6 ms·

Show HN: Weebly 4 – Websites, eCommerce and Email Marketing

171 points by drusenko 10y ago

drusenko 10y ago
Hey everyone, David (founder/ceo) of Weebly here. We’re really excited about this launch, Weebly is now a platform to power a business online with websites, ecommerce, and email marketing all under one roof. In case you haven’t heard of us, we were W07 (one of the first YC batches) — 9 years later, over 40M people have created their site or store on Weebly, and 325M people around the world and half of the US population visit those businesses every month. Here are some cool things you might not notice: - We were born pre-AWS and actually run our own data centers, have an ASN and manage our own network, host 2PB of data that is geographically replicated in near-real time, and have successfully defended against 200Gbps+ DDoS attacks. - We’ve put a ton of care into bringing all of the pieces together (websites, ecommerce, email marketing) in a super integrated and seamless way. Check out, for example, how you can customize all of the store emails with Weebly Promote (email marketing), when you send out an email campaign you can automatically track sales generated from that email, how we automatically import and create smart groups -- like frequent customers who haven’t purchased recently -- or how we will even recommend pre-created emails based on actions you take adding new products, putting products on sale, etc. - The eCommerce platform has been significantly upgraded, with things like real-time shipping (UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL integrations), abandoned carts, gift cards, a re-built tax & shipping engine, a new store front & checkout, bulk editing and power seller features, and a whole bunch of other cool stuff. - Check out the apps for iOS and Android. It was pretty hard engineering work to get a full live editing experience with a fast, native UI that need to ultimately render down to a slow WebView (no one else that we’re aware of has been able to pull this off like this). - We’ve built a web code editor (similar to Mozilla Thimble from a few days ago) that’s pretty nifty. Create a site, then go to Theme>Edit HTML / CSS (screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ry5aeykn1l56l17/Screenshot%202016-09-20%2019.28.40.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/ry5aeykn1l56l17/Screenshot%202016-...) - Here are some of the cool new themes: https://highpeak-theme.weebly.com/ https://highpeak-theme.weebly.com/, https://verticals-business-slick.weebly.com/ https://verticals-business-slick.weebly.com/, https://pathway-financial.weebly.com/ https://pathway-financial.weebly.com/, https://urbandine-business.weebly.com/ https://urbandine-business.weebly.com/, https://jaysims-oasis-merch.weebly.com/ https://jaysims-oasis-merch.weebly.com/, https://oikos-test.weebly.com/ https://oikos-test.weebly.com/ Our ultimate goal is to create a platform that small to medium creators of all kinds can use so they can focus on what they love doing, and less on the business of running their business. Imagine all the time spent learning from awesome people like patio11 -- what if we could make the whole online side of running your business a whole lot easier? That’s the dream, this is the first step in that direction. Happy to answer any questions and would love your feedback!
- HorizonXP 10y ago
  Hi David! This looks pretty fantastic! Well done on getting this together and launching! I think we should always congratulate folks who get to the launch phase, no matter their size/age. :-) I have a friend that reached out to me about setting up a website for her business that she's starting with some friends. I was originally going to suggest Shopify to her, especially since we're in Canada. I went to your pricing page, and saw that you have more plans, present them in CAD, and are more competitive than Shopify. Am I to assume that means that this is open to Canadian/international customers? Also, Shopify shows their transaction fees, which seems to be broken down by credit card type. You show your Weebly transaction fee, but then say this is on top of Stripe/PayPal's fees. Perhaps it might make sense to provide details and/or a link to their rates so a customer can evaluate it? Finally, Shopify has a 14 day free trial that is compelling to "casuals" to try and evaluate before they jump right in. I know that would be appealing to my friend. Is there an equivalent option from Weebly? Those are the questions I had for now, without diving too deep into the actual platforms. Ultimately, my friend is completely non-technical, and I don't have the time to support her regularly, so a solution like this that's mostly hands-off is perfect. Kudos!
  - drusenko 10y ago
    Thanks! Yes, Canada is a very important market for us, and we think our ecommerce platform with Weebly 4 is incredibly competitive with Shopify for most non-enterprise use cases. We have a couple big advantages over Shopify: first, the content customization side of things with a WYSIWYG editor -- it's awesome for people who aren't technical, and saves you a lot of time if you are -- and second, deeply integrated email marketing. I'm obviously biased, but I think overall it's a much more accessible, affordable, and intuitive platform for most small to medium businesses. Good feedback on the transaction fees. We actually don't charge any transaction fees on the Business plan ($25/mo), and you can integrate from any number of merchant payment providers like Stripe, Square, PayPal, and Authorize.net. I think we can do a better job of being crystal clear on what all of the payment fees are. On the free trial -- you can try most of the features for free on Weebly, but there are some ecommerce features you need to upgrade to try. We're working on it though, and we should have it released within a couple weeks!
slater 10y ago
I see the HTML that weebly produces now isn't quite as horrendous as it used to be! :D
