Since its inception, Weebly has been focused on making it as easy as possible to build your own custom website using a WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop interface. And it’s done a good job doing that — CEO David Rusenko says that based on a recent Netcraft‘s survey, Weebly powers around 2% of sites on the web.
But even though Weebly is relatively easy to use, there are still plenty of people who don’t know the first thing about putting together their own website, and who would much rather pay someone to build it for them. Which is why Weebly is launching a new Designer Platform. It’s essentially a whitelabeled version of the service, giving a designers a way to quickly build a client’s site and then to provide a CMS that the client will actually be able to use once the project is completed.
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This guest post was written by Kovas Boguta, Head of Analytics at Weebly. In 2009, Kovas wrote a guest post about visualizing real-time social structures.
A decade ago, the open-source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python) stack began to transform web startup economics. As new open-source webservers, databases, and web-friendly programming languages liberated developers from proprietary software and big iron hardware, startup costs plummeted. This lowered the barrier to entry, changed the startup funding game, and led to the emergence of the current Angel/Seed funding ecosystem. In addition, of course, to enabling a generation of webapps we all use everyday.
This same process is now unfolding in the Big Data space, with an open-source ecosystem centered around Hadoop displacing the expensive, proprietary solutions. Startups are creating more intelligent businesses and more intelligent products as a result. → Read More
Weebly, the web-based website creator that sports an easy, drag-and-drop interface, is launching a big new feature this morning: support for multiple editors under the same account. In short, you’ll now be able to let other users edit your website (or portions of it), without handing over your main Weebly account credentials.
After logging into your Weebly account as usual, you’ll notice that there’s a new button that says ‘Add editors’. Hit it, and you’ll see a dialog box prompting you to enter the email addresses of the people you’d like to associate with your account, and three different roles they can be blessed with: Administrator (full access to edit your site), Author (grant access on a per-page basis), and Dashboard-only, which lets them view your site statistics and moderate comments. You can also opt to let site authors edit a page in a draft mode that requires an admin to later push their changes live. → Read More
YCombinator-backed Seeing Interactive, which helps newspapers build and sell space in online ad directories and YC-backed Weebly, the service that lets you build your own drag and drop websites, have partnered up to give local newspapers even more options when selling local advertising to small and medium sized businesses.
Seeing Interactive, which raised $1 million in June, used to direct businesses to Weebly when they needed to build websites to supplement Seeing Interactive’s SEO-optimized Marketplace directory pages. Seeing Interactive has now integrated Weebly into its backend and as of January 1st will allow its newspaper clients to offer advertisers the ability to manage their website and directory listings from the same dashboard. Newspapers can now sell the two services as a package, or separately. → Read More
Weebly, the startup that lets you build a website with an easy drag-and-drop interface, is looking to help you give your site a little extra flair: they’ve just launched a new image editor called ImagePerfect that allows users to craft nifty custom header images with a few clicks. It may not be a Photoshop killer, but it took Weebly CEO David Rusenko all of one minute to build the Mustang image above (in other words, it’s pretty easy to use).
No, this isn’t anywhere near the first web-based image editor (also see services like Aviary and Google-owned Picnik). But it is tightly integrated into the Weebly experience — instead of kicking you into another window when you go to edit an image, ImagePerfect slides nicely into view, allowing you to modify your image in context with the rest of the page. → Read More
When it comes to local advertising, everybody wants to replace the Yellow Pages, which makes money hand-over-fist from local merchants across the country. Seeing Interactive, A Y Combinator startup which launched last March, just raised a seed round of about $1 million from some high-profile investors to help local newspapers take more of those local advertising dollars away from the phone directories. The investors include Baseline Ventures, Lerer Ventures, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit, Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, and Alex Moore (an early employee at Palantir).
In small towns across the country where many people still haven’t heard of Yelp, the Yellow Pages is the only game in town for local business advertising. Seeing Interactive goes to the local papers and gives them a white-label service for selling online ads and services to local businesses. They are already selling these businesses print ads for $200 or so. Now for an extra $5 or so, they can turn those exact same print ads into online ads. They can also get listed in an online SEO-optimized directory of local businesses, and even get their own simple Website (via Weebly). In other words, Seeing interactive creates an online presence for local businesses and leverages the existing salesforce of local newspapers to sell those ads. → Read More
Weebly, the startup that allows users to build rich websites using a straightforward drag and drop interface, is about to get a lot more colorful. The site has opened a new Theme Community, allowing any of its 3.5 million users to submit their own themes for use by other Weebly members. To help launch the new feature, Weebly is holding a contest where it’s giving $10,000 to the top submitted design, as determined by a panel of professional designers.
