Carbon: The Next Generation of Weebly | Hacker News Reader

Carbon: The Next Generation of Weebly

weebly.com

89 pointsjdori15 comments

Weebly is consistently one of the most thoughtful, polished products I've ever used.

I'm interested to get my hands on Carbon— if only to see how they put it all together (I can guarantee you, the experience will be thoughtfully crafted).

How does Weebly compare to other options like Squarespace? I'm currently researching these kinds of services so this couldn't come at a better time.

One of the significant drawbacks to every proprietary drag-and-drop website builder is that you cannot easily export your website. Any time you spend building your site with their tool just further locks you into their hosting platform.

I've seen some very nice personal webpages built on Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, etc. by non-technical and non-design users, but I would never recommend it to a business client.

What about for say a small non-profit that isn't tech-savvy that will have at most 10 pages of content?

I could see where this could really be an issue if there was a lot of content or integration with the website being made. And I suppose too preserving old URLs (if that's something the client cares about)

For a website like that, I would recommend a simple Wordpress site on a basic shared hosting provider. It's quick to get set up with the most important information, and then easy to keep updated by multiple non-experts.

If they have old URLs you can use the redirects under "Settings" -> "SEO". Oddly placed, but hey, the functionality is there. And for non-techies I think Weebly is wayyyy better than WordPress.

What happens when the organization outgrows the features offered by Weebly, and wants to move their site to another host?

There is an export site functionality which gives you everything: HTML, CSS, images, uploaded files, etc... I'd never actually tried it until now, so thank you :-)

Sounds like a perfect use-case for weebly. Weebly is much easier to setup than Wordpress.. in fact there is no setup at all

You can export your site with Weebly.

Squarespace is excellent as well— they are both (by far) the two best website builders.

Weebly is easier and less sophisticated. Squarespace has a steeper learning curve but is more sophisticated.

That being said, Carbon is clearly a play by Weebly at being more sophisticated, so we'll see!

Source: My job is reviewing website builders at sitebuilderreport.com. I've reviewed 50+.

I listened to a talk from David Rusenko a few months ago, and they have worked on creating a product that is easy to use from the start. It's amazing to see how far they have progressed as a company and how easy to use their products are. Creating a website is not an easy thing to do for many people, and I appreciate the attention to detail the Weebly team puts into their products to make them as intuitive as possible.

For product based small businesses I think $25/mo is pretty competitive.

UI/UX is pretty well designed, at least from what I can see in the free trial. I am a bit confused with the the hamburger menu on the top right and the Edit Store/Add Product tooltip placement. Behavior doesn't look intentional to me, it's oddly placed.

Given that their own page looks weird (I can scroll right) on ff on android tablet and that I was unable to view video because half of it was hidden (it even crashed later) I think I'll pass.

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10312412, which looks like the relevant blog post.

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