Weebly

Full Review

Nothing against the other great apps I've reviewed on this site, but I think Weebly makes a strong case for the one you can't really live without. I say that not because other apps aren't useful - they are. But you could still find old fashioned ways to manage contacts and projects. When it comes to websites, there isn't an "old fashioned" way to design one - that's why Weebly is so useful. And especially today, when there's really no excuse not to have a website.

I built a mock website for HeadStartup, to explore the full functionality of Weebly. Just pick a theme to get started, and there's quite the selection. At any point you can change what theme you have, so you can throw some content together before making a decision. I picked one I liked, and got to work on the homepage. The interface really is effortless, it's completely drag and drop.

On the top of the editor Weebly sorts actions into four categories: Basic, Multimedia, Revenue, and More. Under Basic is where you can add a title, paragraph of text, video, contact form, and more. Under Multimedia, you can add photo galleries, slideshows, files, audio, video, and embedded documents, etc. The Revenue tab is where you can place adds, and More contains a few more miscellaneous items such as polls and contact forms.

Just from that feature set alone, it should be apparent that Weebly lets you build full-fledged, powerful website. I built something simple, 4 tabs in which I uploaded a picture, included a slideshow, and linked a YouTube Video. Everything was fairy seamless, and came out exactly as I expected. The picture upload took some time, but the uploaded pictures were full quality so I'm not complaining.

With completed websites, Weebly lets you create a subdomain under weebly.com, or you can buy your own URL through Weebly (separate cost) or link your Weebly site to a URL that you own. The options are very open ended, and I checked out a few Weebly sites under custom URLs and they worked perfectly fine.

Amazingly, most of Weebly is free. There is a pro version, and that adds features like video player, audio player, 100MB file upload limit, embeddable documents, and expanded visitor stats for up to 10 sites. The free version still gives you unlimited pages and all of the other features, though the limit is two sites per free account. If you choose to go pro, the price ranges from $2.99/month to $4.58/month depending how large a contract you purchase.

The Bottom Line

I'm really impressed with Weebly, because I pretty easily made a nice looking site for free. Most small businesses will get by just fine with the free package, so the only cost would be the hosting fee - which is inevitable. But beyond that, Weebly gives anyone the tools to make a great web 2.0 site, without having to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a design and development. I'd recommend Weebly for almost any business, because there are very few businesses these days that can justify not having a website - especially when it costs nothing to design.

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