This is a pretty big deal for Weebly. Up until now, users have had around 80 themes to choose from, which pales in comparison to the number of themes available for some other site building platforms, like WordPress. You’ve always been free to use your own custom CSS styling, but many of the site’s users are using Weebly specifically because they don’t want to have to deal with that sort of thing. Now they’ll have a lot more variety to choose from, with no mucking around in CSS required. → Read More
Since mid 2007, Weebly has offered an intuitive and powerful drag-and-drop website building tool that makes it easy to build rich sites websites with no technical know-how required. Up until now, the company has marketed its product directly to consumers, generating revenue by offering some premium features and services. Today, the startup is bringing its technology to a new market: web hosting customers. The company is announcing that it has been integrated with Endurance International Group, a company that owns a number of hosting providers. Endurance has over 700,000 paid customers across all of its properties, and all of them will get Weebly integration.
Weebly has provided Endurance with a dedicated set of servers that will be running the service. By keeping the Weebly machines on site, Endurance will be able to keep access speeds high to its customers, and can better control reliability and data storage. But while Weebly won’t be directly in control of the servers, they’ll still be pushing regular updates as Weebly proper gets updated. → Read More
School’s back in session, and Weebly, a startup that makes it super easy to build websites using a drag-and-drop interface, is looking to capitalize on it. Today Weebly is launching a new product geared directly at educators and their students, allowing schoolchildren who may not familiar with the basics of HTML or CSS to craft their own multimedia online blogs and reports with a minimal amount of effort.
The new product is similar to the normal Weebly editor, but with a few key differences. For one, Weebly has stripped out all of its monetization and retail features that wouldn’t be applicable to students. And more importantly, the site is letting teachers manage the accounts of all of their students. Because schools obviously wouldn’t want some of this content to be avilable to the public, teachers can elect to keep their entire class’s accounts set to Private, which means only the student and their teacher can see it. → Read More
Weebly, a popular WYSIWYG webpage maker, is launching a new feature today that will allow users to quickly make fully customized web stores using the Weebly interface they’re already familiar with.
Using the new feature is simple. Weebly has added a handful of new ‘revenue’ elements to its main menubar, which allows you to drag-and-drop items onto your page. Simply drag one of the four available ‘Product’ elements onto your page, and you’ll be presented with a small box where you can describe your product, add a photo, and set a price (you can easily create a new item in less than a minute). After creating a product once, you can add it to your other pages without having to recreate it.
The store supports both PayPal and Google Checkout accounts, and allows users to add items to a virtual shopping cart as they browse (you don’t have to buy one item at a time). → Read More
Weebly, the WYSIWYG website designer, has introduced integration with Google’s AdSense API that will allow its users to easily monetize their pages. The site is also introducing new ‘Pro’ accounts, which will give paying members access to increased privacy and other features. After selecting a desired ad size, users can place their AdSense widget by simply dragging onto their page in the Weebly editor. From there they can modify its appearance without having to muck with CSS or HTML. The site has also eliminated a few steps in the AdSense application process, but it hasn’t been able to do away with it entirely (users will still eventually have to enter their contact and required financial information, but Weebly won’t make you do it immediately). Users will split revenues from their site 50/50 with Weebly. Weebly’s new Pro accounts introduce new features like embedded audio, increase file size limits, and the ability to customize or remove the Weebly footer. A year costs around $60, while users who sign up for two years will get a discount. Weebly’s AdSense integration is sure to be a hit with people looking to quickly monetize their sites with as little hassle as possible (though Weebly might have to educate some of them on what AdSense is). Some more tech-savvy users might balk at the prospect of having 50% of their revenues paid to their hosting site, but Weebly isn’t really made for this kind of user in the first place. The Y Combinator-funded site has seen explosive growth over the last few months, and has seen its usage double in size since February, from 300,000 to over 600,000 users (you can see a graph below). There are a number of other players in the WSIWYG page creation space, including Jimdo and Synthasite. For those that aren’t using page creation software, Triggit allows users to embed AdSense ads into any site using a line of JavaScript. CrunchBase Information Weebly Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
