Checking Out Weebly’s Ajax Site Creator

While Weebly main page look like this: http://www.inetpub.hu/kurbli/weebly.png, I don’t want try it.
(XPSP2, IE7 7.0.5730.11)

Amberjack doesn’t seem to deliver actual videos. What would be a tool to quickly make a weebly-type video?

What about web menu to surf between a site? I would very much like an easy way to embed menu in such web pages creation process.

I’m starting to wonder what Squarespace has done to piss off the blogosphere. No blogs ever mentions what I think is the best tool in this space.

Squarespace is by far the best site creation tool I have used. I have tried some of the newer ones and they don’t seem to get that people want simple and no coding. Some just dump me to a blank page with no hint at what to do next. It’s like being told to get out of the car in the middle of the dessert - not very comforting.

Someone please help Squarespace find better PR firm so that they can survive and I don’t have to switch our public facing site to some other tool.

I’ll give Weebly about two minutes of consideration and if it doesn’t wow me by then then it is not worth looking at in a world where Google Page Creator is already available.

Ok. I gave it a few minutes, watched the demo, signed up, created a test page and am back to comment about it.

This is how quick to review and smooth all solutions should be.

At first glance it seems like a nice tool for a personal site. I like the pre-built modules to choose from and the integration with other service.

I will add it to my list of sites I tell people to check out when they ask me how they can build their own website. You would be amazed how many times I get asked that just because I work at a “tech company”.

Just a note to let you know that the new version of Webation Active (version 7.5 - due January 2007) will have many web 2.0 improvements - including full drag and drop (of page content elements and the site structure) and a many interface improvements including a new toolbar.

We have also introduced free setup on all $US plans - visit us online at: http://www.webation.com

Now this is cool.

Web 2.0 is really taking a step forward. I just wonder if that won’t slow the browser down too much…

Why is that so many of these Web 2.0 companies do not obfuscate their code - it constanly amazes me -

Cool concept - but it seems that this is a very crowded market - in 7 comments - there was 2 other competitors mentioned plus 3 in the original market - so there is atleast 5 competing for what is a fairly small market

Sampa is the most sophisticated system to create a website today. (disclaimer: I’m biased because I’m the founder.
Not only we have Menus, we have dynamic menus. We trivially integrate with YouTube, Flickr, Blogger and Google Analytics. When I mean trivially, I mean “just put your username here”.
It has a blog integrated. Actually, you can have multiple blogs, like one private and one public, or one about tech another about cooking. It has integrated security, tagging, geo-tagging (coming soon).

You all should give a try: http://www.sampa.com

It still continues to amaze me that the cart always comes before the horse. Websites on the Internet are pointless if they aren’t optimzed for search engines. How are any of these systems any different than Geocities?

I mean basically why create a website if it’s just going to sit there and collect dust? I just looked at the mambo system and once again you have directories with names like 16/23/. How does a frigging search engine interpret what that means..or more importantly…how does that beat out your competition that manually puts keywords in their directory structures?

The real ugly truth of the Internet is that there are people that know exactly how to get a first page presence with an incredibly ugly spam site. Does it matter that it’s ugly? No…all that matters is that it’s sitting on the first page of the search engines.

You understand? This is about conversions, not about taking up space on the Internet with another pretty dust covered website.

Larry,

I agree with you about SquareSpace. I consider it to be one of the best premium blogging/site authoring solutions out there. Although, its focus is on blogging, the service is flexible enough to create a good looking and usable website that goes beyond blog posts. I have to admit, there are some advanced features I would like to see from it.

Here is my company’s blog and interim site that is running off of SquareSpace.
http://www.convos.com

I’m glad to see more players entering this space - it’s a sign that we are all moving the right direction. The Synthasite team has been very quietly working on taking the product to a whole new level and although Synthasite has never been out of a closed Beta - the new version is going to really be something else - it’s like we’re skipping version 1.0 and going straight to 2.0.

We’re incorporating 2 years worth of learnings already in developing Synthasite, and applying it to what we think will really hit the sweet spot. Look out for a launch in early 2007 - I have no doubt that it will impress!

And just to address Stephen’s comment - the market is not small by any means. These products are not just for websites, they’re also for building & customizing blogs & other web pages - so the potential market is massive (50m blogs out there at last count).

Larry/JP,

Thanks for the Squarespace comments

msn spaces, ms live for business page creator, yahoo, google…..what’s the point? people are moving toward dynamic content for personal use (photos, blogs etc) and other high end solutions for business…so who is this for and what on earth are you promoting? another tripod? another geocities? but with some ajax? forget it, with single signon and ease of account management, my money is one msft, yahoo or goog for this utility, and the world of dev shops for higher end solutions…

Had a look at the example site (http://example.weebly.com/):
How dumb! The DOCTYPE is “XHTML 1.0 Strict” but it’s FULL of invalid/deprecated/uppercased tags etc. …inside a frame. Doh!
Another HTML-soup generator that’s definitely NOT gonna make the Web a friendlier place.

Is the actual Weebly site built with their own product? This is a good indication whether or not you can actually do anything useful with it or not?

I have tried Google Page Creator, it is very basic.

Is that spam?

Yes

As the list of online tools that allows you to build a web site is getting bigger every minute I decided to put my list on del.icio.us:

http://del.icio.us/lenkov/sitebuilder

Hopefully this way we can reduce the self-advertising on this blog and focus on what’s more interesting — will there be enough market for all these site builders appearing with mushrooms-after-rain speed, especially when goog/yahoo/msft had entered the space.

Well one way to look at it is: there are ~24M small businesses in USA alone. Less then 10% of them have web sites (not to mention blogs or other customer facing online presence)

Another way is to compare it with other industries like clothing. Even the big chains (gap, hugo) and stores (macys, target, walmart) dominate the market (as msft/goog/yahoo inevitable will), there is still huge market for boutiques (maybe more in Europe then in US) who can offer more personalized touch at still reasonable price (before to go with fully custom designed clothing which in our case are the web design agencies).

I think for as long as there are many options, each one with its unique values — it’s a good market to be in. The problems will start when there are only three options: msft, msft and msft. (or msft/goog/yahoo).

We have temporarily hit the maximum number of users we can support. We have added your email address to the list of users to send invitations, and will do so as soon as possible. Please email invite@weebly.com with any questions or concerns.

haha - is that spam?
no, I think they accidently posted it to the wrong comments web site

Congratulations, guys.

why do you have people speaking japanese on your website. its so dumb. i dont like this site at all. you are to confusing.