Weebly (YC 07) Launches Whitelabel Platform for Designers
blog.designers.weebly.com
blog.designers.weebly.com
For designers Weebly now takes the place of the developer and gives the designer the ability to make a great looking site that is easy to maintain and manage.
This is genius and is going to be very big.
I work as a product designer for a norwegian CMS, and I would die to make it drag'n'drop direct manipulation-icious. But almost all of our BigCo customers demands solutions outside the regular blog/template, which then would give us two options.
a) Customize direct manipulation for each customer (expensive)
b) Semi-direct manipulation which launches TinyMCE and other micro controls when a users clicks a particular part of content.
We've managed to make a dead simple on-site editing interface that works with any design, without any need to stick to any 'template'.
Our goal is to allow designers with a knowledge of HTML and CSS to make completely custom designed websites that a client can easily (and safely) keep up to date.
Which, as stated, is hard when you got demanding customers with very different needs for a website.
It works for simple pages where there's no real separation between content and design, but once you have text that's transformed to uppercase in one place because of a "text-transform: uppercase", or a long blog post that's only shown as a summary on the home page - editing directly in place becomes problematic.
For the remaining customizations, you can either choose to style a Weebly element's CSS, or you can drop in your own code with a "Custom HTML" element.
Nice work! Signed up immediately.
I created a quick landing page (http://prototypecases.weebly.com/). Easy to add built in contact forms, integration with Google's web fonts was nice, built in SEO tags to paste html. Tons of layouts to pick from and a super easy way to add images.
I was very impressed by how easy it was to put together and how fast customizing the site is. Classically, when it comes to this sort of thing, I think Wordpress but drag and drop is a very marketable feature for Weebly. I'm impressed.
I do have to note that the control panel timed out and the site displayed some sort of app disconnection error several times.
We're using the total published sites on the Weebly platform divided by that number to get our percentage of the total.
We could probably use active sites and put up a higher percentage, although that number is much harder to calculate...
Could the founders explain why it's hidden?
of course, i know that this isn't a simple request or even a likely one, as it causes all kinds of issues, but i'd start using this immediately if it were provided.
So we're trying to tackle all of the hard problems with creating a website. Sometimes that means we develop very specific tools that just don't have a good solution yet, like our written-from-scratch ImagePerfect image editor.
In this case, we think designers still have it a bit rough. They end up doing a lot of things that aren't related to designing, like managing a hosting environment, or upgrading Wordpress when new vulnerabilities come out (or recovering from a hacked site). Then they have to continue doing inane little tweaks to the website on an unrealistic budget.
We're trying to make the designer's life easier with an integrated solution, and their clients happier by letting them log on and update their website themselves.