Website Creation Made UnbeWEEvaBLY Easy
When talking about the internet you can hardly use the word tradition due to the fact that just about every other day technology, more specifically web technology is advancing and changing. Keeping up with each and every one these advances is like the cartoon coyote trying to keep up with the roadrunner (they’re still at it to this day!). Well, for all you “web design coyotes” out there, especially small businesses in desperate need of a presence on the internet your “ACME” subscription may have finally paid off.
Weebly Inc., has launched a site that can possibly change the tradition of relying on a web guy to create, update, and maintain your website. If you’re a small business owner with a tight budget you might want to listen up before you write that next check to your site’s webmaster. On the other hand, if you are a web designer, developer, or webmaster it might be time to “step your game up” if you haven’t been keeping up with new web design trends. Weebly.com offers web design, web hosting, and the ability to register a top level (.com, .net, or .org) domain name or one of their subdomains (www.yoursite.Weebly.com) of your choice as long as its not already taken. More importantly did I mention its free if you either already own your own domain name or use one of theirs!
From the look of the website, the Wee prefix in the name, and the overall workings I’m guessing that Weebly.com is by the same bunch responsible for Weeworld, a MySpace-like community website for friends where you join by creating a cartoon version of yourself called a… Weeme. Cute huh? Just like Weeworld, assuming its related, Weebly.com focuses clearly on being easy to use and simplicity, making the whole process of creating a website as quick and easy as ABC123. Even the initial sign up is only three lines long and you’re off creating your website.
After you’ve signed up and logged in you get an easy to follow step-by-step walk through in putting together your site. Designing a website at Weebly is made easy through the usage of a drag and drop W.Y.S.I.W.Y.G. ( What You See Is What You Get) page editor as opposed to having to write lines and lines of code, then checking to make sure everything looks the way you intended. For an example, right-click on an empty spot along the edges of this page and select “view source code” or “view page source”. That is what a web page looks like to a web designer/developer . Before WYSIWYG and even still sometimes with it, you had to know a little something about code whether it be html, php, aspx etc. to create a website. With Weebly…forget about it! You simply locate the item you want at the top of the screen and drag it to where you want it to be displayed on your page below. Once your item is in place you’ll have some tweaking and customizing to do. If you placed an item that requires text you’ll have to type what you want in that section or if you placed an image on your page you can resize it to your liking.
Weebly makes it very seamless when it comes to adding new pages and even a blog to your site. You can even put YouTube videos on your website with just a click and drag of a mouse (finger if you’re on laptop). Being a part-time web developer myself I decided to give Weebly.com a test drive. As I mentioned before, the sign up takes almost no time at all. I only had to come up with a user name, password, and my email address and I was already being guided through the home web page design process by their friendly little pop up boxes telling me what to do and how to do it. If you do get lost in the whole process somewhere it is not at all difficult to figure out what to click to get you back where you were. If I made a mistake in designing my pages, errors were easily one click away from being fixed which in my opinion will also be true for a person new to web design.
To choose the overall theme/look of your website Weebly provides a variety of different templates(layouts) to chose from. They try to suit every need from personal to hobby to business looking. They also make it a point to mention you can “design on the fly” meaning you don’t have to finish one thing before moving on to designing something else. For example if I were to have gotten only mid way through designing the first page and changed my mind from creating a website dedicated to my exotic stamp collection to the greatest 2Pac Shakur songs of all time I would simply click on a new layout from the top of the screen and presto change-o, my stamp collection is history and 2Pac lives again inside the pages of my website! I’m only kidding. I didn’t get that in depth with my test run. What I did do was go through the Weebly.com process from beginning to end as if I were new to the world of creating a website from the ground up. You can see my quick design here.
Overall I believe anyone will find Weebly very easy and possibly fun to use because it allows for a lot of experimentation, trial, and error. Small businesses will find it cost effective. Webmasters may not find themselves out of a job just yet(Weebly doesn’t write website content. I was worried that the site looks so basic and simple that they didn’t include SEO(Search Engine Optimization) or Ad options but they got that covered too. These are vital to a business website.
The site does have some minor drawbacks that could become major if not addressed. First off downtime, when I first tried to sign up, the site was down for maintenance and again the next day just after I had completed my test site. Hopefully I just caught them at a bad time. Secondly the support is by ticket (email) only. Theres no phone number, no company address on the site period for clients to reach a Weebly representative. If the service is geared toward web novices theres bound to questions too complicated for emails. In the desgn section I ran into a problem that occurred when switching layouts. My text would disappear and my resized photos would go back to original size. Add to that if I wasn’t extra careful where I clicked, the layout would change, erasing my progress. The price is debatable. While I’m a supporter of just about anything free the price can’t be beat at $24.95 per year with great discounts for purchasing multiple years. Like I said before this is only if you choose to buy a domain name from them. If you have your own domain already or use a www.You.Weebly.com subdomain name its free.
I feel there’s a lot of potential for growth and success for whoever invented Weebly so kudos to them and happy free, easy web designing to Weebly users.
