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Weebly, a new startup by three Penn State students, makes it incredibly easy to build a professional-looking website for your congregation – and it’s free. As they put it: “Our focus is to maintain elegance and simplicity coupled with powerful features, to allow all types of users to create, manage, and host their website, free of charge.â€
I tried it out, and set up a site in under an hour. All you have to do is sign up for an account. After that it’s mostly just dragging and dropping “elements†(text and image holders, Google maps, YouTube videos, etc.). You don’t need to know the first thing about HTML, much less how to program. You can even test-drive it.
How Does It Break Down?
In the Plus Column
- The interface is both simple and intuitive.
- Blogging is built in.
- It has a developer section, so programmers can make widgets for Weebly.
- It’s gotten good reviews from notables like Techcrunch.
- It seems to be stable. At least it didn’t crash on me.
- It’s great for videos.
- It even has a simple contact form you can add.
- You can download your whole site as a zip file, which is great for backup.
- You don’t have to use “weebly.com.” You can use your own domain name.
In the Minus Column
- You can only design simple, small sites. In particular, you can only set up a limited number of pages, all of which are part of the main menu.
- You are limited to Weebly’s set of about 20 designs. In my case, I chose one where I could incorporate my graphic. Then I desperately wanted to get into the CSS and make the text darker, so its contrast with the background would be more readable, but couldn’t do it. “Theme specifications (for user-submitted themes)” is on their to-do list, so hopefully this will change soon.
- Statistics are limited to page views.
- You can’t have multiple site administrators, with varying degrees of control over the site.
- It’s new, so who knows how stable it is.
The bottom line: if you need a small, simple website or if ease-of-construction is paramount and you’re willing to compromise on a small site, Weebly looks like a winner. I’d recommend trying it out.
