Weebly: A Free Website Creation Tool

1 - I can do better 2 - Jury's out 3 - Pretty darn good 4 - Splendiferous 5 - Awesometastic by 7 people | Log in to rate

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What is Weebly?

Weebly might sound like a fan page for Weebles, but it's actually a site that allows you to create websites and blogs using a widget-based interface. In fact, building a website with Weebly is a LOT like building a Squidoo lens.

Weebly is free to use, but it's not infested with ads. It's a great tool for non-techies who want to build their own websites without fooling with HTML.

What Can You Do With Weebly? 

The Weebly Toolbox!

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.

What's the Catch? 

Is Weebly a Hoax?

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 about 36 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.

You Can Back Up Your Weebly Website 

Weebly Backups - Very Wise!

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.


Freebie Poll 

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Weebly Demonstration 

Here's a video showing you what Weebly is capable of.

Weebly Website Tutorial - Weebly help and Weebly support

Build a Weebly Website quickly. Get Weebly help and Weebly support using on-line Weebly videos. Add Paypal, slide shows, video, audio and lots of Weebly add-ons with this step-by-step Weebly tutorial.

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Weebly Debate 

Do you think you'll ever use Weebly?

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Sure, why not!

dropship guru says:

I have profited greatly from weebly. I used it to develop my money making drop ship site www.dropship.weebly.com and my money making waterisfuel.weebly.com site.

Clinea says:

I already use it and it is really cool! I think that weebly was a great idea!

Thomas Pierno says:

Oh yes! Weebly is a great means for folks to create rather effective Web site.

I developed a business using it. That said, there are limits to it's artistic sophistication, but for the price of the PRO account one cannot complain.

Using Weebly can earn you income, it can make you rather creative, it easily allows you to generate attractive (but somewhat limited) Website without high tech skills.

I say BRAVO! It is a no brainer to use and a big thumbs up for me!

chim says:

dfengshui.com is a site i made using weebly

nicholas says:

yea

Eh, I'll pass.

spirituality says:

As a webdesigner I don't need this feature and I'd rather not be dependent on a third party site that has no clear way to make their bills.

kamal says:

pls give

Shirene ( that's Sher-ring) says:

well, maybe, hey peoples! You should use piczo.com instead. So much easier and you can have UNLIMITED storage for free! If you wanted a custom domain name on piczo, it's only 20 something dollars a year?! HOW AWESOME!! If you don't want a custom domain name from piczo, try using www.dot.tk. It's free and here's how it works. You get a piczo site, you go onto tk, you type in your piczo site, and then you shorten it out and here's an example: If I were to make a free website on weebly or something, I can use tk and make my site called awesome.tk and you don't have to use the subdomain name! Awesome huh?!

Deborah says:

I opened an account, but it doesn't have the features that Google Pages has for free, like being able to upload your own HTML or CSS pages. I doubt I'll ever use it.

One thing I hated about it was that there was no simple way to close your account. I never published anything, so it doesn't matter.

DONISD says:

No

 
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You Can Register a Domain Name 

Registering a Domain Through Weebly

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.

Upgrading to Weebly Pro 

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.

Your Feedback! 

Have you tried out Weebly? What's your take on this website creation service?

Lensmaster

Webmaster Ryan wrote

i like weebly its good

mines http://www.yugiohduel.weebly.com

Reply Posted July 09, 2009

Lensmaster

TAMILTIGER wrote

I LIKE WEBLY MY SITE NAME WWW.VANNITODAY.WEEBLY.COM
MY SITE SOFTWARE PC GAMES KEYS TUTORIALS AND MORE

Reply Posted June 25, 2009

Lensmaster

dropship guru wrote

I have made a lot of money using weebly and my websites www.dropship.weebly.com and www.waterisfuel.weebly.com These sites have helped me bring in over $10,000 in just 4 months!!

Reply Posted June 07, 2009

Lensmaster

Bruce wrote

I love weebly but there is a problem, and that is the duplicate content issue with especially google. Anybody knows that in terms of seo every single web page should have its own title and description tags, if you have the same title and description on the home page and the internal page that's seen as duplicate content for SE, and consequently has an impact on your SERP rankings !

Reply Posted May 21, 2009

Lensmaster

Thomas Pierno wrote

In life, simple and effective is the mantra most live by. Using Weebly is certainly the Mantra for making Web site creation fun, easy, and effective. It may not be able to produce a site with the sophistication of the Industrial Web development engines but for the most part it is spot on.

I based a business on the Weebly site generator, and it has been a great experience so far.

Kudo's to the Weebly team!

Reply Posted May 04, 2009

 
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