A great design-your-own-website for small businesses

Back to our regularly scheduled rants shortly.



In the mean time, if you have a small business and aren't a total website design guru, check out Homestead. They offer over 2,000 really detailed website templates for a variety of businesses to use with as much or as little of their own changes as they need. They seem to have a really good variety of styles, layouts, colors, etc., so they don't all look like they came out of the same box like, oh, Blogger templates. :) The overall small business website design concept seems pretty usable. I think even my mom, who first tried email after age 70, could manage to put up a site with it.

There are specific sites targeted for many areas such as real estate website design. If the many templates aren't specific enough to your business, they also offer custom website design. That can also be a lot of help for people looking for a web presence but quite lacking in computer saavy. Their prices and services tell you how much help they can provide and for what fees ($600-1000).

For people who need more than just basic text and images, they offer ecommerce website design. You can easily create a storefront and upload your product information plus tax and shipping costs.


Homestead offers a basic website package for $4.99/month though it has pretty limited features such as no included domain name or email, only five web pages, 25 Meg of storage and so on. The more real packages are $19.99 or $49.99 a month which include a far better range of features. These aren't the cheapest nor the fanciest things out there, but they far excel over basic web hosting in the range of templates and help they can provide to anyone looking to create a small business website. There is a free 30-day trial, so anyone can give it a test drive.

Checking out a new website, http://www.wevoke.com

Seems like a cool concept...it lets you pick what sort of emotion you want to feel, and then selects from its vast array of links to provide you with suitable news. I picked "I want to feel 'Most happy' from the last 'day' in category 'Animals'" and got a couple stories on saving animal shelter pets.

The default seems to be "most angering" which I guess has its place, though personally, I find a lot of typical TV news these days to fit that category quite well.

I suppose the site is limited by the range of user-provided links that it has at any moment, but that is not so unusual these days, in the world of wikipedia.org, yelp.com and so on.


The site has some roughness to work out in terms of navigation and overall functionality but I assume that will happen in time. One very minor peeve, when you click to register and it asks for your info to contact them, it says Name, Street, Suburb, State...A person i oh, I don' t know, a major municipality such as Chicago might take offense to the 'suburb' thing....

Still, seems like a cool concept, hope it takes off well.....

Road rant..

Life has me driving way more on the expressway than usual of late. I know this is nothing new, but why are so many drivers so clueless and/or obnoxious or is it just too much caffeine?

It's 10pm and everyone is cruising happily at 70+mph yet I glance up and see two headlights adhered to my rear bumper, even when I am in the middle lane and they could just go around. I happily tap the brake just a speck in case they zoned out and it does no good and they get even closer if that is possible. So of course I wait until a semi is in the next lane and then slow down just enough to block them in next to it. Still fast enough so no one can complain. I stay like that until I think they get even more frustrated, then when they drop back and go around the truck, I speed up just to see them in front of it...and of course they are on their cell phone, no big surprise. Oh, and it is usually a big SUV too.

Three cheers for public transportation and better yet, walking!

I swear...

I won't give up my dreams, goals and ambitions...though sometimes daily life tries so hard to take them away. We are having the worst session of thunderstorms and flooding in 20 years.
It's hard to think about writing, drawing and being a well-rounded person when you have to keep the water from trashing the basement and the child from having nightmares...

Ok, so I got a scooter

A bit behind the curve, sure, but then I was way over 12 when the razor-type things first came out, even over college age I guess. The kiddo wanted a two-wheeled one, too big for her toddler version and they had such good deals at overstock.com, where the Titan claimed to hold up to 350 lbs (way more than anyone I know, for sure, though I'm not sure I believe it), I figured why not.

It was really a lot of fun going scootering w/the child and her friend and they don't seem to think it's too silly. A fun change from the bike.


Most of this blog has been insignificant random rambling so far, but it was originally started in a midlife crisis mode, so I'm sure more of that will need to come out soon, be warned....

It's all relative

Well, she can't ride her bike without training wheels yet, but she Can use a wrench to take them off and on, and the pedals too, and even tighten the axle nuts enough. I think that makes me even more proud.

Things you never thought you'd need to say to your children, Take 1

Today's was: "DON'T throw your shoes onto the garage roof", which followed shortly after "Don't carve your name into the stone of the porch with a gas line marking flag you pulled out of the ground at the construction site near your school...."

The first classic one, when she was 3 or so, was "Don't lick your shoes"...and we had to say it more than once.....eeeeewwwwww......

I'm sure this just gets harder the older they get. I can't wait to see what Take 147 is, and if it involves the police.