- drusenko 10y ago
  Hah, thanks! ;) Check out our online code editor too (https://www.dropbox.com/s/ry5aeykn1l56l17/Screenshot%202016-09-20%2019.28.40.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/ry5aeykn1l56l17/Screenshot%202016-...) -- templates now use Mustache and LESS. It's a pretty neat environment for editing online and seeing a real-time preview -- lots of people use this to learn to code. We also have a Ruby gem that you can plug into a git hook or your favorite IDE for rapid prototyping.
donutdan4114 10y ago
Do app integrations have a way of storing arbitrary data on resources, such as products? For example, Shopify has "metafields" which allow Apps to add strings of data within a namespace/key, which can then be used in the liquid templating engine.
- fligtar 10y ago
  Justin from the Weebly Apps team here -- that's a great suggestion! We'd love to add functionality to store custom data on products, pages, blog posts, etc. and even allow apps to access other apps' data stored in that fashion. We don't support this quite yet, but it's something we're thinking about. You can find all of our documentation at http://dev.weebly.com http://dev.weebly.com
inputcoffee 10y ago
Obviously, this isn't competing with someone who is spinning up their own Django/Rails/Node solution. The big questions that come to mind: 1. How does this compare with hosting Wordpress. I like that with Wordpress, if some issue comes up, you can find someone who knows the innards and program what you need. Does the user have that level of access? 2. How does it compare with WIX, and the other site building competitors? 3. What if someone has built some great piece of code and I want to install some of the functionality on my site, can I do it? It just seems that it is a closed enough system that I have to rely on Weebly engineers to do everything.
- drusenko 10y ago
  1. Wordpress is probably better if you really want a platform to build something very custom off of, so in that sense it would be an alternative to a Django/Rails/Node solution. The downside is that it's a lot of work to both build and maintain, worrying about scaling, ongoing security patches and maintenance, etc. 2. One, Weebly is a much more intuitive, easy to use platform, two, we have a powerful ecommerce platform built-in (Wix doesn't have this), three, we have iOS and Android apps to create or manage everything from (no one else has that), four, we have a deep developer ecosystem (over 200 third party apps and integrations, the most of any platform), and five, the website, ecommerce, and email marketing is deeply integrated, others are more a collection of pieces. 3. Yes! There are a ton of APIs to build into Weebly, check it out here: http://dev.weebly.com/ http://dev.weebly.com/. You can also just copy and paste any code you want into your site with the embed code element. And if you're just looking to showcase code on your site, check this out: https://www.weebly.com/app-center/code-block?ref=ac-collection https://www.weebly.com/app-center/code-block?ref=ac-collecti...
rubidium 10y ago
So let's say I'm going to set-up a small business with an online store and other content (blog, etc...). Let's also say I don't care about the tech stack or want to be doing custom css/html. Weebly looks promising for that, and at $25-50/month isn't too bad. For people more familiar with this area, what other options are there? Wordpress+shopify? And how do the fees stack up with the different options?
- arrosenberg 10y ago
  I haven't played with Weebly, and I've spent a fair amount of time doing custom development, but I have a store on Shopify. The pricing on the last two tiers is very competitive. On the top non-enterprise tier, Shopify is about $180 a month and the feature set seems pretty comparable. Shopify doesn't provide a ton of tools to build your site unless you can do HTML/CSS, so I'd imagine Weebly is stronger in that respect for non-technical users. The email piece seems like an after-thought, once you get beyond a few hundred customers, you will need a more serious solution for email marketing.
- NicoJuicy 10y ago
  I personally use wordpress and woocommerce, got all the customization i need Free mostly, paid plugins for setting it up faster :) -- emails, abandoned carts, ...
tucaz 10y ago
Accessed from Brazil and the content is translated. Very cool. Congrats!
omarchowdhury 10y ago
This looks fantastic. We are moving our store from an older CRM and looking for an alternative. We were set on bigCommerce... Can we bring our own HTML/CSS and integrate with Weebly? Even with custom payment flows?
- drusenko 10y ago
  Yes! You can absolutely do that and customize quite a bit, although the payment flow is not fully customizable. Check out the docs here: https://dev.weebly.com/use-partials.html https://dev.weebly.com/use-partials.html
atourgates 10y ago
One thing I've noticed on Weebly, Squarespace, Wix and other similar "DIY without any coding" website platforms is that all their themes depend on having excellent photography. Excellent photography is great, but many of the small businesses who are primarily targeted with these services, don't have it. And stock photography looks like, well, stock photography. I'd love to see a service like this embrace themes that don't depend on great photography. Themes that make good use of typography and other non-image visual elements.
- drusenko 10y ago
  Very true. Great photography is key for a great looking site. We do have some good stock photography available, but it will never look as good as the real deal. I love your suggestion for more typography focused themes!
- soared 10y ago
  This is problem for every website theme - even lots of bootstrap themes depend on glorious images. Designers who build themes have access to great images and so they use them constantly. Even searching for wordpress themes (of which millions exist) recently I had to ignore 75% of what I saw because they have a huge hero or full column images.
