Web design is a costly expense for your companies business. Let’s face it if you want a website and you don’t have any experience designing websites the option from the Intuit web design (by Homestead) might be an option . Web designers are going to charge you between 1,000 to 2,500, then you’re going to pay $25-50 dollars for them to make updates. The bill can get very high, quickly. Recently, it was called to my attention that Homestead has been using Intuit’s website builder. EIG has purchased a number of big hosting companies like Hostgator, BlueHost, A Small Orange, HostNine, etc. However, if you Google “intuit web design review” you’re going to find a mixed bag of reviews, blog post, and articles regarding their web design.
Before, I get started with Intuit web design I want to make it perfectly clear that Intuit is known for TurboTax, Quickbooks, Quicken, and Mint. I have used them in the past. These are some great tools for managing your finances, but how does Intuit web design stack up for designing websites? In this article I am going to show you exactly what you get when you decide to use them.
Plans
Since most web designers will typically charge $1,000 to $2,500 for a website there are a lot cheaper options which are offered by a lot of the top hosting companies. True, you could take your chances with a novice web developer and find a bargain for $500. However, they are typically overseas developers or website designers that only have a couple of years of experience. Therefore, the website plans might look attractive at a glance. Keep reading because I am going to show you why it’s not worth hiring them to do your website.
Website Design Quality
In my opinion the web design quality with Intuit from Homestead is quite amateur. The templates look like websites that were designed in the 90’s or early 2000’s. You can view Intuit web design samples by clicking here.
As you will see some of the links are actually broken and just redirect to the Homestead website. This is a huge flaw on Homestead’s end and it would be nice if they could provide working links to their templates.
The upfront price does look good at a glance, but upon looking into it more you’re going to have to pay $100 or more just to make changes to your website. This does jack up the price of a $799 or $1299 website even more. You will need to pay your web hosting bill to which is pretty high. Unless you choose to have a website and never updated, which I don’t recommend you do.
Worth The Money or Not?
The simple answer is no I don’t believe they are worth the money. For instance, with their plans you get 1 revision cycle with their basic plan and two with revisions cycles with their Deluxe plan. You also only get a 30 minute consultation or a 60 minutes consultation depending on which plan you choose.
The hosting is actually quite high compared to other companies like GoDaddy and InMotion, too. For instance, the starter plan is $5.99 a month, but it’s limited to 5 pages on your website; this makes it almost useless. The other two plans are $20.99 or $60.99 a month, which is what most companies charge for a VPS plan.
Support With Your Website?
You do get basic and more advanced training with their higher level plans. This does show you the ends and outs to maintaining your website. They do have customer support but their have been various complaints from many other websites that state their customer support is slow, outsourced, and not always the most helpful.
Are They SEO-Friendly Websites?
There are various complaints on Customer Affairs which show that the websites created by Intuit at Homestead are not SEO friendly. Meaning that if you want to receive any traffic from Google, Bing, and Yahoo you could run into some issues. They don’t use the WordPress CMS and upon evaluating their source code I have found that it’s actually quite cluttered. This will certainly keep your website from ranking in the search engines.
Final Verdict
I don’t recommend you use Intuit for your web design needs. They really don’t seem to be a practical solution for your businesses needs. So what options do you have if your looking to have your website designed?
99designs.com. I have used them mostly for logos, but they do have an option to have developers build you a custom website for around $700 dollars. You start a contest and can view tons of different concepts for websites. Then, you pick a winner and can pay for hosting. From there you could pay your developer a monthly fee to make the changes to your website that you will need later.
If you’re looking to do it yourself you could check out these resources down below:
Wealthy Affiliate. This is a program that shows you how to create a website using the WordPress CMS. Their is training that shows you how to actually get targeted traffic too. It’s mostly an affiliate marketing based business model, but you can certainly learn a thing or two about creating websites and marketing yourself online.
Elegant Themes. You can purchase a professionally designed WordPress theme from Elegant themes for under $100 a year. They have an awesome builder called Divi which makes it very easy to develop and design a website. You get unlimited support and will need to purchase your own web hosting, though.
Wix.com. They have hundreds of website templates and you can host with them for $15 to $30 per month. This includes any of their website templates. You don’t have to pay hundreds of dollars for a site design. Overall, it’s a pretty good option for someone on a very tight budget.
Weebly.com. They have a very user-friendly interface that really makes creating a website a breeze. They have a number of different website templates you can use and customized to your liking. You can even host them on their servers for about $12 to $25 per month.
Do you have experience with Intuit websites from Homestead? Please let me know about it in the comments section down below.
