9 ms·

Weebly CEO David Rusenko: It’s Time to Take Us Seriously

162 points by tikhon 14y ago

cageface 14y ago
How is this different from Geocities or the half-dozen other me-too free, easy website providers we had the last time around the internet bubble merry-go-round? The feature lists even look pretty similar. Or is that too long ago for anybody to remember? I worked for a startup that was racking up millions of hits a day and chewing through tens of millions of dollars in funding in 1999. Guess what? It's really hard to make money this way. I'm starting to suspect Prince knew a lot more than he was saying when he wrote that song.
AndrewWarner 14y ago
I just booked an interview with him for Mixergy. Anything I should know about Weebly? Or that I should ask about?
- pg 14y ago
  This is one of the startups that applied to YC at the last moment. IIRC David applied about half an hour before the deadline and didn't even have time to tell his cofounders he was doing it.
  - AndrewWarner 14y ago
    I usually ask YC founders why they think you picked them. I wonder the reverse. Why you picked him.
    - pg 14y ago
      For young founders (they were still in college) they seemed unusually formidable.
- timjahn 14y ago
  Looking forward to that interview. Weebly is the kind of company we should hear more about.
- jamiequint 14y ago
  They run 2% of the websites on the internet: http://www.weebly.com/jobs.php http://www.weebly.com/jobs.php => "Running 2% of all of the websites on the Internet presents some very interesting technical challenges."
  - runn1ng 14y ago
    I would be really interested in their metric of "counting websites", especially in today's mostly dynamic internet. Do they count Facebook/Google, too?
  - cyanbane 14y ago
    I have heard these guys run a great service, however that seems like an amazing statement. 2% seems like a massive amount - especially considering the international reach that I suspect would be needed. Anyone have any stats to back that up or how they came to that number?
    - citricsquid 14y ago
      I'd be interested too, if we assume 1 user = 1 website, that means they have 20% of the websites that webs inc has (http://www.webs.com/company.htm http://www.webs.com/company.htm) which translates as webs inc running 10% (!!) of the internet's websites, which is an incredible figure too.
      - user-id 14y ago
        One user can have up to 10 free websites in their account (and unlimited "designer platform" websites too) so more than 1 website is the average per user.
    - dsandl20 14y ago
      I spoke with David a few months ago. He said that the percentage was based on the number of active websites, which according to http://www.whois.sc/internet-statistics/ http://www.whois.sc/internet-statistics/ is 139,902,673. I don't know for sure if Weebly uses this number to calculate the percentage. But probably not, since it only indicates ~2.8 million Weebly websites, and they claim 11 million (7.8% of that active domain number).
- shareme 14y ago
  I did not have a good impression, they tried to get me to apply and interview through a recruiter and one of my pet things is if someone uses a recruiter they better sell me in to becoming a user of the product or service in first paragraph...the recruiter they were using did not..
- brezina 14y ago
  Ask about how and when they scaled their team. They built this beast on a small amount of angel money, by keeping a small team. Their profitability allowed them to scale the company how and when they wanted to. I'd also ask them about their price/funnel/etc optimizations. These guys have a lot of traffic - so small changes have moved the needle a lot. Easily one of my favorite business in San Francisco.
- revorad 14y ago
  Jessica Livingston interviewed him a while ago. You could pick up the thread from there. Edit: Here it is - http://vimeo.com/10123713 http://vimeo.com/10123713
- architgupta 14y ago
  David has written a bit about how they got their initial traction in his blog. Can you ask him to comment on how Weebly got their users later on - word of mouth (they have a very high net promoter score), SEO, etc? I am a huge fan of David. He helped us in a moment of crisis purely in a pay it forward way.
- tikhon 14y ago
  ask about the company culture. they have a really great and interesting one.
  - AndrewWarner 14y ago
    Thanks. What's interesting about it? What should I know about the culture?
- krschultz 14y ago
  He spoke at YCNYC and really hammered on the 'trough of sorrow' where they didn't think it was going to work out. I think there is definitely some inspiring back story there.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  Ask what he believes drives his 80 percent Net Promoter Score. Also ask if in that number matches with his actual experience (IE, is that how they're seeing growth actually come in).
justin 14y ago
Weebly website creator for iPhone is an amazing experience. The hands down easiest way to make a website that I've seen.
- shasta 14y ago
  I assume you mean it's the easiest way to make a website from your phone. Which is like being the easiest way to cook in the shower.
  - endtwist 14y ago
    Just because you don't want to get clean and make scrambled eggs at the same time doesn't mean others wouldn't like to.
    - lupatus 14y ago
      Add a way to cook bacon, and I would buy one of these.
    - Danieru 14y ago
      Personally I prefer to do my dishes in the shower to save water and soap. I tried scrambled eggs but the egg packet drop rate was worse than wi-fi.
  - pg 14y ago
    More like the easiest way to cook using microwave radiation.
    - shasta 14y ago
      That's too far toward useful. Over a campfire, maybe.
  - goblin89 14y ago
