Cheap yet Professional DIY Web Design
January 13, 2009 by Efficient Entrepreneur
Filed under DIY, Other Resources
Microsoft makes waves in the Web Hosting World
With Microsoft’s newest venture, Homestead, the company has decided to move into the web hosting and design realm. Check out Homestead and take a quick tour of their easy-to-use building features. The program has its positives and negatives, but all-in-all is a nice fit for someone with a tight budget looking for a professional look and little to no interest in programming.
For example, Homestead would be ideal for you if:
- You are a photographer looking for a professional looking site to display your photos and to have people just email you if they are interested in purchasing your services or prints.
- You have a place or a group you want to advertise. Like a restaurant, banquet hall, club or organization.
- You have a service business.
Right now they are offering a 30-day free trial. After that it’s only $4.99/month for a website, $9.99/month for a store selling less than 100 products and between $24.99 and $229.99 for a professional, full-scale e-commerce store. Though, there are much better and cheaper options for e-commerce available on the web. If you are looking to just create a site for yourself, your services, your organization or your destination business and you have no interest in getting into the nitty-gritty of web design, Homestead is that solution.
The Positives: With 2000+ Template Designs, your site will come out looking professional and snazzy! On the e-commerce side they offer about 200 templates, still enough to keep your site looking fresh and original. The user interface is very straight-forward. Each webpage you design is broken up into pieces that you can just click on and edit. Just upload your logo, text and photos and your site is up and running. Have a new event you want to advertise? Just log back into the backend and change the text whenever you feel like it. Just drag-and-drop what you want where you want it!
At $4.99/month Homestead is very competitively priced for what it offers. Hosting alone from any major hosting company at best would be $4.99/month with a much smaller and amateur web design collection. So for the price, you are getting a professional, user-friendly site.
The Negatives: I would not recommend Homestead as your e-commerce solution. There are some strong players in the e-commerce software market that have already streamlined their product and are usually filled with crucial features to help you analyze your sales stats. And those are the free e-commerce options! The paid ones kick it up another notch.
Homestead is now an Intuit company, but it was originally built by Microsoft. And Microsoft is Microsoft…meaning that they are very proprietary. So if you ever decide that Homestead isn’t fitting your needs, you can’t take it with you. That design you’re using on Homestead’s server belongs to Homestead so you’ll have to start from scratch. Whereas if say you were hosting your site on Lunarpages and you have a great site built by a designer, or on your own, or using the web design software they offer, and decide to switch to Bluehost you can take your designs with you, even if you used their software to design your site. Because of Homestead’s desire to protect its designs and coding, you may have restricted access to your FTP and the files on your server. But if you’re not into coding and aren’t planning on hiring someone to design your site for you, then these restrictions will probably never phase you.
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