- bballer 10y ago
  For some stock photography that doesn't feel so "stocky" check out this repo https://github.com/heyalexej/awesome-images https://github.com/heyalexej/awesome-images There are some really good sites in there that have very high quality photos free for use. My two favorites are: http://www.gratisography.com/ http://www.gratisography.com/ http://isorepublic.com/ http://isorepublic.com/ Not to diminish your point that more themes need to gear themselves towards imageless content, this is just a good place to start for those working on budgets.
- _audakel 10y ago
  Free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos. https://unsplash.com/ https://unsplash.com/ I use them alot, great selection of really unique shots.
triangleman 10y ago
Glad to hear y'all are keeping up with the industry. I will have to give this another look.
kfk 10y ago
Good, but I live in Germany and I don't speak German, so how do I read the content?
- drusenko 10y ago
  If you scroll down at the bottom of the page in the lower right, there is an option to switch to English!
- detaro 10y ago
  by switching the language with the button hidden at the very bottom right of the page, which leads here: https://www.weebly.com/?lang=en https://www.weebly.com/?lang=en Really could be more prominent, at least on first page load.
- sixhobbits 10y ago
  I live in the Netherlands and don't speak Dutch. Got redirected to /nl/4, which is almost all in English but has some of the headings in Dutch. Pretty sure it's not intentional..
- minus7 10y ago
  Using IP-to-country resolution and ignoring the Accept-Language HTTP header seems to be a pretty common tactic these days.
SwellJoe 10y ago
Weebly is one of the companies from our batch (W07) that I would have wanted to invest in, if given the opportunity. They just build really cool products for non-technical folks. I've been recommending them for years (even though they kinda/sorta indirectly compete with what we build). I've been surprised by how important and effective email still is to most small businesses, and it's a hard problem to solve; having it integrated with the rest of your site and commerce solution is even harder. Ecommerce is a more obvious need, but has a lot more solutions available, including for non-technical folks. Congrats on launching cool new stuff all these years later!
- drusenko 10y ago
  hah, hey Joe! how are things? :) not too many of us still around from the W07 bach ;)
  - SwellJoe 10y ago
    We're still hanging in there. Our Open Source user base keeps growing, but revenue from our commercial products has been flat for too long; we're working on some hosted products, to hopefully address that. It's likely a pivot is in our future. And, on the personal front, I'm still traveling mostly full-time in an RV (as I've been doing off and on since I left the valley ~7 years ago).
harryf 10y ago
iPhone 6 Plus in landscape ... http://i.imgur.com/ZKorFe9.jpg http://i.imgur.com/ZKorFe9.jpg
- DumpOfGenius 10y ago
  mine's fine. (6s+)
- drusenko 10y ago
  we're working on it, thanks!
uses 10y ago
This page slows my browser to a crawl. I had to close the page to type this comment. Same if I open it in incognito with no extensions. Chrome Version 53.0.2785.116 m, Windows 10
- imaginenore 10y ago
  Weebly generates absolutely ridiculous code. Tons of CSS files, tons of JS files, plus random blocks of embedded JS. I've recently wanted to move a website off of Weebly for a friend, and it's a nightmare. Instead of simple clean markup you get all kinds of monstrosity.
S4M 10y ago
Is this Viaweb 20 years later?
zazaalaza 10y ago
Haha, you forgot to update this section of your site: https://education.weebly.com/ https://education.weebly.com/
Angostura 10y ago
The move from Weebly 2 to Weebly 3 seemed to be very rough - lots of unhappy punters. What lessons did you learn from that move, how did you handle thing differently this time?
- drusenko 10y ago
  We learned a lot, and things have been completely different this time around. We were much more careful about managing timelines & deliverables much further upstream, delivering features in more of a phased approach to prevent on big last minute merge with unanticipated interaction effects, ensuring adequate time for internal testing as well as external beta testing to uncover bugs of all kinds (regressions, usability, etc), and then cutting scope aggressively if necessary as the deadlines approach to make sure that we maintain a very high quality bar -- those are just a few of the things we've been able to improve on. Very proud of Weebly 4 and the team that made it all happen, it's both our biggest release ever, as well as our most polished!
BadassFractal 10y ago
How does this Weebly compare to squarespace, wix and webflow? What's the differentiation?
- wwalser 10y ago
  I believe the CEO answered that questions here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12550520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12550520
- brryant 10y ago
  Webflow CTO chiming in here - Weebly is definitely great for getting something up and running. But if you have specific design needs, then Webflow may be a better fit for you. We have powerful layout options like Flexbox: http://flexbox.webflow.com http://flexbox.webflow.com, and a full interactions & animations toolset: http://interactions.webflow.com http://interactions.webflow.com. Our CMS also gives you the ability to embed dynamic content into you page, so you can power a lightweight ecommerce solution via Shopify or Foxycart. We also support SSL, and a powerful hosting stack where you'll pages will load in less than 30ms. tl;dr: Webflow if you need powerful design controls without coding. There's more info on our website, https://webflow.com https://webflow.com - cheers!
jondishotsky 10y ago
Excellent team, beautiful product, bravo!

