Could the age of the viable free website be upon us?Are you looking for a free website that looks good, has no annoying ads on it and has a back office suite that is beautiful to work with?
I think you might like the look of http://www.weebly.com/
I have just been playing with it and feel like a boy in a sweetshop!
The site cleanly designed, with a fresh appearance and a nice layout that makes it very easy to work with.
It also comes with a lot of cool features.
Want to add a new paragraph with a photo top left? Just drag and drop the appropriate icon into place. Want to work with HTML, you can if you like, but you don't have to.
At the top of the page a series of tabs lead you to the various building blocks to help you construct your website. The tabs are:
- Elements
- Designs
- Pages
- Settings
- Basics
- Multimedia
- Revenue (Google Adsense)
- More.
http://www.MYFREESITE.weebly.com
Or you can buy a domain name and point it at your website.
There are no annoying ads on your site, EXCEPT for a Weebly footer.
You can easily add Google Adsense and share the revenue 50%-50% with Weebly.
There are upgrade options.
When you log back in, your current sites are easy to find, plus there is a clear "To Do List" to take you through your website building tasks.
Right now they are beta testing a set of features that allows any Weebly user to customize their theme, and are looking for users who know a bit of HTML/CSS and would be willing to spend a little time to test out the new features.
This resource seems idealy suited for testing out niche sites... 8)
But note, you can build a maximum of TWO free websites. After that you have to pay - but the rates are very good, AND you can pay by PayPal - always a good option as far as I'm concerned.
6 Months = $4.58/month
1 Year = $3.99/month
2 Years = $2.99/month
One you start paying you can have up to 10 websites per account and get some extra features thrown in too, such as:
- Password-protected pages
- Remove or Customize Weebly footer
- 100 MB file uploads
- Audio player
- Premium Support
I don't know. They suffered a major outage in June 2008, when three, or possibly even FOUR of the Seagate hard-drives on the storage system busted. But "drastic measures" (like replacing all 15 of their hard-drives) were taken "to make sure this never happens again".
Since Weebly's stated aim is to be the most reliable and best free web site creation service on the Internet, let's hope they have better luck with their new storage system.
Verdict: Worth trying for small narrowly focused niche websites, or fun sites...
Question: Does the free version of Weebly do anything that a free blog platform could not do as well or better?
Here's a 3 minute video demo:

