you add; each can link to another URL or page.

Once a photo's uploaded, you can drag it around anywhere on the page. And basic photo-editing tools like its crop, brightness, frames and effects were perks not found in all competing website builders. I found it easy to resize photos on my page, retaining their aspect ratio.

Making Money
The easiest way to make money from your site is to drop a PayPal button onto it. That requires a PayPal business account, which is free and not hard to get. You associate a product with the button, and have a choice of button styles, though these are only described, not shown, and they're generic Buy buttons, rather than PayPal branded. After pubbing my site, my button launched a PayPal window so the money could start flowing to my account. There are also donation and payment form elements you can add to any page.

For a bit more commercial appeal, you can build a full online store, but there's a catch: It's an $9.99-per-month extra-cost option, even for Business Plus plan holders. That's a total of $70.98 per month for what other builders like Squarespace and Weebly give you for about $25 per month. The Product Manager lets you add a photo, SKU or ID, category, and shipping charge. But there's a reason it's called simple: There's no inventory, promotions, or integrated shipping options. The Stripe commerce service, offered by several other site builders, gives sellers a lot more powerful tools.

There's no built-in feature for adding affiliate ads to your site if that's how you want to make money from it. You'd have to use custom HTML code from an affiliate site for this.

Blogging and Community
I've mentioned that you can add social follow buttons to a page, but there's no Facebook or Twitter feed widget like those found in other site builders. If you add a guest book element, visitors can sign into your site and leave comments. Below the Text element is a Blog choice. The editor offers the standard font and image formatting.

I like that you can save a blog post as a draft for later publication. Unfortunately, though, you can't set it to publish at a specified date and time. Site visitors can add comments without signing up, if they enter a CAPTCHA. You can delete a comment if it offends; there's no way to turn off commenting entirely, though. Signing into your site for the guest book doesn't tie in with commenting, and there's no way to restrict access to your site with signup memberships.

Publishing Your Site
I like that Homestead lets you save your site without having to publish it out to the Internet, something surprisingly not offered by some other site builders. After you publish, a small dialog will suggest promoting the new Web content on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Using Homestead gets your site in the Homestead Index, which groups sites by category, and highlights new, highly rated sites as well as those offering discounts. Maybe it's not the most-visited page on the Internet, but it could help your SEO to be linked on a major site. Another site-promotion option is to use LocalLift to include your business in local directories.

Traffic Analytics
I'm really impressed with the included site statistics that came with my Homestead account. Some site builders offer very limited stats or make you install third-party plugins. Right from the Websites Manager page you can see the number of visitors to your site. But the View Stats button gets you far more detailed information. You'll see a bar chart, and you can filter by hour, day, week, month, or year. You can check up on page views, visits, uniques, new visitors, and returning visitors. You can even dig into referrers, visitor profiles, and more. It's a rich set of tools that reminds me of Adobe Omniture in its power. You can even add tracking filters based on IP addresses.

Mobile Site Building—MIA
Mobile site design—or the lack thereof—is a serious weakness in Homestead. There's no mobile-view simulator like you get with many newer site builders, such as DudaOne and Weebly. In fact, it was difficult to find any info on mobile site building at Homestead.com or in its Help documentation. I actually found suggestions to use DudaOne in Homestead's help and in an online support chat session.

If that's the recommendation, I'm not sure why you wouldn't just use DudaOne for everything—desktop and mobile—and skip Homestead entirely. My test Homestead site showed up on my iPhone (Start for Free at Weebly) exactly as it did on the PC, with no responsive design reformatting. That's a big problem, when you consider that mobile Web visits are starting to exceed those from computers. Furthermore, search engines are starting take mobile site formatting into account in their site rankings, in the massive SEO upheaval that's been dubbed the Mobilegeddon. By this measure, Homestead is terribly outdated.

Help and Site Transferability, or Lack Thereof
I received good support from Homestead's online chat support staff. The help is in Q&A form—I'd rather have definitive well-written help, but I was generally able to find authoritative information on the support site. Finally, if you're looking to move your Homestead site to another Web host, you're out of luck. Most Web-based site-builders resemble Homestead in this, but Squarespace let you export to WordPress format and Weebly gives you access to all your server files.

No Mobile? No Deal
In testing, I actually found Homestead more modern and powerful than its long history might indicate, but distinct shortcomings remain. The builder and site-management interface is clear and well designed. And traffic statistics are top-notch. But Homestead still does fall short of the really modern site builders by not offering responsive designs that change to fit the screen they're displayed on, and a nearly total lack of mobile site building is a big miss in this site builder. On top of that, it's pricey compared with the competition. For a service that delivers everything you need at a lower price, check out our website builder Editors' Choice, Weebly.

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