171 points by drusenko 10y ago

Hey everyone, David (founder/ceo) of Weebly here. We’re really excited about this launch, Weebly is now a platform to power a business online with websites, ecommerce, and email marketing all under one roof. In case you haven’t heard of us, we were W07 (one of the first YC batches) — 9 years later, over 40M people have created their site or store on Weebly, and 325M people around the world and half of the US population visit those businesses every month. Here are some cool things you might not notice: - We were born pre-AWS and actually run our own data centers, have an ASN and manage our own network, host 2PB of data that is geographically replicated in near-real time, and have successfully defended against 200Gbps+ DDoS attacks. - We’ve put a ton of care into bringing all of the pieces together (websites, ecommerce, email marketing) in a super integrated and seamless way. Check out, for example, how you can customize all of the store emails with Weebly Promote (email marketing), when you send out an email campaign you can automatically track sales generated from that email, how we automatically import and create smart groups -- like frequent customers who haven’t purchased recently -- or how we will even recommend pre-created emails based on actions you take adding new products, putting products on sale, etc. - The eCommerce platform has been significantly upgraded, with things like real-time shipping (UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL integrations), abandoned carts, gift cards, a re-built tax & shipping engine, a new store front & checkout, bulk editing and power seller features, and a whole bunch of other cool stuff. - Check out the apps for iOS and Android. It was pretty hard engineering work to get a full live editing experience with a fast, native UI that need to ultimately render down to a slow WebView (no one else that we’re aware of has been able to pull this off like this). - We’ve built a web code editor (similar to Mozilla Thimble from a few days ago) that’s pretty nifty. Create a site, then go to Theme>Edit HTML / CSS (screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ry5aeykn1l56l17/Screenshot%202016-09-20%2019.28.40.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/ry5aeykn1l56l17/Screenshot%202016-...) - Here are some of the cool new themes: https://highpeak-theme.weebly.com/ https://highpeak-theme.weebly.com/, https://verticals-business-slick.weebly.com/ https://verticals-business-slick.weebly.com/, https://pathway-financial.weebly.com/ https://pathway-financial.weebly.com/, https://urbandine-business.weebly.com/ https://urbandine-business.weebly.com/, https://jaysims-oasis-merch.weebly.com/ https://jaysims-oasis-merch.weebly.com/, https://oikos-test.weebly.com/ https://oikos-test.weebly.com/ Our ultimate goal is to create a platform that small to medium creators of all kinds can use so they can focus on what they love doing, and less on the business of running their business. Imagine all the time spent learning from awesome people like patio11 -- what if we could make the whole online side of running your business a whole lot easier? That’s the dream, this is the first step in that direction. Happy to answer any questions and would love your feedback!

