In this digital age, you cannot overstate the importance of a website when it comes to business. In many cases the website is your business, especially as more and more companies are opting to go completely online, moving away from retail locations. But coding an attractive and effective website can require extensive HTML and CSS knowledge – and hiring a professional web designer can easily cost thousands of dollars. So what can you do?
Weebly was created in response to this dilemma, offering an accessible web design and web-hosting platform, allowing you to create pages that are both functional and visually appealing. Founded in 2007, Weebly now boasts an impressive 15 million sites and over 100 million unique monthly visitors. Although it remains lesser known than widespread platforms such as Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress, Weebly has proven itself to be a legitimate option worth considering – especially for those not ready to dish out significant funds to an outside designer.
As previously mentioned, Weebly’s main draw is that it’s easy. Really easy. After choosing from a wide range of preset templates, you literally drag-and-drop your website together. Unlike ‘themes’ in many other platforms, each page of your Weebly site can be fully customized with columns, titles, dividers, buttons, and a wide variety of multimedia. The site organizer (the structural backbone) is very intuitive, and you certainly can edit the HTML and CSS manually for further customization if you feel comfortable doing so. Even without previous training or experience, you could get the hang of Weebly in an hour and have a beautiful site completed in a week. And on top of all that, it’s free to use with no time limit. You’ll probably want to upgrade to premium eventually, but even that is very reasonable.
However, there still are a few concerns worth considering. When it comes to SEO, Weebly does a decent job, featuring easy-access meta tags, header and footer codes, custom HTML, and 301 redirects. But it does lack a few essentials, such as heading tags, a central directory structure, and spam control for its blog section. Weebly’s e-commerce features are also a bit weak at the moment, so if you are planning to sell a wide variety of products under many different sections, you might want to reconsider.
Overall, Weebly is a fantastic tool for small business owners looking to create an attractive, functional, and professional website for free. While it might not be the best option for everyone’s main site, you can still consider creative ways to increase traffic through Weebly. For more help on how to use Weebly, contact our experts at Premiere Creative and give us a call at (973) 346-8100.
