Weebly Review: Maybe The Best Website Builder

Weebly is one of the most user friendly platforms on the market, offering a variety of rich features as well as drag and drop design elements. Whether you want to make a website for your business, a weeding blog or just a portfolio to show off your skills; with just a few clicks and edits you can have a great looking website using Weebly. And with over 15 million registered users, you can probably see why it’s one of the most used website builders in the world.

Topics covered in this review:

-         Summary: Overall rating  -         Pricing  -         Interface   -         Design / Themes  -         Customer support   -         Bonuses and promotion  -         Step by Step Tutorial
-         Write your own review and comment

Summary–Overall review

The good things about Weebly:
Easy drag & drop builder – The control panel is easy to use and intuitive, so it gives you the power to make a great looking website with everything you need already integrated.
Is free – Weebly is free so you don’t need any third party tools in order to complete your website. Everything you need is provided, and best of all, everything is free (no credit card required to sign up, no time limit to use the free account, use as many edits or theme changes you want).
No Ads – We all know how frustrating pages of ads are that don’t allow you to have a good page-surfing experience. Thankfully Weebly is not ad-driven. Even with the free plan you won’t receive any ads so you can have a beautiful website to use as your business card.
Versatility – You can use the Weebly platform to build anything you want; be it blogs, forums or even online shops. The ability to add, delete or edit HTML code is going to give you freedom to build anything you want.
Go Mobile – With their mobile editor, you can optimize your website for mobile devices easily. You can even choose a mobile theme for visitors to see that is different from your regular website’s theme.
No Hosting Costs – You don’t need to pay anything for hosting your website with Weebly, as everything is hosted on their own reliable cloud hosting.
SEO Friendly – I have seen many Weebly sites that rank pretty well in Google (some of them having top 10 rankings for competitive keywords). This is because Weebly allows you to insert all the basic SEO functions, like titles and descriptions for every post or page.
Built-in Site Analytics – There is no need to install third party software or enter any kind of scripts to monitor your traffic because Weebly offers you a free way to track your progress day by day. This also allows you to see what you need to improve on your website to grow your audience.
Multiple Languages - Weebly is available in 11 languages (English, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Turkish, Dutch, and German).

The Cons:
 No Sidebar – In Weebly you don’t really have a sidebar where you can insert widgets like “Popular Posts” or “Recent Posts”, which can be helpful if you have a bigger blog with a lot of posts.
 Adsense Earnings – If you choose to monetize your blog with Adsense and choose the Google Adsense widget to place your ads, Weebly takes away 50% of your earnings. But yet again, I don’t think someone who uses Weebly will use it for placing Adsense ads
Overall Conclusion:
With over 100 million visitors that are going to 15 millions Weebly sites each month; you can understand why this is a good solution for everyone who needs a quick and easy solution for their website.

Awards:
-         Best interface 2013 WBTUTORIAL REWARD
-         Best for beginners 2013  WBTUTORIAL REWARD

Pricing

You can use Weebly for free and with no time constraints to make a great looking website and use it for as long as you want.
But, like with every website builder, there are some paid options available to further develop your website and give you access to a lot more tools and features.

There are 2 option available right now :

1)    Weebly Starter for $3.29 per month
This package is a great option for those that want to build a simple website for their small business. It’s also perfect to use as a business card so people can reference information about your business easily (i.e. homepage of coffee shop that includes hours and location).

This plan allows you to differentiate from all the others that are using a free plan because you will have access to more features. This means that you can remove the footer link to Weebly, customize the footer as you want or even add your own favicon (small picture that appears on the left side of your URL).

All of these things will make a bigger impact on your visitor’s experience because they will not know you made your website with Weebly. This will allow you to brag about the site like it was coded from start to finish by you.

2)    Weebly Pro for $6.63 per month

With the Weebly Pro membership you can take your website to the next level. Besides receiving everything the Starter Package has to offer, you will get access to a bunch of other really interesting and helpful features like :

a)     Site search – This is very useful, especially if you have a bigger site, because your visitors can easily find all the information they need.

b)    Header slideshow – With this feature you can transform the header into something a lot more interactive and professional looking. You can add multiple images as well as a transition that changes them every few seconds.

c)     HD video & audio player – If you have something to show to your audience, then this is a great way to do it. You can insert an HD video player on your website that supports almost all the video formats. This is a lot more professional looking than simply inserting a Youtube video player.

All the features you can unlock with the paid memberships are listed in the table below :

Interface

Weebly’s interface is very easy to use because it is WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), which means that you can build the website in real time. Even the changes that you make are shown in real time on your finished website.

There is no preview mode where you can see how the website will look like after certain changes. Everything is with drag & drop and very intuitive. You have easy access to all the tools you need, and that’s exactly what you need when you first start to build a website. That’s exactly why we like Weebly, because it does everything you need it to do, quickly and easily.

