Weebly Overview
New To Weebly ? Here is a Quick Overview Of Weebly
Weebly is a Free Website building tool that not only lets you create a website for free but also hosts your website for free. With Weebly, you do not need to download or install any thing on your computer. All you need is internet connection. You can use any computer that is connected to the internet to build your free website using Weebly’s online site editor. The sign up is very easy and you will be ready to start building your free website immediately with no waiting.
The real advantage of Weebly is that it requires no technical background to create a website yourself. Simply drag and drop elements anywhere on the page to make up your site.
Weebly Drag and Drop elements to any place on a page to create your own site
Weebly Templates
There are hundreds of templates to choose from. Switching to a different theme in Weebly is a snap. The Text, Images and other work you do on the site get applied to new template automatically when you change theme. Check the Weebly Template Demos of the new upgraded themes. Once you pick a theme, you can go back and forth and try different templates to pick the best one to your taste. You can pretty much get a site up and running in a matter of 30 minutes. And there are plenty of different elements to cater to a lot of the small business needs. You can build a super professional website using weebly by spending just a bit of time. Take a look at Weebly Site Showcase for examples of some of the websites built with Weebly.
For the benefit of those who are entirely new to weebly, following are answers to some of the frequently asked questions. But first, let us tell you that all information in here is provided by weeblyforums, which is an independent source. Weeblyforums.com is not officially connected to Weebly.
Is building and hosting a website with Weebly really Free ? Or is it a Scam ?
To some, it may seem suspicious when a website can be built and hosted for free. It may seem like a catch. Actually, there is no catch. And Weebly is neither the first one nor the only one to offer free websites and hosting. There are many others and there is a strong business model around it. Some of them practice a freemium business model, where they put a price tag on advanced features. Some others operate as a non-profit. There are close to 10 million websites built with Weebly that are currently in use.
Do we need to provide any credit card information to build a free website with Weebly ?
No credit card information is required to build and host the free site with weebly. All you need is an email for your account to be associated with. Unless you need to upgrade to the Pro features, there is nothing to pay and hence no need for credit card.
How good is Weebly for SEO ?
Weebly Is SEO Friendly. You can do a lot of things to optimize your site for search engines. However, the Weebly Blog lacks some necessary SEO. If you are looking for a serious Blogging platform, it might hurt your SEO. If you plan to use Weebly for regular pages, there are plenty of SEO optimization options available. Take a quick look at SEO Tips for Weebly.
Are there any other free website building applications like Weebly ?
There are many other free website builders similar to Weebly. Some are very close to Weebly’s offerings. Some other excel in their own specialities. Providers like wordpress.com, blogger.com are primarily for bloggers. Providers like Yola.com, Weebly.com, Webs.com are geared towards small business and professionals.
Is Weebly the best website building application ?
Weebly does not fit every one’s needs. For example, if you need a strong blogging platform with a great amount of user management, Weebly may not be the right choice. But Weebly is certainly one of the best for small business needs. Check the advantages, disadvantages and feature comparison of Weebly and Yola to help you with making the right choice.
Are there any pre-requisites to be able to build sites with Weebly ? Does it require any technical knowledge ?
There really are no pre-requisites to be able to build sites with Weebly. No technical knowledge required. Infact, that is the essence of success for Weebly. It is easy enough for any one. It is powerful enough to customize the way you want once you gain some technical knowledge. It is similar to creating powerpoint presentation where you drag and drop different elements. In case of weebly, the drag and drop elements automatically convert to a website.
What packages are available with Weebly ?
The four major packages available with weebly are 1) Weebly Free 2) Weebly Pro 3) Weebly For Education 4) Weebly Designer Platform. Weebly Pro comes with additional features and costs about $5 a month. Weebly For Education is targeted at teachers and students where the teacher gets to administer student sites. Weebly Designer Platform is for professionals who build and maintain sites for clients and get to use it as a white label platform.
Do I need to download or install any software on my computer to use Weebly ?
No. You do not need to download any software to be able to build and host sites. You can login to your weebly account using any web browser and create a website from within your web browser like Internet Explorer or Safari and publish it directly. You can connect to your weebly account from any computer and edit your website from any where as long you have internet connection and can access weebly.com.
Is Weebly reliable ?
Weebly is fairly reliable for anything that is not mission critical. Weebly sites are down at times for a couple of hours here and there once in three months or so. It may not be suitable for a top end e-commerce site like amazon.com or ebay.com. But for small businesses looking for web presence, Weebly can be considered very reliable.
Can I access Weebly from any where using any computer ?
Yes. You can access weebly.com from any computer and continue to build your site where you left off. It’s like using gmail or yahoo mail. You can login to your account from any computer to edit your site and publish it live.
Can I use free templates in Weebly ?
Weebly provides several templates that are free to use for your website created with Weebly. These templates are customized to work with Weebly backend. There are also some third party weebly template providers that sell templates customized to work with Weebly backend. In addition, there are also third party free weebly themes that are customized to work with Weebly. But, any generic html template does not work with weebly unless it is customized to use weebly specific tags.
Am I allowed to build my client sites with Weebly ?
Yes. You can build sites for your clients and maintain them yourself and bill your clients for your services. Weebly does not have any restrictions against it.
Can I choose my own website address for my Weebly site ?
Weebly lets you choose your own sub-domain name for free. Anything like example.weebly.com can be picked as long as it is available. If you have purchased your own website address from providers like GoDaddy.com or 1and1.com, you can use it for your website built with Weebly.
Will I be allowed to change the website address once I publish my website with Weebly ?
You can change the website address for you site created with Weebly any time you want. You can change to a different sub-domain name or you can change to your own domain or from custom address to a weebly sub-domain name.
Can I place advertisements and earn money with the free website built with Weebly ?
You can use the included Google AdSense to generate revenues. You can also use other forms of advertising using custom-html. However, when using Google AdSense element of Weebly, the revenues are share 50/50 between you and weebly.
Does Weebly automatically force advertisements on my website ?
No. Weebly does not force advertisements on your site. Unless you choose to include advertisements with Google AdSense or so, no advertisements will be placed on your site.
Can I move my website from Weebly to another host ?
Yes. Weebly provides a mechanism to download the site you built with Weebly so that you can host at a different provider like GoDaddy.com. There are a couple of things to keep in mind though. Not all the functionalities can ported. For example, the Blogs, or the contact forms and submissions etc can not be ported to a new host.
There are several other things that you can accomplish with the Free account in Weebly. Pro users who pay $5 a month will get the options like 10 sites in one account, password protected pages, increased file upload sizes etc. Check Weebly Features for a full list of features and functionalities.