Easy Website Building: Weebly

What is it?
A website for building websites.

It's for you if:
You are looking for a way to easily build a website or blog.

What's cool about it?
Simplicity. Anyone can use it; it's designed for the not-so-tech-savvy. It has plenty of features to put a great site together whether it's for personal or small business use; your site will look very clean and professional when complete. One of its best features is the choice of design templates. These are the backgrounds to your site. No matter which one you pick your site will be easy to read and navigate.

How do I get it?
Go to www.weebly.com and sign up. You can sign for a free account which gives you (plenty) basic features or a Pro account which will give you additional features such as premium support, video player, 10 sites, and large sized file uploads (100 MB). More than likely, the basic free version will be fine for you, particularly, if you are just starting. For the Pro version you'll pay $5/month with a 6 month commitment, $4 for one year or $3/month for 2 years.

Tips/Extras
I think the pricing is very reasonable for such great software; I am all about paying a reasonable fee for software, especially if it gives me a great user experience, simple to use design and a good set of features (known in the software world as "feature-set").

When you build a website you must "publish" it to the web so that others can see it. You can publish your site for free using Weebly's service but the internet address will be http://yoursite.weebly.com. This is fine for most folks. If you want your own "domain name" such as www.yoursite.com, you must pay a fee per year. Weebly charges $50/year. They charge less with a 2, 5 or 10 year commitment. This is a lot more expensive than other services such as Google or GoDaddy but in the end the ease of use, feature-set and hassle-free website building is worth it.

If you are using a Mac, then you are probably better off using iWeb. You'll pay $99/year for Apple to host your site but it's included as part of your Annual Support. The only issue I find with iWeb is the lack of template choices. You can buy templates online and install them on your Mac to get around this issue - search in Google for iWeb templates.