by Tolovaj
Weebly is simple yet appealing drag and drop service where you can set your web site in couple of minutes and start your on-line presence or support existing one. It is attractive, it has millions of users, it is search engine friendly and it is free.
Here are top 10 things you should know about www.weebly.com if you want to incorporate it in your web strategy:
(All images: Openclipart.org, PD licence)
1. They are free. If we are talking about business, we should know profit is made when you deduct costs from the revenue. If the costs are zero, one part of equation is optimized already. So you have more time to concentrate to the other half: the revenue.
2. Weebly is popular. It is among top 500 most visited sites on the internet. With more than 10 millions of sites hosted under that domain it is roughly the same rank as Squidoo or HubPages. This still doesn't guarantee it will be up 100 percent of time or search engines will index your site on Weebly fast (or at all) but it certainly offers good chances for that. In 2007 it was declared as one of top 50 sites in the world by choice of Times' editors. This means quality and calculating in web years there is tradition too!
3. Weebly sites are really easy to made. They are based on drag and drop concept of modules and there are tons of free already made designs available.
You don't need any HTML knowledge to set a site on Weebly but if you got any, you can use it to your full advance.
Did I mention there are many free tutorials for absolute beginners and for experienced users available?
4. It has a lot of features even in its basic form: you can use text, pictures, galleries, slideshows... It also includes contact forms, audio and video players and you can also add files to download. Weebly can be used as static site or blog or combination of both.
5. One great advantage of Weebly is very important to all non-English speaking world (and yes, it is still more than a half of the world). 
You can set your free site on Weebly in any language you want and of course I have set my sites on Weebly in Slovene:
Pravljice za otroke (Fairy Tales for children)
and
Pravljice bratov Grimm (Grimm's Fairy Tales)
As you can notice, both sites are simple, they are still work in progress, but they have some traffic and links to my main sites. It took me only couple of hours to set them up. Pretty cool, huh?
6. It is limited in design. Maybe free templates are not enough for you. If you don't know HTML programming you can feel certain limitations with existing modules very fast.
7. It is limited in number of pages you can create, number of sites you can register through one account (e-mail based), size of files you can upload and bandwith you can use. All limitations are negligible for 95 percent of web users but if you think about serious business, you should be aware of them and think about Weebly Pro features.
Weebly Pro or Reseller options have a lot of additional options, like direct video upload, password protection of certain pages, improved built-in statistics and their price ranges from just under three to 250 US dollars a month.
8. You can use your Weebly site to offer your goods or services. There are some limitations but most of them are not important to small business owners.
Weebly also allows you to set practically all sorts of links to your affiliate partners and it supports Google AdSense program.
Of course you can use it to support your external landing pages to improve their positions in SERP.
And as nice addition there is also Weebly's Affiliate Program, where you can earn commission from sales on different Weebly sites. If you are interested, just check their main site!
9. Weebly has basic support based on e-mail. There is no phone support and you should take care of your backups in case anything bad happens.
And occasionally it really happens. I have read about Weebly sites being erased or hacked or hi-jacked what is certainly big no no for all e-commerce based sites.
Weebly's blogs have very poor spam protection and Weebly has a lot of bugs especially when you use its sites with third party content.
All these problems makes Weebly unsuitable for landing site in my opinion.
katiem2
on 06/18/2012
I would avoid any site with known security issues, it's just to risky and there are safe options available. Thanks for the pros and cons of Weebly.
katiem2
on 06/18/2012
I gave Weebly a go long long ago and it was a bit limited for me back then. I certainly would avoid any site with know security issues. Thanks for the tips and for highlighting the pros and cons of this site.
Jasmine
on 06/28/2012
I'm in the process of making my first website with Weebly. The design is simple and it's very easy to set up a website of your own - writing optimized content takes some time, of course. All that you've said is true and I've learned a thing or two as well :) Great review!
ethelsmith
on 06/25/2012
I have used weebly now for over a year and had no problems security wise. I do use the pro service and have paid roughly what you say. Weebly have updated their system a lot lately and it is faster. It works for me, at least for now
10. I have a good news: there are many sites similar to Weebly. None of them is so popular, but all are easy to use, all are free at least in basic versions and all can be used to increase our on-line presence and strengthen our virtual empires.
