The reason I'm giving homestead.com such a high rating is because it would appear to be the best free home for any website. You don't even have to have annoying banner ads pasted all over your web pages. However, as someone who designs web pages using both FrontPage and Dreamweaver, I find homestead.com to be so very frustrating that I might suggest paying an ISP for your own site instead.

Homestead offers a lot for nothing. You get 16 Megs of storage space, which is more than enough for any company that doesn't have thousands of pictures or media files. If you set up your company store with homestead, they will automatically submit your URL to at least nine search engines. Their web authoring program is completely WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get). Using this, you can choose from hundreds of their still pictures and clip art, and still be able to upload your own pictures and media files of all the major extensions. There are also many templates which are okay, but oh so generic. They even have a shopping cart system built into their web authoring program that uses I-escrow. They offer, but I haven't used, chatrooms and a customer service button as well. Also, any item you post for sale will also get placed into a special homestead listing that anyone can search.

And your domain name is very easy to remember, and access. Let's say your webpage name is going to be Xpage. Then your URL would be one of these two links:

http://xpage.homestead.com/index.html
http://www.homestead.com/xpage/index.html


Pretty snazzy huh?

It sounds almost too good to be true, doesn't it?

Well, it is if you have a lot of patience, no knowledge of HTML and a fast connection.

The problem with using homestead is exactly what makes it so good: their powerful web authoring tool. It does what it is supposed to, and pretty well. However, I believe it is a java app, and a fairly large one at that. I'm not sure of its full size, but even with broadband it seems to take at least 30 seconds to even load up. It would certainly take several minutes with a standard modem. Also, as a large java app, it is fairly unstable. I think a crash every 20 minutes would not be uncommon. It seems to eat up all my available resources. I found myself saving every few minutes, which actually ads to its instability as the memory leaks grow and grow.

It isn't really that difficult to make simple webpages on homestead, especially if you start with one of their templates. However, I found it frustrating because I could not plug in any raw HTML. And there is a limitation once you start wanting do any powerful sort of layout involving tables or split images.

Recently, Homestead has added a $29.99 per month professional service. They appear to give you more of what you already get, including a true domain name, full tech support and possibly better listings.

In summary. It is free. It does work. The pages don't look bad, nor does there need to be any annoying flashing banners. But it is so frustrating for someone who already knows how to edit their own page, that instead I suggest learning Frontpage and jumping right in.


Recommended: Yes

Monthly fees (US$): 0.00 or $29.99
Platform used: Windows NT
Hosted on Secure Server: Yes
Database used: Oracle
Main focus of Web site: Sales/E-commerce