Design / Themes

The collection of Weebly templates is massive, so you have a lot of options to choose from. This means that you are sure to find something that you like. They are sorted by styles and colors, and for every theme you can choose the color that will dominate your website. The only downside is that you can’t choose custom colors, you can only pick one from those that are available. The upside is that most of the time you will find one that will match it pretty close.

For those that have knowledge about web design or have some coding skills, there’s an option to access their source code make some HTML/CSS changes to match your desires. If you are like most of us and don’t have this kind of knowledge, then there are a few third parties that sell premium Weebly themes.

Customer support

Customer support is provided through email, but not by phone. Even though they respond very quickly and help you with any problem you might have, it would be nice to know that you could also contact them by phone. This is a small let down, but they are bridging this gap with a large and well-constructed knowledge base.

If you take a look at the image below, you can see that they are doing a very good job covering all the aspects of creating a site. They even have tutorials for fixing problems that you may encounter when making your own website.

Bonuses and promotion

Weebly is not notoriously known for dropping promotional codes every month, but from time to time they give out some coupon codes for their paid memberships.
Be sure to check this page regularly to see the latest Weebly coupons.

Step by Step Tutorial To Create Your First Weebly Website

The first thing you need to do is to sign up for Weebly. You don’t need to input any credit card information or anything like that. All you have to do is to insert your name, e-mail and then create a password.
Alternatively, you can choose to sign up with your Facebook account.

After you complete the first step, you will be sent to the “Choose a Theme” page where you will have to….drum roll…choose your favorite theme. You can either choose it by clicking one from those that are in front of you (or you can scroll down for more), or you can choose a category from the 2 tabs on your upper right.

Here you can choose what kind of template is better for you: minimalist, bold or maybe a corporate one. From here you can choose the color that will dominate the entire theme.

The next thing to do is to register your subdomain name. You will choose the first option named “Use a Subdomain of Weebly.com” and enter whatever you find suitable, like your name or your coffee shop’s name. After this you will simply press the continue button.

The real fun can now begin! Now you will start to build your website and add all the elements you need to make it shine in your visitor’s eyes. The first thing you have to do is change the title. You can do this by simply clicking the title, deleting it and writing your own. Alternatively, you can also upload a logo by simply clicking the “logo” button.

You can also provide your social media information through icons for Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and email. If you have other social media accounts that you want to enter details for, then you can click the “add more” button.

The header image can be changed by simply clicking the “Edit Image” button that appears when you slide your mouse cursor over. Next click “Add Image”, then click “Upload a photo from your computer”, selecting the image you have ready on your computer. Press “OK” and then press the orange button on your upper right side that says “Save”.

After you press “save”, a drop-down menu will pop up and ask you if you want to save this header image for all the pages, only to this page or to selected pages. Do as you wish, but for this test we will choose “Save to all pages”.

At a later stage, you can to each individual page and change each header image accordingly.

On the left is the panel with almost all the things you need to get going. You can drag & drop the elements you want in order to build your page. In my example I have added the

Title and Image + Text to build my text part of the page. Then I added the divider in order to separate the text part from the details part of my page. The second part is formed by two columns, which can be done with the “columns” tool. Here I have added a Map and a Contact Form.

Bellow are the results after less than 10 minutes of work:

If at some point you want to change your theme, then you can easily go to the top blue bar and select “Design”.
Here you can change your theme, change your fonts or, if you have HTML/CSS knowledge, even make some internal changes to the script. Be careful when using the HTML/CSS form if you do not know exactly what you are doing, as even a small change can ruin the website’s look.

The “pages” tab is for adding new pages and also for adding the basic SEO information, like the page title and description that you can find under the “Advance Settings”.
*Keywords are not really important because Google and big search engines do not count them as ranking factors.

You can add a new page by clicking the orange “Add Page” button and entering all the details needed like the page name, etc. There is also the possibility to add subpages (especially good if you have a big website or even a store where you can sort the products by category). There is also a second level of subpages in case you need to target each page by niches and topics.

Settings is the last tab and it’s divided into six categories.

1)    General – Here you can change the site address and title, even after the website has been published already. You can also save a site password if you want the website to be visited only by a select group of people.

2)    SEO – This is important to pay attention to if you want your website to have good positions in the search engines. Carefully choosing your titles and descriptions can have a greater impact on your rankings. You can also add your Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools tracking codes in the Footer and Header boxes.

3)    Ecommerce – On the “eCommerce Settings” tab, you can choose between PayPal or Google Checkout as your preferred means of processing payments.

4)    Mobile – Here you can enable the mobile mode so your website can be displayed correctly on mobile devices.

5)    Editors – This is where you can add other people that you want to contribute to the sites besides you. You just have to enter their email address and assign a role (Administrator, Author or Dashboard Only Access)

6)    Archive/Un-publish – Here you can request that your website be archived and sent to the email address of your choosing. This is mostly for backup purposes.

If you want to see what you can achieve in a matter of minutes, just take a look at this Sample Site i have done for this tutorial.