TBWHS.com is hosted by GreenGeeks
I was just about ready to purchase a website design from them before reading this. I am so glad I didn’t do it though. It’s sad that they make it appear that your going to be getting a cheap website, but there is always some fine print that states otherwise.
However, I was considering using their website builder and doing it myself for cheap. Do you still feel that it’s a bad option for that?
I have collected about 10 reviews from other webmasters that do use Homestead. Nearly all of them are negative. At this date in time, 8 out 10 of them are negative.
Yes, I do feel there are much better options like Wix and Weebly for doing it yourself. As I stated, the site designs are very basic. There are a lot better options out there other than their web design plans. It doesn’t look like it’s worth the money to me.
But, the hosting prices are very high. This is the worst part. They are about 4x more than most shared hosting plans. Really, I would look elsewhere.
In regards to their customer support I have to say it’s actually quite bad. You get the runaround and you constantly have to be on them in order for them to do something. You get very short answers to your questions. They like to point you to articles and just tell you to read them. I even called them up and they were very rude to me on the phone. They made it seem like I was bugging them because I needed some help.
The websites are very plain. Someone actually commented on my site and told me it looked like a teenager did it. Wow! How professional!
Thanks for sharing.
I spent over $2,000 with Homestead because I had a website done by them in the past year. Really, not all that satisfied with it. Looks just like every other website you see on the internet. Wasn’t really anything special at all.
The bad thing is when you move your website you are using all their software so my site won’t work with GoDaddy now. Instead, I have to have my website completely redeveloped. I am going to go a cheaper route this time. I did find https://www.gowebdesign.com/ which does websites for $599. They look so much better than the one Homestead created for me and they are half the price.
Overall, not very happy with Homestead. They are way overpriced and I will not use them again. Huge mistake on my end, but it’s a lesson I had to learn.
Yeah, there hosting is expensive, and the websites do use their own software which to my understanding only works with them unless this has changed over the years. The kicker is the price they pay to host them on their servers. It’s outrageous!
I have heard good things about GoWebDesign over the years. They do offer a 15-day money back guarantee, too. It looks like they use WordPress as a CMS for their designs. They can even maintain your website for $45/hour after that too 🙂
I had Homestead design a website for me before and it was one of the most horrid things I have ever seen in my life. It took them 1 week to do it which was about the only good thing I can say about it. The site looked so basic and I told them I didn’t want it. You pay all your money upfront and Homestead refused to give me my money back.
I begged and pleaded with them for a refund or at least a prorated one, but nothing was ever granted. Since, then I have migrated away from them. They are very expensive for web hosting and the web design service is a joke. Do yourself a favor and stay away from them!
Yeah, Elaine like I said the websites look like they were designed in 1990’s. Certainly don’t look very modern and are pretty “Plain Jane.”
It stinks that you weren’t happy with the website that they designed for you. Offering some sort or redesign or refund would have been nice, though.
Thanks for letting us know about your experience with them.
I don’t understand how you can state they are overpriced. A website for $799 is a bargain. Then they show you how to make changes to your site. If you were to have a web designer do that for you it would cost $1999 for the website and then $50 dollars an hour. That would be about $2400 in total. I’ve used Homestead in the past and was pretty happy with the site they created. I guess you can’t please everyone!
Hey Robert,
What you get for the $799 or $1299 price tag is very basic. Meaning it’s a generic site, with some generic training, and a website that not SEO optimized. I talk to people all the time and they always ask me how do you get traffic. I explain SEO to them.
I just believe there are much better options out there.
I spent over $2,000 with Homestead because I had a website done by them in the past year. Really, not all that satisfied with it. Looks just like every other website you see on the internet. Wasn’t really anything special at all.
The bad thing is when you move your website you are using all their software so my site won’t work with GoDaddy now. Instead, I have to have my website completely redeveloped. I am going to go a cheaper route this time.
Overall, not very happy with Homestead. They are way overpriced and I will not use them again. Huge mistake on my end, but it’s a lesson I had to learn.
Hey, nice post and in this dynamic era, it is important to design a mobile website and give it a responsive look.
Exactly, I still can’t believe people don’t have responsive websites, nowadays.
In regards to their customer support I have to say it’s actually quite bad. You get the runaround and you constantly have to be on them in order for them to do something. You get very short answers to your questions. They like to point you to articles and just tell you to read them. I even called them up and they were very rude to me on the phone. They made it seem like I was bugging them because I needed some help.
Its all about the risk and investment. Every business requires some major risks for the improvement and promotions of the business. Web designing is normally an expensive and risky activity but having a much benefit as compared to any marketing strategy at this time.