www.portraitsofalaska.homestead.com -- My Summer Project... W/O
Written: Jun 21 '01 (Updated Jun 21 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Free. Free. Free. Free. Free. Free. And easy to use.
Cons: The site slows down considerable during peak hours.
The Bottom Line: Homestead.com offers an excellent free web hosting for personal sites such as mine.
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| flak-attak's Full Review: Homestead.com |
About the time the dark patches start rudely interrupting the mesmerizingly white landscape of winter, I finally begin to allow myself to think again about summer.... My pulse quickens a little at all the prospects: volleyball, basketball, hiking, camping, fishing, and the scenery. Oh the scenery! I can't even describe for you how exquisite the views.
But wait! Now that I bought my handy dandy little Canon Scanner (will be reviewed at a later time), I can actually show you all without mailing each of you a handful of postcards.
I began shopping around for the least expensive web hosting service so that I could put a gallery of my favorite shot online for the world to see. World Wide Web – get it?
Eventually, I decided that homestead.com was the best service for me, especially since it was free (which is pretty inexpensive). So I began the long but rewarding process toward having my very own website. Here is an account of the journey.
I began by deciding a name for my website, which by the way was very difficult. I nearly filled a page with potential names until I found one that I liked: Portraits of Alaska. It had a nice ring to it – as if I really knew what I was doing. (I really don't of course, but it's fun to act like it.) So my website became www.portraitsofalaska.homestead.com. Of course, with the free version of homestead, you don't get a free domain name. However homestead.com does offer a professional service with which you get your very own ".com" address without the homestead suffix.
A very important thing to note about deciding the name for your website. Homestead doesn't tell you that once you decide on your name you cannot change it. The only way you can change the name of your website is to create another free site and then transfer your original site to the new one.
OK. The next thing I did was to enter all my personal information, which was pretty easy.
Then I came to the part where I needed to enter some key words for people to find while searching for my site and others like it. Unfortunately I skipped this part hoping to come up with some key words later when I had established my site. BAD IDEA.
Again, homestead failed to tell me that I couldn't come back to that part. So my site has no key words.
Anyway, I finished entering the information and began to build. The first page that you will arrive at will be a "Choose Building Methods." You can choose to use their Page Building Wizard or you can start with a blank page. For the first few pages that you build, I recommend using the Wizard as I did; then after you've done it a couple of times, you'll choose the blank page.
First of course, I built the index.html page. Homestead offers a myriad of wonderful "elements" for your page. Elements are simply blocks of already-written essential components of your site: e.g. hit counters, photo galleries, text blocks, web polls, and many more.
I decided on many of these, arranged my page, and then I began the tedious process of uploading all my photos through my ancient dial-up connection. Then I went back and downsized all my photos to make them under 100K........and uploaded them all again. Typical male efficiency.
Anyway, after forsaking epinions, housework, wife, and country to work on my very own website for Great Alaskan Shots – I'm semi-finished. Eventually, I'd like to set up some kind of check out for people to buy pictures, but I may have to choose Homestead Professional for that.
Speaking of Homestead, I was very happy with their customer service and their offer of unlimited free sites. If you'd like to jump into the cesspool of the WWW – headfirst – then homestead.com is the easiest and most cost-effective out there. (Wherever "there" is.)
BTW, Please check out my website if you get the chance. It's www.portraitsofalaska.homestead.com. Don't leave without signing the guestbook.
"This review is part of the Summer Solstice Write-Off hosted by wovengold to celebrate the long days of summer. Please take a few minutes to check out the summer scribblings of amycamus, art_ana, BeeCharmer, bmcnichol,
caspian, eplovejoy, flak-attak, Girl_Goddess, jo.com, jro26, marytara, naphtalia, Pearman, phineaskc, Social14, wardukeky, windfish and wovengold. Go to http://wovengold.tripod.com/solstice for links to their write-off submissions. Thanks for reading!"
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
flak-attak
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Member: Sam Flack
Location: Copper Center, Alaska
Reviews written: 34
Trusted by: 23 members
About Me:
WORK HARDER! Millions on welfare depend on you....
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