HorizonXP 10y ago
Hi David! This looks pretty fantastic! Well done on getting this together and launching! I think we should always congratulate folks who get to the launch phase, no matter their size/age. :-) I have a friend that reached out to me about setting up a website for her business that she's starting with some friends. I was originally going to suggest Shopify to her, especially since we're in Canada. I went to your pricing page, and saw that you have more plans, present them in CAD, and are more competitive than Shopify. Am I to assume that means that this is open to Canadian/international customers? Also, Shopify shows their transaction fees, which seems to be broken down by credit card type. You show your Weebly transaction fee, but then say this is on top of Stripe/PayPal's fees. Perhaps it might make sense to provide details and/or a link to their rates so a customer can evaluate it? Finally, Shopify has a 14 day free trial that is compelling to "casuals" to try and evaluate before they jump right in. I know that would be appealing to my friend. Is there an equivalent option from Weebly? Those are the questions I had for now, without diving too deep into the actual platforms. Ultimately, my friend is completely non-technical, and I don't have the time to support her regularly, so a solution like this that's mostly hands-off is perfect. Kudos!
- drusenko 10y ago
  Thanks! Yes, Canada is a very important market for us, and we think our ecommerce platform with Weebly 4 is incredibly competitive with Shopify for most non-enterprise use cases. We have a couple big advantages over Shopify: first, the content customization side of things with a WYSIWYG editor -- it's awesome for people who aren't technical, and saves you a lot of time if you are -- and second, deeply integrated email marketing. I'm obviously biased, but I think overall it's a much more accessible, affordable, and intuitive platform for most small to medium businesses. Good feedback on the transaction fees. We actually don't charge any transaction fees on the Business plan ($25/mo), and you can integrate from any number of merchant payment providers like Stripe, Square, PayPal, and Authorize.net. I think we can do a better job of being crystal clear on what all of the payment fees are. On the free trial -- you can try most of the features for free on Weebly, but there are some ecommerce features you need to upgrade to try. We're working on it though, and we should have it released within a couple weeks!

slater 10y ago

I see the HTML that weebly produces now isn't quite as horrendous as it used to be! :D

drusenko 10y ago
Hah, thanks! ;) Check out our online code editor too (https://www.dropbox.com/s/ry5aeykn1l56l17/Screenshot%202016-09-20%2019.28.40.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/ry5aeykn1l56l17/Screenshot%202016-...) -- templates now use Mustache and LESS. It's a pretty neat environment for editing online and seeing a real-time preview -- lots of people use this to learn to code. We also have a Ruby gem that you can plug into a git hook or your favorite IDE for rapid prototyping.

donutdan4114 10y ago

Do app integrations have a way of storing arbitrary data on resources, such as products? For example, Shopify has "metafields" which allow Apps to add strings of data within a namespace/key, which can then be used in the liquid templating engine.

fligtar 10y ago
Justin from the Weebly Apps team here -- that's a great suggestion! We'd love to add functionality to store custom data on products, pages, blog posts, etc. and even allow apps to access other apps' data stored in that fashion. We don't support this quite yet, but it's something we're thinking about. You can find all of our documentation at http://dev.weebly.com http://dev.weebly.com

inputcoffee 10y ago

Obviously, this isn't competing with someone who is spinning up their own Django/Rails/Node solution. The big questions that come to mind: 1. How does this compare with hosting Wordpress. I like that with Wordpress, if some issue comes up, you can find someone who knows the innards and program what you need. Does the user have that level of access? 2. How does it compare with WIX, and the other site building competitors? 3. What if someone has built some great piece of code and I want to install some of the functionality on my site, can I do it? It just seems that it is a closed enough system that I have to rely on Weebly engineers to do everything.

