Homestead Helps Build Sweet Home Page

Updated SiteBuilder tool has simple editor and add-ons to help you build a nice place to visit.

Paul Heltzel, special to PC World

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Pay for a Web site? Why, you'd rather pay for water...or your browser. Ha! There's no shortage of providers who will beg you to build a site on their server (with display advertisements on your pages, of course). Homestead's recently updated SiteBuilder makes a compelling argument to settle in with the free Web host.

I took a look at SiteBuilder and built two quick personal and business pages. Primarily, I wanted to see how Homestead.com's editor handled its newest feature: the capability to start with template pages, then edit them to suit one's needs. In previous versions, you started with a predesigned page and used clumsy HTML-based tools to edit the page. Or, you started with a blank page using the Java-based SiteBuilder editor.

When you want to create or edit a page in SiteBuilder, you must first wait for the Java program to download to your system. Over a 28.8-kbps modem, this takes just a few minutes, as advertised (you can also download and run the program from your hard drive to avoid this hassle.)

SiteBuilder looks and acts like its competitor, Yahoo's PageBuilder. Both are simple-to-use, word processor-like tools that make HTML editing easy. They're no better or worse than the free editors that come with Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer.

The main reason to use Homestead is, of course, the free Web space and the generous helpings of art and templates that make creating online invitations or other types of pages easy and fun. The template pages are attractive and useful. Often, just the opposite is true when you rely on premade pages, even those provided by expensive, shrink-wrapped editors.

In addition, the template pages match each other, so your chat page can match your resume page in look and feel--a helpful, and often overlooked, feature.

Another unique feature is voice chat. Homestead recently added a simple voice-chat plug-in from HearMe, which offers surprisingly good quality.

Homestead isn't perfect. In particular, the interface for getting started is unnecessarily cluttered, especially compared to those at Yahoo and Tripod. And for my money (or lack thereof) I prefer to create my pages in my program of choice, and then FTP them to my site. But inexperienced Web builders--and those who can't pass up a free Web page--will get along with Homestead just fine.

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