An Effortless Way to Create a Website

By | June 13, 2009

3. Weebly

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 Weebly.com represents a free website creation tool; the company itself is based in San Francisco, California and was founded in 2006 with the mission to help people put their information online quickly and easily. Weebly uses a widget style format, allowing users to create pages with only a few clicks by dragging and dropping different page elements.

Although given solution is a free one in June 2008 Weebly Pro feature was added, allowing users to get extra functionality (creating password-protected pages, upgrading file size limits, receiving additional support services and so on). It’s compatible with the most popular browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Google). The fact that at the moment Weebly is considered to have about 2 million users means nothing, but being one of the most popular online website builders.

For a very long time the only significant criticism was the lack of the ability to edit or upload CSS/HTML of the web pages. However on February 26, 2009 Weebly introduced this feature, thus responding to the request of its users.

Now let’s check the widget style of the Weebly’s website editor and an example of the page you can create spending no more than 2 minutes.

The Sample page and the editor (on the top):

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 The section of editing the pages of your website:

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 It seems to be pretty simple and enough intuitive, still to my mind Wix’s editor is much user friendlier.

  • As regards the features, here are the most characteristic ones:
  • There are no bandwidth restrictions, storage caps or limits on the number of pages allowed
  • Supporting an unlimited number of blogs within your website with powerful blogging features
  • There is no advertising placed even if you have a free account
  • The opportunity to publish the website to your own domain
  • E-Commerce feature: the ability to create an online store and many others.

If you would like to test Weebly’s functionality, visit the home page to create a free account.

4. WebStarts

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 WebStarts.com is another great tool designed to help users create and maintain different kinds of websites. It allows you to quickly edit your website and keep the content fresh and original. WebStarts doesn’t limit your creativeness with the templates, allowing you to change every single element of the page. As the previous solutions given online website builder has both free and Pro versions, so you can choose whatever you want depending on your needs. Here you can learn more about pricing and features each version has.

Along with the great functionality of WebStarts there is one more thing I personally liked – the presence of video tutorials dedicated to some really important topics (for example, how to get found on Google, how to add a domain name and etc.) inside the user account. Another nice thing about WebStarts is that you can become a Pro member for a very affordable price – $3,94 per month.

As for the user interface we can check the following screenshots in order to see how it looks.

Here is the Home Page of the user account:

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 And the Sample page I created using available templates:

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 Despite the fact that editor itself looks quite out-of-date (like MS Office 2003), it’s pretty easy to use. It allows you to drag and drop objects to the exact location you want them to be displayed on your page. So you can create really unique layouts limited by your imagination.

Talking about the main characteristic features of WebStarts the following ones should be mentioned:

  • The ability to add Flash animations
  • Full HTML control for the professionals
  • Easy to use web statistics to monitor, analyze, and react to your web site’s traffic in real time
  • The opportunity to accept credit cards
  • The ability to adjust image opacity
  • Widget gallery: adding hundreds of mini applications to your website and so on.

You can check all the features and watch the videos here.

One thought on “An Effortless Way to Create a Website

  1. Cooper Foster

    is there a sort of internet bookmark for Mobile Webistes?;~.

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