drusenko 10y ago
1. Wordpress is probably better if you really want a platform to build something very custom off of, so in that sense it would be an alternative to a Django/Rails/Node solution. The downside is that it's a lot of work to both build and maintain, worrying about scaling, ongoing security patches and maintenance, etc. 2. One, Weebly is a much more intuitive, easy to use platform, two, we have a powerful ecommerce platform built-in (Wix doesn't have this), three, we have iOS and Android apps to create or manage everything from (no one else has that), four, we have a deep developer ecosystem (over 200 third party apps and integrations, the most of any platform), and five, the website, ecommerce, and email marketing is deeply integrated, others are more a collection of pieces. 3. Yes! There are a ton of APIs to build into Weebly, check it out here: http://dev.weebly.com/ http://dev.weebly.com/. You can also just copy and paste any code you want into your site with the embed code element. And if you're just looking to showcase code on your site, check this out: https://www.weebly.com/app-center/code-block?ref=ac-collection https://www.weebly.com/app-center/code-block?ref=ac-collecti...

rubidium 10y ago

So let's say I'm going to set-up a small business with an online store and other content (blog, etc...). Let's also say I don't care about the tech stack or want to be doing custom css/html. Weebly looks promising for that, and at $25-50/month isn't too bad. For people more familiar with this area, what other options are there? Wordpress+shopify? And how do the fees stack up with the different options?

arrosenberg 10y ago
I haven't played with Weebly, and I've spent a fair amount of time doing custom development, but I have a store on Shopify. The pricing on the last two tiers is very competitive. On the top non-enterprise tier, Shopify is about $180 a month and the feature set seems pretty comparable. Shopify doesn't provide a ton of tools to build your site unless you can do HTML/CSS, so I'd imagine Weebly is stronger in that respect for non-technical users. The email piece seems like an after-thought, once you get beyond a few hundred customers, you will need a more serious solution for email marketing.
NicoJuicy 10y ago
I personally use wordpress and woocommerce, got all the customization i need Free mostly, paid plugins for setting it up faster :) -- emails, abandoned carts, ...

tucaz 10y ago

Accessed from Brazil and the content is translated. Very cool. Congrats!

omarchowdhury 10y ago

This looks fantastic. We are moving our store from an older CRM and looking for an alternative. We were set on bigCommerce... Can we bring our own HTML/CSS and integrate with Weebly? Even with custom payment flows?

drusenko 10y ago
Yes! You can absolutely do that and customize quite a bit, although the payment flow is not fully customizable. Check out the docs here: https://dev.weebly.com/use-partials.html https://dev.weebly.com/use-partials.html

atourgates 10y ago

One thing I've noticed on Weebly, Squarespace, Wix and other similar "DIY without any coding" website platforms is that all their themes depend on having excellent photography. Excellent photography is great, but many of the small businesses who are primarily targeted with these services, don't have it. And stock photography looks like, well, stock photography. I'd love to see a service like this embrace themes that don't depend on great photography. Themes that make good use of typography and other non-image visual elements.

drusenko 10y ago
Very true. Great photography is key for a great looking site. We do have some good stock photography available, but it will never look as good as the real deal. I love your suggestion for more typography focused themes!
soared 10y ago
This is problem for every website theme - even lots of bootstrap themes depend on glorious images. Designers who build themes have access to great images and so they use them constantly. Even searching for wordpress themes (of which millions exist) recently I had to ignore 75% of what I saw because they have a huge hero or full column images.
bballer 10y ago
For some stock photography that doesn't feel so "stocky" check out this repo https://github.com/heyalexej/awesome-images https://github.com/heyalexej/awesome-images There are some really good sites in there that have very high quality photos free for use. My two favorites are: http://www.gratisography.com/ http://www.gratisography.com/ http://isorepublic.com/ http://isorepublic.com/ Not to diminish your point that more themes need to gear themselves towards imageless content, this is just a good place to start for those working on budgets.
_audakel 10y ago
Free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos. https://unsplash.com/ https://unsplash.com/ I use them alot, great selection of really unique shots.

triangleman 10y ago

Glad to hear y'all are keeping up with the industry. I will have to give this another look.

