Weebly: A Free Website Creation Tool

Weebly surprised me: It's one of the best free online tools I've seen for website and blog creation. It allows you to pick a design, then drag & drop elements onto each page you create.

You can easily add text, pictures, links, contact forms, Flickr galleries, files, Google maps, feed readers, YouTube videos, and Google videos. You can also add your own custom HTML.

You can even monetize your Weebly website with AdBrite ads. Weebly also added Google AdSense recently.

At the moment, there doesn't appear to be a catch. However, when you create a website using Weebly, there are a few things you have to put up with.

For one thing, you can only choose from several designs for your website. You can customize some of them a bit, but you are still working with a limited cookie-cutter design.

You'll also have to put up with a "create a free website with Weebly" link at the bottom of each page you make. The nice thing is that it's a very small and tasteful link. Considering that you're getting a free website with no gunky ads all over it, I think that was very gracious of Weebly.

The only catch I can think of is this: Weebly can always change. It's slick now, but who's to say Weebly will be the same six months or a year from now? Weebly needs to earn revenue somehow, and the company may be forced to create new rules as the site becomes more popular.

Weebly is a great tool, and I think it has a lot of potential for niche marketing. But if you're going to create a professional website for your business, you're better off paying for web hosting and hiring a web designer.

One of the good things about Weebly is that it lets you download your website's data. I give them lots of brownie points for this, because if Weebly ever changed its business practices or went belly-up, it means your website doesn't have to sink with the ship.

It's easy to do. When you're editing your website, you just click on the Settings tab at the top and select download your site as a .zip archive.

People might overlook a link that tells them to get a free website on Weebly, but a URL like "tree-limb-services.weebly.com" simply doesn't look professional. It's OK for a casual site, but otherwise it makes you look like you don't take your business seriously.

Fortunately, Weebly will let you point a domain name to your website. This must be how Weebly gets income, because each time you publish your website, you're given the option to register a domain through Weebly.

A domain registered through Weebly costs $24.95 per year. While that's not an unreasonable price, I know for a fact that you can register a domain for less than $10 a year. If you don't want to fool with setting up your domain name and pointing it to your website, registering with Weebly might be worth it.

Weebly allows you to use a domain registered elsewhere, but I haven't tried this functionality yet.

There's the free version of Weebly, and then there's Weebly Pro. Upgrading to Weebly Pro costs $4.99 a month, although you have to pay for at least a year's worth of Weebly Pro up front. You can get it down to $3.99 a month if you register for two years.

What does this get you? Well, you get to create up to ten free websites, you can upload files as large as 100 MB, you can add password protection to your site so that only members can view it, you get to strip off that Weebly advertisement at the bottom of your page, and some other nice perks like that.

I'd rather stick with a real web host, personally, but this might suit someone else very well.