When we covered the slate of companies helping people chronicle family stories and milestones, we left out a quiet but excellent Redmond, Washington startup called Sampa. They aren’t new, and we’ve covered them before. The reason we left them out is that we’ve had some difficulty in categorizing them. In many ways Sampa is a blog platform with a focus on privacy features, like Vox. But we’ve also compared them to easy site creation tools like Weebly, Synthasite and Jimdo. But recently they’ve added new features to focus on family story telling and milestones. There is now a Geni-like family tree feature, and trusted visitors can upload photos directly as well. And they’ve also added a MyBlogLog-type feature that shows visitors to the site – both their name and an avatar. Sampa sites have areas that are private by default, so only people you invite in see the site (they see it via an invitation URL, and subsequent visits are authorized via a cookie. The hodge-podge of features results in a really compelling hang-out for families to tell their stories, celebrate weddings and births, and share photos and family tree information. The site is also free, although eventually users will be able to pay to have advertisements removed. It’s a good site, and one of many startups that are doing a lot on very little capital – the company has raised just $310,000. CrunchBase Information Sampa Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Changing around the style of your profile is a big part of MySpace’s culture. Heavy users change their profiles daily, leading to over half a million threads in MySpace’s forums from users asking how they can customize their profiles. Yet after four years of operation, profile design still consists of CSS hacked together through third party sites or an allegedly ripped-off (Real Editor) editor that only works in IE. Online website designer Weebly has done better and provided a lot of the functionality MySpace should already have. They’ve spent the last several months not only creating their own MySpace profile editor but also an integrated widget platform to boot. It’s all hosted under a new site called SnapLayout. The SnapLayout editor is pretty straight forward. You log in with your MySpace credentials, and can use a WYSIWYG editor to make drag-and-drop changes to all the major features of your profile. You can select a pre-made template or start customizing changes on your own. The editor lets you move around boxes, use Flickr photos for a backdrop, adjust text size and style, or even change the entire color pallet of your profile (i.e. summer and winter themes). It can also add a slide show of all your uploaded photos to the header of your profile. I’ll defer the details to Justine Ezarik and surprise guest MC Hammer in their demo video below. The more significant piece, however, is the widget platform that lets users select and add widgets to their profile. All you need to do is click on one of the widgets and drag it to where you want it on your profile. Their first example is a free gift widget that lets you and your friends give virtual gifts to each other. When you give a gift to a friend, you just need to log in to MySpace to verify your true identity. There’s a viral aspect to the widget because users that want to show their gifts will have to have a SnapLayout profile as well. They will be adding a select number of widgets in the coming weeks and eventually opening the system. The danger is, of course, is that MySpace releases their own system in the coming months. But their snail’s pace of innovation doesn’t make that likely. Lets just hope that MySpace doesn’t find the service in violation of their terms of service and shuts → Read More
AJAX website editor Weebly has just landed $650K in investment and launched a new blogging platform today. The investment comes from Ron Conway’s Baseline Ventures, Steve Anderson, Aydin Senkut, Paul Buchheit, and Mike Maples. Weebly plans to put the money towards new personal and product design. Weebly’s core product is an AJAX website editor that creates personal pages using template skins and drag-n-drop website content widgets, similar to the way you control layout on any of the various personal start pages. Previously users could only create static pages composed of content widgets for things like text, images, video, and some widgets like Google maps or adsense. The new blogging platform and WYSIWYG editor lets users add dynamic content to their pages. Blogs can be added like any other Weebly page to the navigation bar of your Weebly site, except with some specialized widgets. The blog supports the basic blog features, such as posting, commenting, categories, and archiving. Webjam, which raised $2 million in March, has a similar AJAX blog editor for their user’s personal pages. However, unlike Webjam, Weebly allows editing the page and posting on the actual page in a truly WYSIWYG interface. Also, each post can contain any of the Weebly widgets, just like the regular pages. Like other platforms, posts can be drafted, published, and tagged. The upgrade also features some new widgets, like the Twitter badge, although you can embed any widget by placing the code into a standard HTML Weebly widget. Weebly’s creators plan on rolling out more wrappers for popular web widgets and eventually opening the platform to the community. Unfortunately since it is built on their own platform Weebly cannot take advantage of pre-existing plugins from other popular blogging engines such as WordPress. True WYSIWYG editors are a welcome addition to blogging, which has been reducing friction to publishing on the web from Geocities all the way through Blogger. Weebly is a Y Combinator company. → Read More
