Weebly Goes With YCombinator
Michael Arrington
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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.
I know that a lot of skilled technical people will probably be down on AJAX site creation but for the average Grandmother or Soccer Mom this is a godsend. I know from working in IT that I get probably one question a week about how to get a website up easily for “my son/my sister/my Grandma”.
More power to this type of setup. Sure it’s a niche, but a valuable niche.
When will “websites” be purchasable at places like Hallmark or the checkout stand at the grocery store? Impulse buys and greeting cards are pretty much the complexity and effort that “son/sister/grandma” ultimately want to put, and usually end up putting, into a site, at least in my experience.
It’s interesting to compare and contrast this with Terapad - http://terapad.com
A web site creator for mom and dad - not a bad idea. Many people tried to do this before (including Google) with rather poor results. However, the implementation and the current choice of elements a Weebly customer can place is so poor that really nobody can use it - within a couple of minutes useage i got 5 errors! It will probably take years to get this system so bullet proof that mom and dad can use it. The current version of Weebly is another proof that the complexity of AJAX cannot be managed by typical young software developers. I wonder how serious investors can throw money at a student level project.
Hey Horst, saw your feedback email earlier. We’re not aware of any issues with the software right now. If you can get back to us, we’ll look into anything that might have popped up — or shoot me an email with your number, and I can have someone from the team give you a call.
They should eventually sell themes to the users. Compete with sites like Template Monster but have the backend entirely there and extremely easy for users to edit.
Any news on Synthasite?
Congratulations to David and the team. Good effort.
@ Horst:
“complexity of AJAX cannot be managed by typical young software developers.” “typical” means under par, in the software development world, so your statement is true but is not particular to young developers. I’ve seen good/bad developers of all ages I’d say age is not a factor here.
didnt infogami already do this?
horst,
its more likely the browser your user is buggy, its a little hard to be so harsh to the developers of this site for bugs, when in fact JavaScript is more less broken due to all the bugs in the browsers, and browser incompatibilities.
While I like the idea of ‘instant websites for non-geeks’, and think that eventually someone will nail this, Weebly does seem pretty buggy. For example, take a look at this page: http://colin.weebly.com/index.html and you can see that quotes aren’t being escaped properly. This is not a browser error, or due to JS support. Just good old fashion sloppy programming (which I my self am guilty of as well of course).
Looking forward to seeing the bugs get ironed out.
Looks nifty, though I personally use Visual Studio 2005 and think I will stick with it.
Hey Colin, thanks for letting us know about the quotes issue, which is now fixed. Let me know if anything else comes up.