Report > A Quick Review of Homestead.com

A Quick Review of Homestead.com

Homestead.com is a pretty good site to navigate and explore. The site is generally clear and precise, and importantly, it is a site that will host your web site for free.

The "Homestead Editor" is a great tool for users -- it’s a web page editor that allows you to create and work on a Homestead hosted web page. However, that’s just the problem. The Homestead editor is so easy-to-use they make it so you don’t want to stop using it. You wish you could use it for a regular yourname.com site.

The interface of the editor is pretty simple, but the web pages you can generate are great! Their editor is simple to use, and good for beginners (I recommend Microsoft FrontPage for "real" web pages). The editor allows you to highlight a word a click a button that says "link" to link that word to another page, which is much easier than knowing the HTML tags. The editor also features a simple FTP program, which works fairly quickly. They also help you insert images from some images from other sites. I suggest that they get better pictures from the other sites, because the ones they have are pretty useless, unless you’re doing an "animals" web page. The editor does offer an HTML section, for advanced Homestead users. The editor also includes a free counter, stats, chat room, and tons of other great features!

There are some problems with Homestead and their editor. For example, the Homestead editor makes make my computer perform "illegal operations" too often, causing my machine to freeze up. Once it freezes up, your whole computer goes into a coma, until you press Ctrl + Alt + Del. Once you do that, you have to shut down Homestead and load the editor again. Loading the Homestead editor takes much too long. They say that it should take several minutes, and it does. I don’t suggest downloading anything while loading the Homestead editor. It may freeze your computer up or it may go much slower than usual.

Another problem with the Homestead editor is saving your web page. Saving your web page usually takes about 30 seconds to 1 minute, which isn't too bad. But, there are problems sometimes with this process. On many occasions, the Homestead editor doesn’t even save. I often get this annoying message:

"This page could not be saved for an unknown reason. If the problem persists, use the 'Save as' feature from the file menu". Or, contact support@homestead.com".

That gets really annoying. Homestead should actually try to take the time to get this problem fixed, as the same problem happens to all my friends often too. The Homestead support staff is not very helpful either. I e-mailed them over 6 months ago on some subject, and they never e-mailed me back.

There is a downloadable Homestead editor, but of course, you can only use it with Homestead. The downloadable editor is absolutely worthless, but it’s supposed to save you the time of loading the Homestead editor every time. I would personally recommend the online editor over the downloadable one. The downloadable editor works nearly the same as the online editor, but there are many problems with it. The images often come out blurry, and the links are easily broken. Homestead should try to fix this editor up as soon as possible. It has the ability to be quite useful!

Overall, I would conclude that Homestead is a great website provider:

Pros: Online editor is fairly easy to use, Homestead will host a site for free

Cons: Bad tech support, bad offline editor