Weebly's Home page |
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| Developer(s) | David Rusenko Dan Veltri Chris Fanini |
| Stable release | Beta |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Type | Web hosting |
| Website | Weebly.com Weebly for Education Weebly Designer Platform Beta site |
Weebly is an online, free widget-based website creator, funded by micro-seed fund Y Combinator. It uses a widget-style format, allowing users to create pages with only a few clicks by dragging and dropping different page elements (images, text, or interactive content, etc.) onto a page and filling in the content.[1] It competes with Yola (formerly Synthasite), Lifeyo, Cif2.net, Jimdo, Webs, uCoz, Wix, and other web hosting and creation sites.[2] The site was originally created by David Rusenko, Dan Veltri, and Chris Fanini, all of whom attended Penn State for an undergraduate degree.[3] It was named by Time Magazine as number four of the fifty best websites of 2007.[4]
In June 2008, Weebly added the Weebly pro accounts feature, allowing users to create password-protected pages and upgrade file size limits, as well as receive additional support services.[5] As recently as October 2008, Weebly editing has become compatible with Safari and Google Chrome in addition to its existing compatibility to Internet Explorer and Firefox.[6]
It is also noteworthy that the weebly application was the most popular app for google chrome during the early day's of the chrome app store.
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Weebly's WYSIWYG editing interface allows users to easily and quickly "drag and drop" content into the currently open Web page, which Weebly considers its flagship feature. Consistent with this design are also a blog editor, a simple method of implementing and customizing its library of themes, and a policy of no forced advertising on even free accounts' Web sites, which are similar to Cif2.net's editing interface features. Pro accounts include more capabilities such as the adding of in-site audio or video content, up to 100MB uploads, up to 10 sites, favicon, removal of the Weebly footer message, advanced collaborative editing, HTML5 video playback and more; "premium" support, and advanced site statistics. It has recently introduced a Collaborative Website Editing which allows users to invite other users to edit their website. This function is similar to Lifeyo's collaborating with other editors to edit on a website, with the exception that Weebly has separated how you can invite additional users to edit, with the Pro function allowing said user to allow invited users to edit only a certain part or only limited access, while the basic function gives the invited user complete control over editing your website[7]. Also, a rather recent announcement on the Weebly blog stated that they were working on an upcoming app for the iPhone[8].
For customer satisfaction, Weebly provides an email form onto which a person can write, requesting one-to-one help.[9] Weebly replies directly to the email address you submit on the support form.[10]
The objective of Weebly when it was first created was to enable content creation.[1] Weebly staff said:[1]
How many people have good information that they would like to put on the web, but currently don't know how? Maybe it's because they don't have a web host, maybe it's because they don't know how to write a web page and upload it. Whatever it is, web content creation needs to get easier, and I think this is the next step. Want a three column layout? Drag and drop. Add Google AdWords to your site? Drag and drop. Then double click it, and set your options from easy drop-down-menus.—Weebly staff, First Post!, Weebly Blog
When Weebly came close to its initial release, the staff decided on a two-phase launch plan: first, there would be a limited invitation followed by something "more substantial" a few weeks later.[11] The invitational beta release was announced June 2006,[12] followed by the official private-beta launch on September 12, 2006.[13] Later, in February 2007, Weebly staff announced it was working on a new WYSIWYG-like editing interface for Weebly.[14] This interface, along with a few other new features, was released March 2007.[15] By December 2008 Weebly reached 1 million users and it had become profitable.[16]
Since it is built on its own platform, Weebly cannot take advantage of pre-existing plug-ins from other popular blogging engines.[17] In 2008, it released several new templates but at the same time received criticism for not realizing the biggest feature request from users: the ability to edit or upload the CSS/HTML of the web pages.[16] In response, on February 26, 2009 Weebly added the ability to edit the CSS and HTML of any site.[18]. Lack of multi language support is a deterrent for those looking to create websites for non-English speaking audience[19].