Saturday, June 20, 2009

Homestead Bulk Email Restrictions Solution- Aweber

Homestead temporarily suspended my email account because of the amount of subscribers that I was sending emails to on a daily basis. I did not know it but the restrictions on the account only allow users to send fifty emails at one time.

One of my lists for daily youth devotions had grown to over 3500 subscribers.

The compliance team for Homestead put the clamps down and I was forced to find a different email service to send out the mass mailings with every day.

What started out to be a headache turned into a blessing. I found Aweber!


If you have never heard of Aweber their system is amazing. You can send unlimited bulk emails and the beauty of it is that you can totally automate everything. This is a step up from what I had to contend with when I was using the Homestead newsletter system combined with H-mail.

With Aweber you create a form that you can embed on your Sitebuilder page using the HTML code that is created with your custom form selections. It’s very easy to do. When someone submits an email address they are automatically (instantly) sent an email that you have created. Then, you design follow up emails and choose when they will be sent after the first email that your subscriber opts in with.

In order to send bulk emails out to my list of subscribers with Homestead I had to login in everyday and create a new email and send it. This is a great feature that they provide to us, but because of the amount of emails that I send daily, finding Aweber is the best thing that could have happened to me.

I am grateful to the compliance team for placing restrictions on my account which forced me to find Aweber as a solution to the problem.



Article about the Homestead Users website
Homestead SiteBuilder Help

Friday, June 19, 2009

Sitemap

You must have a sitemap if you’re using the Homestead website, sitebuilder program. If you are not familiar with this feature, you can get a tutorial that will help you create, install and register one with Google through a free webmaster’s account.

The technique of adding one is very simple once you understand how it is to be done. It is really just a six step process.

1) Create a file
2) Create an XML sitemap
3) Upload it into your Sitebuilder
4) Register with Google for a webmaster’s account
5) Add a special code in the advanced section of the properties editor that they provide to you.
6) Verify your website and your done

Here’s a link to a tutorial on how to add a Sitemap to a Homestead Website

This is not anything that is included in your hosting account. It is something that is entirely separate and must be updated every time you make a new post on your site. When I was learning how to add a sitemap to my Homestead website, I asked one of the technical support professionals at the company and they informed me that it must be updated with every new post.

The purpose of the sitemap is basically what the name implies and by having one it makes it easier for Google to crawl or spider your website.

Homestead Users
Homestead Website Help
Ebook Increase Website Traffic

Friday, June 12, 2009

Can’t Download SiteBuilder Update-Possible Solution



Every once in a while Homestead updates the SiteBuilder program and we can’t publish a website page until we upgrade to the new configuration. But what should you do if you close the window and reopen it and it won’t download the new features? This recently happened to me and I have a few possible solutions to share with you.

What can be done when a Homestead SiteBuilder update won't load?
I discovered this first option by contacting tech support. After asking me several questions, the phone technician suggest that I open my SiteBuilder and click on the help tab at the top of the page. As the menu dropped down, I was directed to click on the selection that said, “Force Update.” This was the first solution that was attempted and it failed.
Awesome Video-Homestead Intuit User
Tip: Do not delete and download the program again before trying the next suggestion.

I tried to do the previous suggestion while I had the Homestead representative on the phone, when it failed I then asked, “what now?” He then proceeded to suggest that I go into my computer and under “add/remove programs,” delete the SiteBuilder that was installed on my PC. Then, he suggested that I download the program again.

Well, being a computer operator for some time now, I thought that there might be an easier solution. So, I asked him if he thought that if I restarted my computer and booted it up again if that would help. He replied, “Possibly, give it a try.”

I restarted my windows 2000 program, logged into my SiteBuilder and the new update began to download. Once it finished I opened the website page that I had previously been trying to publish and it worked. I can’t believe that I almost went through removing the program and reinstalling it. My suggestion had worked and a solution was accomplished.

Homestead E-Book

SiteBuilder Beginner
Deleting Homestead/SiteBuilder Page

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Adding a Dropdown Menu to Homestead Website-Is this feature available?

Have you visited the official Homestead Blog? Would you like to add a dropdown navigation feature to your SiteBuilder website pages? Recently I decided to see if I could find out how to add this feature to my pages.

First off I discovered that many people would like to be able to just click a button and have the option of adding a menu that lists website pages in a main category that will drop whenever it is clicked on.

I found the answer or actually several questions about this topic as I was searching for a solution or an HTML code of something that would let me have this navigation feature on my site.

So this is the big question that seems to be a common thread in many of the comments listed at the Homestead blog, “when will this feature be added to the sitebuilder program?”

I guess by now you have figured out that a menu that drops with several links within a category is not available at this time from the Intuit Company.

Here is a link to post on Homestead’s Blog where the readers respond saying that they want a dropdown menu. The article is called, Add a New Page to Your Website. I think you will I find that we are not the only ones who want the company to create this feature.

One person that commented on this particular article said that Homestead Users have been asking for a dropdown menu for years.

Hopefully soon I can write an article or make a video that shows how to add a dropdown menu to a Homestead website. For now, it is not an available option from the Intuit Company.

If you’re like me, you love the ease of using the SiteBuilder to build websites. I’m hopeful that someday soon the designers at the company will respond to their customer’s requests and develop a drop menu that will work with a Homestead website. My guess is that they are already working on adding it, just because it’s such a popular request from Homestead Users.

So, there you have it I never found anything that explained how to add a menu that drops down to a SiteBuilder page.
SiteBuilder Statistics
Optimization
Google Webmasters Homestead Website

Friday, June 5, 2009

Checking Your Statistics-Homestead’s Real Tracker Gives Accurate Stats


Did you know that you can find out how many visitors are coming to your Homestead website every day? Do you know that inside your main account you can access this feature and discover what keywords people are using to find your website pages? This service is provided with your Intuit/Homestead account. It is called Real Tracker and the best part is that the program is totally free.

Benefits of Using This Free Statistics System



  1. With this system you will be able to see how many people have visited your website on a specific day or days combined.

  2. You have options to view where your traffic came from, what pages they entered the website on, where they surfed while on your site and on which page they used to depart.

  3. It is possible to see the exact keywords that people used to find your website through the search engines. You will be able to tell if they came from Google, Yahoo or MSN.

  4. By clicking on the link provide, you will be taken the search engine results page that your visitor used to get to your Homestead/Intuit website. The actual page will have the keyword phrase entered in the search box when you get there.

  5. There are graphs and charts available that you can look at to see what the performance of your site has been like over several months.


The link to this Real Tracker statistics feature is found in your main account. Here is Homestead Websites Account Login link.



How to Get Homestead Website Statistics



  • Login to your main account page and click on “My Account” at the top left.

  • Use the menu at the top center of the page to select the website you want to study.

  • In the center column just below “Promote your site,” is a link that says “View Your Website Statistics,” click on it.


That’s all there is to it. Now just explore all of your options and get to know the Real Tracker functions really well. By checking your websites statistics you can learn how people are finding your Homestead site and focus on making changes to your pages so that you get more traffic from specific pages that are already performing well. Sometimes by just adding an s to a word or even taking one away your rankings with search engines can change.



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