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.

There are countless potential uses for this, but the obvious ones are for personal blogs and for reports (you can see an example of what a Weebly report might look like here). Teachers can also create their own publicly available class websites, allowing students to easily upload assignments and giving parents a place to look to see what their children are up to at school.

At this point most of these features are pretty basic, but I see quite a bit of potential here. Imagine letting teachers build out individual student profile pages, where students would be greeted with photos, their recent grades, and maybe a personal note from their teacher (I imagine that would be more popular with younger kids). There are obviously some education products already out there, like Blackboard, but most of these are pretty spartan and data driven — Weebly would give teachers a new degree of customization and it’s more user friendly to boot. That said, schools are notoriously political, so Weebly may have some trouble getting its foot in the door.

Weebly is offering the product for free for teachers with up to 40 students, and then $1 per additional student account, purchased in packs of 10. Teachers can also sign up for Weebly Pro for $40/year, and all of the pro features extend to their students. There’s also a discount for teachers who refer each other.

As part of today’s news, Weebly has also announced that it has partnered with National History Day, a program held in schools across the country where over 500,000 students create a research project describing or reenacting a historical event. One option students have is to build a web site for their project, and this year Weebly will be the only officially sanctioned way to do that.

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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). And aside from any fees you might have from PayPal or Google, the Weebly storefront is totally free – the company isn’t taking a cut of any of your sales. To make money, Weebly plans to offer ‘pro’ features for power users at a premium in the future (the site also generates revenue through its pro accounts and domain sales).

There are already quite a few services online that allow you to generate your own virtual marketplace, but Weebly cofounder David Rusenko says that most of these do a poor job allowing you to customize the look and feel of your store, which often leads to something generic. Because Weebly can already be used to build your own fully customized webpage, adding the ability to sell items seemed like a natural extension to the product (especially since many users were already trying to sell items from their Weebly pages on their own).

At this point my only complaint about the Weebly store is that it doesn’t yet offer templates, though Rusenko says they’re on the way. This means that whenever you create a page for an item, you’re going to have to re-drag all of the links to your other items back to the bottom of the page. This may allow for a wide degree of flexibility, but I think it will also lead to inconsistency on some stores, as some designers forget to add links to their other products (or they get lazy). Rusenko ackowledges that this could get frustrating, but says that the Weebly storefront is really meant for people with small inventories, so this shouldnt be as much of a hassle as it would be for major retailers.

Beyond the new storefront functionality, Weebly is doing quite well. The site has almost 2 million registered sites (and is growing steadily, see graph below).

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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.

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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.

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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 down yet another third party application that adds functionality to the site.

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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.

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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 with how-to hobbyist’s site, Instructables, to make buying parts for your project a snap. They’ve also got more parts supplies calling to get their data up on the site.

Tsumobi
Mobile applications have so far been nightmares to implement. It’s often hard to gain adoption due to complicated installs and near impossible to get users to upgrade their version once the product has shipped. Tsumobi hopes to solve this problem by creating their own language. The new language will sit on top of J2ME and process applications downloaded (via URL) for Tsumobi enabled sites. This means that developers will be able to change Tsumobi applications on the fly and have Tsumobi enabled phones automatically get the updates just by visiting a link.

Whitenoise Networks
Whitenoise is like a social network for the music industry. It comes with specially made tools for bands, agents, publicists, and venues to manage each part of their business. Bands will be able to manage their cross country tours by map, using a venue search to find gigs in any town they’re passing through. Venues will get access to a full list of artists in their area along with samples and ways to reach their agent to book a show.

Buxfer
Buxfer is Quicken for 20 somethings. As we covered before, it solves a problem similar to Billmonk, but with more advanced features. Buxfer tackles the unique needs of young people trying to find out where all their money evaporates to and reign in their expenses. To date, they’ve been tracking $8.4 million in over 30,000 transactions.

Writewith.com
Writewith is a collaborative writing web app, enabling you to easily flow through the steps of writing, editing, and publishing a document with a group. A document is started by uploading an existing document (.doc, .txt, .rdf) or just typing away. After the initial draft is completed, you can invite other editors by email and assign them tasks. Writewith has full version control and even lets you post comments to each other, making it possible to edit together in real time. Currently Writewith is in beta testing with 15 college newspapers including Stanford and two of Canada’s largest college papers (which even includes a national newswire).

Socialmoth
Socialmoth is a community to post your thoughts anonymously. You can view postings (mostly gossip and secrets) from the whole community as well as get updates for when someone in your group of friends makes a post. The vast majority of their members appear to be women, with over 600 posts being made per day. These guys will also be taking a new spin on their idea, launching Disenchat.com, a place to post anonymously about your workplace. The system will verify your organization by email address (like Facebook) and let you start riffing. Outsiders will be able to see the existence of the forum and volume of posting, but not the specific comments.

View3
View3 plans on changing the way 3D models are made. Like Photosynth, View3 will let you walk into and explore 3D images of photos, but will let you use as little as one photo to get started. The project has been started by a group of 3 Stanford grad students and currently holds 2 patents in the area.

Auctomatic
eBay power users make an average of 400 listings per day. With 5 pages to fill to make a listing, that’s 2000 page views and a lot of clicking. Auctomatic plans to make this a whole lot simpler first by cutting it down to a single page and then adding more management features on top. eBay sales management is a category currently dominated by Vendio and Marketworks, who together contribute about $1.8 billion dollars of goods to the auction giant. For their service, these providers often take a percentage of sales, as well as a monthly fee that can be as high as $400. Auctomatic plans to have more a more flexible program and pricing. They have already raised $400K in angel financing apart from Y Combinator.

Snipshot
Snipshot is a photo editor that lets you start editing any photo with one click of a bookmarklet. You can use Snipshot to crop, resize, adjust colors, an automatically enhance you photos within your browser and then save it back to the web. There are a couple other photo editors in this category and Photoshop plans to get in as well.

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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.

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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.

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