Many homebases

Home{base} is a simple, elegant, self-maintaining web site for you, your band, your business, organization, operation, outfit, or concern. It synchs with your web services, blogs, and social media accounts, so it’s always up-to-date, and you don’t have to worry about it.

How it works

A few times a day, your home{base} checks in with your various web presences. Your blog, your Facebook business page, your band's six Twitter accounts. Then it updates itself accordingly. Upload your new music video to Vimeo, and it'll be there, at the top of your site, just waiting for your fans to click play. Tweet about your extended holiday hours, and anyone who visits your site will get the message.

Anatomy of a homebase

No more updating six different sites to make sure everyone knows what you're up to. No more trying to squeeze four web addresses onto your business cards. No more worrying that your site's visitors will find the blog you last updated in September and think you've gotten out of the game.

What it does

Homebase unifies your many lives into a single, coherent, user-friendly site. And it comes with a bunch of helpful features baked right in:

  • An elegant, self-maintaining home page that synchs with your services, blogs, and social media.
  • Integration and synchronization with your existing web services. (Native support for Instagram and Bandcamp are coming right up, with more to follow. And if you need a service we don't yet support, we can build you a custom module to handle it).
  • Contact form A contact form that's pretty darn good at filtering out bots, spiders, and spamasaurs.
  • A contact widget that you can embed (just like a YouTube video) in your various sites, to make yourself accessible while cutting down on spam.
  • Beautifully, usably designed themes. Home{base} is flexible software that can organize and present your content from around the web however you want it. Like a car maker, we've built different models to suit different needs. (More options for musicians, writers, photographers, and small businesses are on the way. And if you need special features, or want a thoroughly branded site, we're happy to craft a bespoke theme just for you. Learn more about home{base} themes on our Models page.)
  • Mobile-friendly responsive design. Every home{base} theme, standard or custom, will adapt to the size, shape, and capabilities of your visitor's device, which means your mobile site comes standard. No pinching and zooming necessary on your phone. Big, easily tapped links on your tablet. No clutter on small screens.

    Desktop, laptop, tablet, phone

  • Customizable "flagship" content. Don't want the political screeds you occasionally reblog to obscure the book you just published? Just tell home{base} what's important, and it'll stay front-and-center. And our simple, intuitive back-end interface makes it easy to change whenever you like.
  • Automatic Updates Automatic software updates. We're always improving home{base}, adding new features, building new models, supporting new services, making it faster and ever more reliable. And as soon as an update is ready for prime-time, we roll all the new hotness out to your site. Your home{base} gets better all the time, at no extra charge, without you having to lift a finger.
And lots more options are available built-to-order. Need a unique, idiosyncratic site design? That's our bread and butter. Technical obstacles? We can handle them. Give us a holler and let us know what you need.

Why we use it, and what we use it for

We built home{base} to address a number of frustratons we had with our own web presences. Don't get us wrong, we like (most of) our web services (pretty well (most of the time) ). But we felt scattered.

Should we direct new fans/friends/clientele to our Facebook page? Should we ask them to follow our tweets? Does anyone ever actually see anyone else's tweets anymore? And were we keeping this blog for our health?

We had concerns about the stability and longevity of these services. We found ourselves carefully crafting content only to watch it quickly disappear under a crush of sports slogans and baby photos. We enjoyed the immediate feedback, but didn't like leaving our own sites to languish while donating our content to corporate behemoths.

home{base} was our answer to all of these problems:

  • E Pluribus Website E pluribus unum. No more spreading yourself too thin across a vast, demanding internet. No more trying to intuit which of your web presences is right for a given audience. Should you send them to your Tumblr? Your Twitter feed? Your blog or your Facebook page? Just send them to your home{base}. We make it easy for folks to find what they want from there. It's your best face, forward.
  • It's your work; it should be working for you. You've been donating your labor to Facebook. The content you contribute to their ecosystem helps them sell ads and attract new members. Home{base} helps you reclaim your own content, and keep it in circulation as long as you like.
  • One fewer chore One fewer chore. No more updating your site to say you've updated your Tumblr. No more waiting for videos to upload so you can embed them on your home page. No more leaving your own site to languish while you feed the Facebook beast. Home{base} takes care of itself, and it's always up to date.
  • Domain names are forever. Those of us who've been hanging out around internetville a while know that web services come and go. We've had to pack up and move our Myspace blogs, our Friendster profiles, our Livejournals, our GeoCities guestbooks, each time forfeiting the friends and connections we'd built up. But your home{base} lives under your own web address. You can cancel some accounts and add others any time you like, and the URL you printed on those business cards still works just fine. This is your site, and it stands as long as you want it. (Even if we someday go the way of AOL, you'll still own your own name, and the site it leads to.)

Who it's for

Home{base}, as we may have mentioned, is versatile software, with lots of possible applications. But we did build it with certain folks in mind. Artists, musicians and bands, sole proprietors, food trucks, filmmakers, photographers, family farmers, and short-staffed non-profits all benefit from the low-to-no-maintenance nature of home{base}, and its capacity to unite scattered web presences behind a coherent, accessible facade.

Home{base} is for those of us with stuff to do. We have to be writing and playing and making, and we don't need another chore. But we do need to be accessible to our customers, our clients, our audience. Voila home{base}.

Which, incidentally, is how we developed an uncharacteristic (for us) ethos:

Don't do it yourself (if you don't want to)

We're DIY folks, ourselves, and we absolutely admire and encourage people who want to make their own way in the digital world. But we also understand that our hobbies aren't for everyone.

Companies are racing to be the Ikea of web design, outsourcing the site assembly to the end-user. Which is all well and good, it's just not our jam. We don't expect you to build your own web site. That's our job. And we're really good at it.

website attendant

We'll set up your home{base} for you, make sure it's running smoothly, and see that any unique needs have been met. We'll take care of the hosting and help you secure and redirect a domain name, if you need one. And once your site's up and running, we'll hand off the keys to you, so you can add or remove services and edit your personal details if and when you need to.

How to get one

You can order a home{base} today.