So we're trying to tackle all of the hard problems with creating a website. Sometimes that means we develop very specific tools that just don't have a good solution yet, like our written-from-scratch ImagePerfect image editor.
In this case, we think designers still have it a bit rough. They end up doing a lot of things that aren't related to designing, like managing a hosting environment, or upgrading Wordpress when new vulnerabilities come out (or recovering from a hacked site). Then they have to continue doing inane little tweaks to the website on an unrealistic budget.
We're trying to make the designer's life easier with an integrated solution, and their clients happier by letting them log on and update their website themselves.
This looks fantastic, just what my company was looking for to quickly develop websites for the small business clients we deal with. They all want a CMS, but the value proposition just isn't there for us for a $2,000 project that requires all custom design work.
Wow, this is pretty huge. There's a big gap between designers and developers particularly in the smb market. Youll have designers that don't know how to develop make brochure-style sites that business owners don't know how to develop. Or you'll have developers make an editable site that looks like crap. If you want both you have to pay a lot of money.
For designers Weebly now takes the place of the developer and gives the designer the ability to make a great looking site that is easy to maintain and manage.
Problem is some companies wants to go outside the 'template', and that's where direct manipulation gets really tricky when you got a different customer every month.
I work as a product designer for a norwegian CMS, and I would die to make it drag'n'drop direct manipulation-icious. But almost all of our BigCo customers demands solutions outside the regular blog/template, which then would give us two options.
a) Customize direct manipulation for each customer (expensive)
b) Semi-direct manipulation which launches TinyMCE and other micro controls when a users clicks a particular part of content.
We've managed to make a dead simple on-site editing interface that works with any design, without any need to stick to any 'template'.
Our goal is to allow designers with a knowledge of HTML and CSS to make completely custom designed websites that a client can easily (and safely) keep up to date.
That's what I meant with b), which is how we do it too. But it's not the best solution, which is direct manipulation – no 'form window' to edit the content of a page.
Which, as stated, is hard when you got demanding customers with very different needs for a website.
I'm not actually convinced a) is the best solution though. For some things it is, but once you work with structured data that might show up in different places and might be displayed in different ways in those places, it's not always the best.
It works for simple pages where there's no real separation between content and design, but once you have text that's transformed to uppercase in one place because of a "text-transform: uppercase", or a long blog post that's only shown as a summary on the home page - editing directly in place becomes problematic.
By the way, the majority of customizations can be made to the template, and you are free to edit all HTML/CSS of the site there.
For the remaining customizations, you can either choose to style a Weebly element's CSS, or you can drop in your own code with a "Custom HTML" element.
Seems like you've created a very polished control panel. I'm working on a wysiwyg web editor so I'm curious to know which javascript/css frameworks you've used.
the only feature i'd like to see is the ability to plug in functionality, like the ability to create your own front- or back-end plugins or an app store type of thing similar to shopify.
of course, i know that this isn't a simple request or even a likely one, as it causes all kinds of issues, but i'd start using this immediately if it were provided.
This compelled me to play around with Weebly for the first time.
I created a quick landing page (http://prototypecases.weebly.com/). Easy to add built in contact forms, integration with Google's web fonts was nice, built in SEO tags to paste html. Tons of layouts to pick from and a super easy way to add images.
I was very impressed by how easy it was to put together and how fast customizing the site is. Classically, when it comes to this sort of thing, I think Wordpress but drag and drop is a very marketable feature for Weebly. I'm impressed.
I do have to note that the control panel timed out and the site displayed some sort of app disconnection error several times.
I'm not sure if I get the pricing right: using Weebly pro I'm paying 4,58 US$ a month max. and can use it on 10 Domains. If I use Weebly Designers I pay up to 24,95 US$ for a single domain. So the possibility for my own branding justifies a price increase of up to 50x or am I missing something?
I'm with you...with this price structure, I don't think the whitelabel upside is worth the extra cost. I'd rather create my client his/her own website in a Pro account and let them worry about the reoccurring annual fee. Plus, it appears that the designer is billed, when I'd much rather it be direct billing to the client.
39 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadWe're using the total published sites on the Weebly platform divided by that number to get our percentage of the total.
We could probably use active sites and put up a higher percentage, although that number is much harder to calculate...
So we're trying to tackle all of the hard problems with creating a website. Sometimes that means we develop very specific tools that just don't have a good solution yet, like our written-from-scratch ImagePerfect image editor.
In this case, we think designers still have it a bit rough. They end up doing a lot of things that aren't related to designing, like managing a hosting environment, or upgrading Wordpress when new vulnerabilities come out (or recovering from a hacked site). Then they have to continue doing inane little tweaks to the website on an unrealistic budget.
We're trying to make the designer's life easier with an integrated solution, and their clients happier by letting them log on and update their website themselves.
Nice work! Signed up immediately.
For designers Weebly now takes the place of the developer and gives the designer the ability to make a great looking site that is easy to maintain and manage.
This is genius and is going to be very big.
I work as a product designer for a norwegian CMS, and I would die to make it drag'n'drop direct manipulation-icious. But almost all of our BigCo customers demands solutions outside the regular blog/template, which then would give us two options.
a) Customize direct manipulation for each customer (expensive)
b) Semi-direct manipulation which launches TinyMCE and other micro controls when a users clicks a particular part of content.
We've managed to make a dead simple on-site editing interface that works with any design, without any need to stick to any 'template'.
Our goal is to allow designers with a knowledge of HTML and CSS to make completely custom designed websites that a client can easily (and safely) keep up to date.
Which, as stated, is hard when you got demanding customers with very different needs for a website.
It works for simple pages where there's no real separation between content and design, but once you have text that's transformed to uppercase in one place because of a "text-transform: uppercase", or a long blog post that's only shown as a summary on the home page - editing directly in place becomes problematic.
For the remaining customizations, you can either choose to style a Weebly element's CSS, or you can drop in your own code with a "Custom HTML" element.
of course, i know that this isn't a simple request or even a likely one, as it causes all kinds of issues, but i'd start using this immediately if it were provided.
I created a quick landing page (http://prototypecases.weebly.com/). Easy to add built in contact forms, integration with Google's web fonts was nice, built in SEO tags to paste html. Tons of layouts to pick from and a super easy way to add images.
I was very impressed by how easy it was to put together and how fast customizing the site is. Classically, when it comes to this sort of thing, I think Wordpress but drag and drop is a very marketable feature for Weebly. I'm impressed.
I do have to note that the control panel timed out and the site displayed some sort of app disconnection error several times.
Could the founders explain why it's hidden?