EVALUATION OF HOMESTEAD INTUIT WEBSITE SITEBUILDER


#1.

Homestead is about to make a classic business school case study boo-boo, I think. 

It has stopped updating, despite not informing clients, its flagship desktop sitebuilder, in 2007. 

It is now emphasizing what it sees as "the future", the online Sitebuilder Plus.  Sitebuilder Plus, despite its name, is a dramatically inferior product that I really cannot use. 

If you use the online sitebuilder, be aware (though I was never told) that the pages get a bit out of joint as you hit around a 1,000 pages.  However, despite the claim that the problems were due to the size of my website, the same spacing problems (where the website does not match how it looks in the sitebuilder) occur even on the smaller ones. 

If you don't post much and you don't care about the poor functionality and poor efficiency of the online Sitebuilder Plus, it might be ok for very small sites.

They have a new owner now, so perhaps that owner will see the value in developing the Sitebuilder Plus while keeping the online sitebuilder (which the old owner wanted to phase out, in a fit of "non-thinking" miscalculation).   The online sitebuilder is a good product, so use that instead of the dramatically inferior Sitebuilder Plus.



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Write up before 7/18/13 addition on Sitebuilder Plus, per link to the left side.​

I am writing this page because I can't seem to get their attention to correct certain malfunctions of spacing!  If they do the adjustments and it works, then I'll, of course, recommend them, for the ease with which the program can be used.

The service when things are down is good.  But somehow I can get nowhere when I talk about how the screen in Sitebuilder, on my computer, will not match with what that is when published. 

When I mention that to the service agents, they say "huh".  I'm not sure if they are only experienced in the online version of sitebuilder only.  But I use the one that is the software on my computer because I can navigate via a tree outline to find my pieces (of which there are about 1,000), as it is impossible (to my knowledge) to get to what I want without having to do a massive scroll-down.

I have to do constant publishing, seeing how my screen and the online differ and then artifically adjust mine to reflect that.  I am not sure why they cannot adjust their software not to produce those differences - and it is frustrating, besides taking a huge amount of time, to adjust so that the webpage online shows up decently.  Sometimes, if I revise a page, the lines magically move on their own, so I've got to do some more adjustments. 

The following occurs regularly:

The text boxes will shift upward an unknown amount, so I have to publish and compare and then adjust my working copy to move it down, often overlapping into the words below (which doesn't show up online).

I have to do a hard return before a word that is close to the end of a line, though there appears to be plenty of space to the margin, as when I publish it it'll move one word to the next line and then move the words that were there before down one additional line.  Sometimes it has changed the spacing so that the words I wrote on one line are end up at the margin online though I've got several blank spaces on my line. (It seems that it is getting worse, as in Life Management Contents/Links page, a word at the end of a line that still had almost a half inch of space shifted downward, leaving one word on the line and the line below it moved down one more line.  On the internet page it looks like the end of the lines are closer but that is because visually the publication moved the words even further to the right!) 

And then, when I do a text box, some of the lines will appear after the bottom of the box on the web.  You can see the bottom of the box above a few of the written lines in the box! 

If I space over to "stack" words for a diagram, the appearance on my computer has everything lined up correctly but the page that shows up on the internet will have moved it over to the left, sometimes significantly.    A "stack" looks like this:

         sssss            xxxxxxx    -->   fffff
         yyyy            zzzzzz             gggg
        aaaaa            bbbbbb            hhhh

  On the page To Master Life..., to get that straight on the internet, I had to do this in sitebuilder:             Goal
                                     Line  (and even on this page it moved the version on the
                                              internet two spaces to the left!

While in Sitebuilder, a _______ doesn't appear on my computer screen in Helvetica and a few other fonts, so I have to highlight the area and use verdana.

I will try to publish a page and it will pop up that there is no connection.  When I press connect, it does not do so.  So I have to shut everything down and restart the whole thing, which takes a while to re-load. 



I have stopped importing my Word documents, as it is hard to get a revision of a page into the file manager.   I delete the old page and then I import the new revised page, with the same title, so I can keep all links to it intact without having to find every place it is linked.  Somehow after uploading it and publishing, the old page reappears!  I would love to be able to replace these, as it is easier than creating a whole new webpage to make it easier to do a revision any time I want to. 

Notice how as I published the link to this page on Technical And Computer Related Resources, how Homestead slipped below the text box!