After Condé Nast, owner of Wired and other magazines/websites, acquired Y Combinator funded Reddit, people took notice. This wasn’t just some quirky incubator where they gave college students a few bucks to kick start their new companies (although it is that, too – their standard deal is $5000 + $5000 per founder, for 6%ish of the company) – real products were coming out of Y Combinator, and people started to notice. Y Combinator funds startups twice per year, in batches. Funded startups that have previously launched include Reddit, Kiko, Loopt, ClickFacts, TextPayMe, Snipshot, Inkling, Flagr, Wufoo, YouOS, PollGround, LikeBetter, Thinkature, JamGlue, Shoutfit, Scribd, Weebly, Buxfer, and Octopart. Today, Y Combinator invited in TechCrunch and a select group of investors and industry experts to view the current crop of companies, just getting ready to launch. Michael Arrington and I attended the sessions, and our notes on the new companies are below. Here’s a rundown of who presented, minus a few who are still in stealth mode: Zenter Zenter is an web based presentation app that promises to really take advantage of being online. Users will have the regular functionality of PowerPoint, but with the ability to directly add content from the web (Google Images). Each public slide show will also be put into a public library, for other users to remix or just drop into their show. Weebly Weebly is an AJAX website creator that recently joined Y Combinator. Weebly’s drag-n-drop interface lets you quickly put together a personal website any way you like. For the demonstration they recreated the Benchmark Capital website. They recently had a great upgrade to their site which included some slick new themes and layouts possibilities. Our previous coverage of Weebly is here and here. Virtualmin Virtualmin is taking on the lack of innovation in the server admin programs, like Plesk, by making a more accessable version for pages managed by the non-technical crowd. The program will feature simple installs of popular programs like content management systems that often cost extra on other providers. It will also let you administer your website from your desktop and mobile device. Octopart Vertical search engine Octopart, which launched not too long ago, focuses on putting an end the inadequate search engines used by electronics parts manufacturers. Octopart lets you search, compare prices, and view specifications for parts on Allied Electronics, Digi-Key, Mouser, and Newark InOne. They have a deal → Read More
Weebly, the best of the Ajax site creator crowd, has taken funding from YCombinator and is opening up an API for outside developers, reports VentureBeat. YCombinator is best known for founding Reddit, A Digg-like site which was recently acquired by Condé Nast. This is a company that we initially passed on writing about in the late summer due to bugs, but we took another look in November and came away impressed. As VentureBeat mentions, they integrate better with Google Maps than Google itself does with its own web site creator. Everything seems to be on track with Weebly except that annoying business model. With all of the competition in this space, the price has been set firmly at zero. Trying to add advertising won’t fly with customers. Perhaps they can make money on hosting sites. Or just keep the burn rate low and flip it before the money runs out. Weebly has made it as simple as possible to try their product. Just pick a username and password, no email required for testing. → Read More
I have to give credit to Weebly, which is turning into one of the best simple site creation tools on the Internet. When we first heard about them a couple of months ago all I saw was another buggy Ajax website creator. What we really wanted to see was something better than the existing tools – Google Page Creator, Sitekreator and Synthasite. We’ve taken another look over the last few days, and Weebly has come a long way in those two months. Weebly allows users to create simple multipage websites using a drag and drop Ajax interface, with just a few clicks. Users can then save those websites to a Weebly server or download them for use elsewhere (if you download the site, the Weebly header bar is removed). A RSS element can be included. In addition to standard text and image tools and RSS support, Weebly supports Javascript-based elements like Google Maps, the Flickr Badge, etc. Some recent commenters in blog posts (see comments here for example) have complained that the site is slow, although in our testing it responded extremely well. This may be an issue with traffic load to the Weebly site. We’ll see how it performs in the coming days with periodic testing. Weebly is also making good use of video to show people what it’s all about. This is something we continue to suggest to new companies, and recently profiled Amberjack helps startups do this. We’ve included a demo video for Weebly below (if anyone knows what porn movie they stole the music from, please let me know). There are also a number of videos available to help users with certain aspects of the service. Note: Weebly is open for registrations but they are limiting the total number of new users. If you can’t sign up, be patient and try again in a few days. → Read More