I have written two more articles on this subject and you can check them here:
My minisites and microsites about fairy tales
and
How to use free blogs and free sites to support your e-store
or you can have a quick peek on my another free minisite, made to support our main site with articles on culinary subjects:
Kulinarika za zacetnike (Culinary for beginners).
One day in not so near future I will probably make another article on Weebly alternatives because some of them offer pretty advanced features and it is always good to have a backup plan if something goes wrong. But I still have a lot of experiments to do before that and I guess for now this is it.
Go, try Weebly for yourself and don't forget to have fun!
Aesop: unclear biography, no written fables, with timeless morals6 days ago
1001 Arabian Nights: The Stories Behind the Storyon 03/21/2013
Little Red Riding Hoodon 03/11/2013
What is a Fable?on 01/29/2013
Do you have any experience with Weebly? Please share it with us!
As far as I know there were only few security issues with 'sales' pages and I believe this is improved now.
I would never use any free site (where I don't have all the control) for collecting any sensitive data anyway. I look at Weebly as a terrific support site for any kind of business or as a hobby site where you can learn and have fun too.
Yep, it's great to know there are alternatives as Webs, Yola, Jimdo etc. but Weebly is still the number one player in this field.
I've had a couple of Weebly sites for several years. I do find it a bit clunky, but it looks clean and neat. I didn't know about the security issue. Thanks for putting this up and letting us know about the alternatives too.
Thanks again for your participation, TenaciousD. Wish you a great journey on Weebly and Web in general:)
No problem, I just wanted to clear a few things about your article. Weebly is great but as your rightly said it has limitations.
Thanks for your comment, TenaciousD. If you have read my wizz carefully you should probably notice I am Weebly user too. It is great site (I mean GREAT!) but it seems fair to pointing out to other possible users Weebley's limitations. You admit you don't know about hacking, well, I have read reviews of people who lost costumers on this issue.
I have also read about other problems and have to admit I haven't experienced anyone of them but have read about them from many sources (just type Weebly + problems in your browser). Maybe some of them are outdated, but if the users really got problems non related to violation of TOS I rather play on the safe side.
The fact is Weebly free account has limitations and we should be aware of them. Better safe than sorry.
Good review, but there are some problems/ in-accuracies with you article.
Weebly has over 100 templates that can be used to customize your website, which I feel is more than enough for most people. There are no limitations to the number of pages you can add either to free account websites or pro account websites. But you are correct in terms of other limitations, eg maximum file size for uploads is 5MB, although you can have as many files as you like provided they are under 5MB. Bandwidth is unlimited for either weebly free account or Pro account, you can only make 2 sites with weebly free account as compared to 10 sites with weebly pro account.
Spamming can be a real headache, although you can disable comments if you wish or use the approve comments options (called 'approve first') to allow you to moderate comments. I don't know much about hacked websites, so I can't add any comments there.
About websites being deleted/shutdown all I can say is that quite a few times it maybe caused by the website creators violating their Terms of service (ToS). Weebly states quite clearly that they can terminate your account which includes disabling your account and shutting down your website
without notice if you violate their terms. This isn't new as most other online website creators have the same conditions and will shutdown your site without informing you. I have done a bit of research on why weebly sites are abruptly shutdown, it turns out many of those sites which were shutdown were violating weebly's terms of service (eg get rich quick schemes, pyramid/MLM, copyrighted content etc) so it was only a matter of time before they would be caught anyway. Others who did not violate the Terms of service but still got shutdown, I can't say anything about that, but perhaps someone reported your site to weebly, which in turn caused weebly to shutdown your site.
All in all Weebly is a good platform, but not a perfect one. If Weebly was perfect we wouldn't be having this discussion and everyone would already be having a weebly website by now. ;)
(Just a Weebly user)
Sources:
google.com
Me ( I have a site so I know a little bit as well)
http://kb.weebly.com/faq-pro.html
http://www.weebly.com/tos.php/
It happened to me few months ago too, katiem2... It looks even WWW is rounded place:)
I went to check this out and turns out I have a Weebly account. Thanks for the reminder of this web service )K
Weebly can be used for very different purposes and I have explored only couple of many options. Thanks for your comment, Marko:)
Thanks for info, I will try it. I believe that it can be useful for generating traffic especially if it is easy to use and you don't use that site for other commercial purposes.