1. No pricing information, other than “It’s Free”. Is everything in Weebly free? If it is, I assume there is not much it does, which makes me lose interest in it. If it is not, I want to know the details before signing up.
2. aboutus.php: Can Weebly not do clean URLs? If it can, then why do I see “.php” on the Weebly site itself?
Standard fare for the Hacker News crowd, of course, but complaining about a file extension? If you're even aware of that stuff then you're clearly not in Weebly's target market.
How do you know that? How does that follow from what I wrote?
Maybe I am a web designer, or maybe I am a web-publishing consultant looking for good services to recommend to people asking about something affordable.
If Weebly cannot entice me enough to get me past their sign-up form, then I will not try their offering and I will not be able to recommend it to others either.
As for “complaining about a file extension”, see alanh’s comment.
But lately I've decided to evaluate new products by downloading their mobile app, because I think that's how more and more people are being introduced to products and services.
If I had known before embarking that it was a blogging service I definitely wouldn't have done it this way. When I think blogs, I think of the past, I think of desktop browsers, and I definitely I don't think of mobile.
So, I downloaded their iphone app. Probably less than two minutes later I had a blog running on their site with its first post.
It is best practice to have well-thought-out URLs that do not have extensions. The reasons include:
- If your site’s back-end technology changes, all those URLs will either break, or need redirected, or be specially handled with have extra cruft forever.
- It takes longer to type and is harder to remember.
- It makes your technology obvious instead of receding into the background.
- It limits your ability to make awesome URLs, because now your URLs are dictated by how you name and organize your server-side scripts. (URLs are a user interface, just like GUIs, though they don’t get as much attention! http://alanhogan.com/url-as-ui)
- There is no benefit to outweigh the above negatives.
I think it revolves what your website actually is and how deeply invested you are in your URLs.