Weebly (YC W07) Debuts an iPad App for Building and Managing Websites
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
What's funny to me is that Weebly generally flies under the radar of the tech press. And yet in terms of profitable YC companies, they have to be near the top. David Rusenko has even talked about going public with Weebly (not unprecedented for website builders: Wix did it earlier this year).
Weebly is a company worth taking a close look at.
Even though I kind of hate dragging those component around, the reality is that the little tool has made the company I work for upwards of £3k this month at a time where the team are between more technical projects. Win, win....for now!
So what we do is have initial 2 hour project discovery meeting where we literally go through every page they want, how many pictures/ paragraphs are suitable for each page. We log all of this and send them the full content list of what is needed.
Wonderfully, we schedule the 'Platform Training' meeting (where we sign it over) exactly one week later and send them a content deadline for half-way through that week. No surprises that not a single client has yet to send any content through on time!, so (and we make this absolutely clear) we populate with lorum ipsum and stock imagery proofs to the exact discussed paragraph/image count per page.
We do the platform training with the dummy content, show them how to do everything (2 hours) and send them on their way. Monthly hosting (£12.00/month) to cover weebly fees.
We've found that with this 'package' we make no-bones about what they are getting (a template driven site, chosen by us - no design 'sign-off' etc..). They know the quality of our 'other work' (it's usually why they come to us) except we crucially figure out their budget VERY early on and can 'channel' into a specific category accordingly. It's nice having that other option.
It's going well so far, 4 clients that we would have turned away, £3.5k income that we would have lost and gone to a bedroom dev or smaller agency. The hours quoted have (amazingly) worked out to the hour for each of these projects (£60/hr rate) - except the latest, which is 2 hours under ATM. I can't ever remember a time where a £6,000+ site was ever on budget (we actually get our hourly rate on these small sites!!).
I enjoyed using the app. Easy to understand and super easy to get something published. I sent it to my mom, who was just this weekend asking how hard it would be to set up a website for her friend's small business.
Weebly seems to be aimed at mainstream people who think "Boy, I should have website for my wedding/club/team/group/gaming clan." Of course, their goal is make that more and more empowering over time though. If you think about it, what you can do with Weebly was potentially difficult for the average web developer 10-15 years ago -- I'd say that's a leap! Before I started programming, I used front-page and dreamweaver to get started. Eventually, I got more sophisticated as I got more interested in building things but it was empowering to create a website without knowing HTML or CSS.
Weebly is more likely replacing low-end web designers (ie: the web designers who do projects for less than $5,000). But they are also growing market share- Weebly is cheap enough to get people online who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford a website.
If you are interested, I wrote a blog post examining the ways software is (and isn't) eating web design. http://www.sitebuilderreport.com/blog/how-software-is-eating...
Weebly is pretty solid and the only major one that's free to use with your own domain. It just has a small 'powered by weebly' at the bottom. And it generates standard HTML and CSS that you can then move to another webhost later if you want. It also does an htaccess for redirects if you're moving from a previous host using different tech. The only downside is that you don't get full control over the URLs.
"the only major one that's free to use with your own domain". Nearly every website builder lets you do this. Squarespace, Wix, Yola, Virb etc.
Weebly's base package is free and includes the ability to use your own domain. It's the only one.