At first glance, this tool looks stupendous!
They have a lovely intro video, pricing tiers on their home page, and a simple 1-2-3 approach, all on their home page. Great marketing and user-friendly at first glance. Love it!
Industry Specific?
Homestead website builder’s templates can be used for any industry. They have a “Design Templates” section on their site that gives you a feel for the design quality of the website builder templates you will have access to. They also have a Customer Sites page, showing you what others have done with the templates. The only complaint I have is that the Customer Sites page doesn’t link directly to the live websites.
Pricing
There are three pricing options. They were VERY hard to find; I had to Google for “homestead pricing” in order to find them. Bad Homestead, bad.
Homestead lets you start your account with a 30-day free trial. After that, you will be charged either $4.99, $19.99, or $59.99 a month. They used to have a setup fee of $20.00, but it appears they don’t charge that anymore. If you opt-in to the $4.99 a month package, you are limited to 5 pages, which is a major bummer because you can’t do a whole lot for search engine marketing if you only have five pages.
Would you like some free help preparing for your site? Cool. Here’s a free download I created just for you.
Mobile?
Look at Homestead’s Features page. Does it mention mobile or responsive? Does it? Nope.
So I went to one of the sites they have listed as a customer site and tried it out on my phone. The website loaded just fine, but it is not responsive or loading a mobile-only version. *sigh* It’s kind of a big deal right now to have that sort of thing.
In What Browser Does the Website Builder Work?
Pretty much any browser out there works with this tool as far as I can tell.
Search Engine Optimization?
Nothing is mentioned about search engine optimization. So I looked at one of their customer sample sites and found that yes, somehow, custom meta information was entered for each site page. This is good. What is bad is that I don’t know if I, the customer, get to enter this information if I have the basic package or if I have to pay for a higher-end package to be able to do it, or if it is auto-generated by Homestead’s website builder.
They do have a stats feature. They do not mention if the customer can enter their own Google Analytics code or if the Homestead stats are the only option.
Blog Features?
Yes, as long as you get the middle tier or higher.
Ease of Use
Based on the video from their home page, the Homestead website builder tool looks super easy to use. Yay!
Use Your Own URL?
Yes.
My Initial Impression
This tool looks like a great solution. It’s not the least expensive or the most robust, but for a basic, quick website for those that only want a brochure site, you’ll be fine. For the more intense site, Homestead’s website builder has some of the tools you will want, so if you are dipping your toes into more intense online solutions, you’ll still be just fine. But I have concerns about Google Analytics code and mobile-friendly experiences, which can matter greatly when you decide to get super serious about using your website as an online business-generating tool.
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