Homestead Launches SearchLight (June 30, 2006) - Web site creation software, e-commerce and online marketing solutions provider Homestead Technologies (homestead.com) announced on Thursday it has launched SearchLight (searchlight.homestead.com). The service provides users with an affordable and efficient way to deliver advertising to small business Web sites from over 20 different search engines, including Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com and more.
The service is available to both Homestead subscribers and small business owners who host their Web sites with other Web hosting providers. Homestead helps small business owners become successful online by making their Web sites appear more prominently and frequently within appropriate search engine results. This enables potential customers to find their products or services faster and more easily.
"SearchLight solves one of the greatest challenges faced by small businesses online," says Justin Kitch, Homestead founder and CEO. "SearchLight strives to level the playing field with the larger, national businesses that are reaping most of the benefits from Internet advertising and eroding the prospects of small, local businesses that make our communities unique."
Increasing a Web site's "natural" search ranking is complicated, time consuming and often concludes with varied and unpredictable results. Homestead simplifies search engine advertising by eliminating the time and hassle associated with launching and managing a search engine advertising program.
Homestead Launches SiteBuilder Lite (March 3, 2006) - Web site creation software provider Homestead Technologies (homestead.com) announced on Friday it has released its new SiteBuilder Lite, which is compatible with Mac OS X.
SiteBuilder Lite enables small business owners to edit and update the frequently changing aspects of their Web sites. It can be used with Homestead QuickSites to build a professional small business Web site from scratch or with Homestead's advanced editor SiteBuilder. The modified version of Homestead's SiteBuilder offers 'DIY' or full-service Web site creation, hosting, marketing and e-commerce capabilities.
"Homestead has created SiteBuilder Lite using AJAX, because it offers users a smoother, more immediate editing experience that will feel like they're doing so on an application, rather than a Web browser," says Thai Bui, Homestead's CTO.
SiteBuilder Lite and QuickSites, launched jointly in March of 2005, was named PC Magazine Editors' Choice and also won a DEMOGod award at the Demo@15 conference.
Netcraft Releases December Survey (December 18, 2002) - Internet research organization Netcraft (Netcraft.com) announced on Wednesday that it has released the December 2002 edition of its monthly Web Server Survey.
Despite financial struggles in the telecoms, hosting and domain registration businesses, says Netcraft, many of the metrics measured in the Web server survey grew during 2002. During the year, the number of hostnames responding to the survey fell by over a million, but many of those sites were parked domains and template-produced sites at advertising-supported mass hosting companies. Verisign, register.com and homestead.com collectively lost more than 3 million such sites in 2002, says Netcraft.
According to the survey, the Web became more geographically disparate in 2002, with an increase of 4.1 million host in Europe and Asia-Pacific compensating for the loss of 5.3 million hostnames in the US. Hosting facilities in the rest of the world have caught up with those in the US, says Netcraft, with companies located in well-developed overseas economies repatriating their sites.
The number of active sites, says Netcraft, grew 17.66 percent from January to December, indicating that conventional Web is still expanding. And the number of SSL sites is up by 14 percent. Most notably, says Netcraft, the number of sites using some sort of scripting language on their front pages has increased by more than half. The most common scripting languages, ASP and PHP, have each seen significant increases in deployment as businesses build more sophisticated sites.
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