kfk 10y ago

Good, but I live in Germany and I don't speak German, so how do I read the content?

drusenko 10y ago
If you scroll down at the bottom of the page in the lower right, there is an option to switch to English!
detaro 10y ago
by switching the language with the button hidden at the very bottom right of the page, which leads here: https://www.weebly.com/?lang=en https://www.weebly.com/?lang=en Really could be more prominent, at least on first page load.
sixhobbits 10y ago
I live in the Netherlands and don't speak Dutch. Got redirected to /nl/4, which is almost all in English but has some of the headings in Dutch. Pretty sure it's not intentional..
minus7 10y ago
Using IP-to-country resolution and ignoring the Accept-Language HTTP header seems to be a pretty common tactic these days.

SwellJoe 10y ago

Weebly is one of the companies from our batch (W07) that I would have wanted to invest in, if given the opportunity. They just build really cool products for non-technical folks. I've been recommending them for years (even though they kinda/sorta indirectly compete with what we build). I've been surprised by how important and effective email still is to most small businesses, and it's a hard problem to solve; having it integrated with the rest of your site and commerce solution is even harder. Ecommerce is a more obvious need, but has a lot more solutions available, including for non-technical folks. Congrats on launching cool new stuff all these years later!

drusenko 10y ago
hah, hey Joe! how are things? :) not too many of us still around from the W07 bach ;)
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  We're still hanging in there. Our Open Source user base keeps growing, but revenue from our commercial products has been flat for too long; we're working on some hosted products, to hopefully address that. It's likely a pivot is in our future. And, on the personal front, I'm still traveling mostly full-time in an RV (as I've been doing off and on since I left the valley ~7 years ago).

harryf 10y ago

iPhone 6 Plus in landscape ... http://i.imgur.com/ZKorFe9.jpg http://i.imgur.com/ZKorFe9.jpg

DumpOfGenius 10y ago
mine's fine. (6s+)
drusenko 10y ago
we're working on it, thanks!

uses 10y ago

This page slows my browser to a crawl. I had to close the page to type this comment. Same if I open it in incognito with no extensions. Chrome Version 53.0.2785.116 m, Windows 10

imaginenore 10y ago
Weebly generates absolutely ridiculous code. Tons of CSS files, tons of JS files, plus random blocks of embedded JS. I've recently wanted to move a website off of Weebly for a friend, and it's a nightmare. Instead of simple clean markup you get all kinds of monstrosity.

S4M 10y ago

Is this Viaweb 20 years later?

zazaalaza 10y ago

Haha, you forgot to update this section of your site: https://education.weebly.com/ https://education.weebly.com/

Angostura 10y ago

The move from Weebly 2 to Weebly 3 seemed to be very rough - lots of unhappy punters. What lessons did you learn from that move, how did you handle thing differently this time?

drusenko 10y ago
We learned a lot, and things have been completely different this time around. We were much more careful about managing timelines & deliverables much further upstream, delivering features in more of a phased approach to prevent on big last minute merge with unanticipated interaction effects, ensuring adequate time for internal testing as well as external beta testing to uncover bugs of all kinds (regressions, usability, etc), and then cutting scope aggressively if necessary as the deadlines approach to make sure that we maintain a very high quality bar -- those are just a few of the things we've been able to improve on. Very proud of Weebly 4 and the team that made it all happen, it's both our biggest release ever, as well as our most polished!

BadassFractal 10y ago

How does this Weebly compare to squarespace, wix and webflow? What's the differentiation?

wwalser 10y ago
I believe the CEO answered that questions here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12550520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12550520
brryant 10y ago
Webflow CTO chiming in here - Weebly is definitely great for getting something up and running. But if you have specific design needs, then Webflow may be a better fit for you. We have powerful layout options like Flexbox: http://flexbox.webflow.com http://flexbox.webflow.com, and a full interactions & animations toolset: http://interactions.webflow.com http://interactions.webflow.com. Our CMS also gives you the ability to embed dynamic content into you page, so you can power a lightweight ecommerce solution via Shopify or Foxycart. We also support SSL, and a powerful hosting stack where you'll pages will load in less than 30ms. tl;dr: Webflow if you need powerful design controls without coding. There's more info on our website, https://webflow.com https://webflow.com - cheers!

jondishotsky 10y ago

Excellent team, beautiful product, bravo!