There are multitudes of options when it comes to selecting the right website building service to help you design the very best website to fit your needs.  How do you choose?  Weebly is one great choice to consider for potential designers looking for a powerful, user-friendly, cost-effective web-design option.

Design Features

As Weebly users begin designing their sites, the first step is to choose whether or not you plan to sell products.  If yes, users will have to add store and product information.  After that, users can choose a template from over 60 options offered by Weebly.    While users are unable to preview the sites in mobile as well as desktop view, it does offer the choice of changing the theme later without having to rebuild the entire site, which is a nice option to have.

The Weebly web design interface includes a dark left panel for dragging elements onto the page.  That panel changes modes of function when users make choices from the menu at the top.  That menu offers choices such as “build,” “pages,” “theme,” “store,” “apps,” “settings,” and “help.” Users can add all of the traditional elements to their page, including text boxes, images, maps, spacers, and media.  The “media” option includes video, audio, and document files, but only paid accounts can include audio and video files.  Weebly also gives users the options of including elements like feeds, forums, polls, RSVP forms, and surveys.

Weebly also includes several layout options, and the choice to customize themes by changing the text display.  Users can add site pages from a sidebar that appears under the “pages” section of the top menu bar.  This allows users to choose between standard pages, blog pages, store pages, or external pages.  Weebly also allows users to enter text directly onto the page instead of into a sidebar.  Image editing is also fairly user-friendly, allowing designers to adjuster things like brightness, contrast, and color, as well as applying filters and text as desired.   It also includes access to images from other online sources like Facebook, as well as searches for free and paid stock photo choices.

For users interested in apps and images, Weebly allows users to access an App Ceenter which includes more than 300 widgets that can be added to the site.  Some are free, and some have fees, but there are many offerings to choose from.  Weebly also has a comment system option that users can select, or they can use the comment system from sites like Facebook or Disqus.

Weebly gives users the option to register a custom domain name, or to use their site address as a subdomain of Weebly.com, whichever they prefer.  Weebly has a mobile-site creation option which automatically generates a mobile site based on your website design and template.

Finally, one of Weebly’s biggest advantages is that it allows users to take a site created in Weebly and transfer it elsewhere for hosting.  From the “settings” page, users can download their site as a ZIP archive file that includes all of their HTML information, and send it via email.

Pricing Options

Weebly offers its users a free website option, in exchange for simply an email address and a password.  This site will include 500 MB of storage, and will include Weebly ads.  For a fee of $8 per month, starter accounts do not include the Weebly ads, and do include a custom domain name, unlimited storage, and a ten-product store.  For $12 per month, the Weebly Pro package adds in a site search option, password protection for up to 100 site members, and veido background, as well as increasing the store product limit to 25.  With a $25 per month Business account, users can sell unlimited products, including digital goods, and for $38 per month, the Performance option also includes email marketing up to five campaigns per month for 500 addresses, as well as real-time shipping rate calculation.

Customer Service and Conclusory Thoughts

If you get stuck in the design portion of the process, Weebly offers a series of helpful tutorials for designers.  They also offer great online support, as well as video and blog support. Weebly also offers all users, even its free users, access to some site-activity stats for their sites.  Even free users can see their page views and unique visitors for each day of the month.  Upgraded accounts are able to see things like search terms used to arrive at the site, referring sites, and top-visited pages.  Weebly also gives users great tools to help promote their sites, which can be important for attracting the audiences you want.

Ultimately, Weebly is an intuitive, user-friendly service that helps users to create attractive, easily accessible sites, blogs, and online stores.  Even users with beginning design skills will find Weebly easy to use and interact with.  Choosing Weebly means you’ll be able to create an attractive, high-quality website without the headache that can often come with doing so.