Website Builder: Weebly

This month I will be reviewing website builders.  I will be listing the good and bad about them. At the end of the month, I will be providing you with a free downloadable website builder comparison chart of the most promising tools I find.

What are website builders? I am pretty sure there’s a lot of answers to this question, but for our purposes this month a website builder is a tool that does all the hard work for you, allowing you to get a professionally designed website online with little to no technical knowledge on your part.

Initially, I will be looking at the tools without signing up for any accounts.  I will dig deeper into the most promising accounts at the end of the month.

So let’s start by looking at a very popular tool, Weebly.

Industry Specific?
No. Weebly offers website templates for all types of businesses, at least it looks that way on their home page.  The sample sites they show on their home page look clean and modern.  You can copy the URLs of the websites they are showcasing and paste the URL into a browser to see the live, Weebly-built sites.  If you do, you’ll see they function well and are super easy to navigate.  It also looks like you might be able to incorporate e-commerce based on the examples they show.
Would you like some free help preparing for your site? Cool. Here’s a free download I created just for you.

Pricing
Weebly offers a free account or you can pay $4.00 or $8.00 a month.
When you pay more, you get more.  It isn’t easy at first glance to figure out exactly what you do/don’t get for each pricing tier, but you can start out for free and figure out if you need more later for a fee.  There doesn’t appear to be a setup fee.

Mobile?
Yes.  Weebly is on board to give you a mobile version of your website.  Is this part of the free package?  Who knows since they don’t easily provide a breakdown of their features before signing up.  But yes, there is mobile compatibility.

In What Browser Does the Website Builder Work?
On Weebly’s home page, there is no statement as to what browser you should use when you are working within Weebly’s website building tool, so we are going to assume it is friendly to most modern browsers.  It’s an assumption only at this point as I haven’t signed up for an account yet.

Search Engine Optimization?
What is search engine optimization?  It refers to how easy it is for your site’s pages to be found by search engines.  Ideally your website builder tool will allow you to optimize each page.  Also, it is mandatory in my book to view statistics on how your site performs so you can adjust the worst and capitalize on the best. The good news is Weebly claims to have search engine tools and performance analysis.

Blog Features?
Blogging is one of the most important things you can do to grow your site’s presence online.  I will be talking about this in other blog posts later.  And a good website builder should have the ability to blog if you plan on using your site as a business-generating tool.  The good news is that Weebly has blogging capabilities.

Ease of Use
The demo animation of how to put content on your website pages shows a very easy-to-use drag-and-drop website builder tool. It shows text and images easily being dropped on the website page’s canvas.

Use Your Own URL?
You can use your own URL with a Weebly account.  You can also create an account that has an address at Weebly’s URL.

My Initial Impression
For being so “surprisingly easy,” I am disappointed at how surprisingly vague the Weebly website initially is about what you actually get for free or for a paid account.  I am, nonetheless, very curious about the tool because it looks quite promising in ease of use and quality of template design.

Will Weebly make it to the top of my list at the end of the month?  I feel pretty good about the odds.
Click here to grab my free download to help you get all your ducks in a row before your build your site.
Even though I made it for people who are getting ready to hire a web pro, 80% of it will help you if you are building your site on your own.