    If someone found yet another task that today's small computers could be used for—great. The fact that these computers are also commonly used to call and text doesn't matter (we do that from their bulkier counterparts as well). I believe a lot of opportunities in the world of mobile computing are missed because many of us can't stop thinking about modern mobile devices as ‘phones’. See also: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/03/welcome-to-the-post-pc-era.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/03/welcome-to-the-post... Also, > Which is like being the easiest way to cook in the shower. is a kind of response I think you'd get if about 30 years ago you say PCs could be used for publishing.
tomkin 14y ago
10 years ago only enthusiasts could create a website. 5 years ago more people could thanks to Wordpress. What will come in 5 or 10 years from now? I feel like Weebly is coming close to that 99% consumer's needs tipping point.
- jordanlev 14y ago
  I agree. I build expensive beautiful custom-designed websites on open source CMS platforms (mostly Concrete5 these days, which is ideal for the kinds of sites I do). But 90% of people don't need that and I refer a lot of people to Weebly. And it seems that most of the innovation in CMS's these days is happening with hosted services, so it will be very interesting to see how things play out over the next 5 years.
  - andyking 14y ago
    How do you find Concrete5? I discovered it relatively recently and I've been investigating it in comparison to WordPress, which is starting to feel more than a little bloated. (A WordPress installation with a bunch of plugins installed starts feeling like a Windows installation with a bunch of crap set to start automatically, with everything putting its little infobox, ads, and all manner of dross all over the place. I was turned off it totally the other day when a plugin update filled my entire screen with an ad.) I'd love to jump ship to something a little more modern, that's been developed from scratch with today's tech instead of patched together over the years. Do you find Concrete5 a decent replacement for WordPress for relatively simple content sites?
    - CWSpear 14y ago
      As a developer, I like it because it's more extensible and well structured than WordPress, and focuses more on plugins (they don't have to be a bad thing!) rather than baking all of the functionality into a theme. As a user, I like it because it's smokin' easy to use!
    - david_nash 14y ago
      I'm a wordpress developer and am currently finishing a C5 site. At first it looked awesome, then as I got into the template development I was less impressed. It's just not as polished as wordpress. I totally agree that wordpress is bloated, but C5 expects a lot more understanding of PHP and C5, which can be hard at times, because there documentation isn't very up to date. It may have just been me but I came across a couple of problems that should have been trivial to fix, or at least document, and that I had to search through forum posts for the answer. For one I actually had to post in the forum (ie the location of the dashboard URL, I couldn't see it in any of their docs). I recommend trying it out for now, but I personally wouldn't build a business around it (as a developer - it's pretty good for content admins and users).
fennecfoxen 14y ago
It's harder to take you seriously when your name is Weebly. Just saying. ;) The websites! They weebly and they wobble but they never fall down!
- DevX101 14y ago
  it's a little silly, but not much more so than 'google' or 'yahoo'.
  - famousactress 14y ago
    I was trying to remember how I felt early on. Google didn't seem silly to me cause it just made me think of the number. I do remember 'Amazon' sounding like the batshitcraziest name you could possibly pick for an bookstore though.
    - salemh 14y ago
      Silly names become brands, wherein the name becomes irrelevant IMHO. I've always thought so thinking about 'Tool' as a band, and how the word itself, is silly. But you wouldn't notice it (symbolism etc. aside)
revorad 14y ago
Weebly is awesome. I recommend it to every non-techie friend who asks me for help setting up a website. So happy to see them doing well building a solid fundamental technology.
robgough 14y ago
I've not actually heard of these guys before (maybe I've not been paying enough attention) but this looks like a fantastic product/service. This looks to be perfect for me to recommend to friends and family who want me to create them "a quick website", with minimal costs. The iPhone app video looks pretty compelling. Congrats.
bo1024 14y ago
Why would they need or want to go public? It sounds like they already have a great product and they're profitable. Do they need to raise money for something in particular?
- mhartl 14y ago
  Going public creates a liquid market in the company's shares, which allows the owners to convert equity to cash. This ability is especially prized by investors, but founders and employees-with-options also benefit. (It's hard to buy a house with stock.)
  - bo1024 14y ago
    So please correct me if I'm wrong, but put more bluntly, you're saying that it is selling your company in order to get rich, no?
    - ahlatimer 14y ago
      Well, you're already rich on paper. An IPO just gives you an easier path to turn that value on paper into money.
    - robryan 14y ago
      Selling a portion of your company to get well off well retaining a large stake. Also good to have employees able to cash out more easily.
    - pg 14y ago
      No. You don't get any richer by a trade at market price. The goal is usually diversification.
      - sireat 14y ago
        I will have to respectfully disagree with pg here. Going public usually involves getting quite a bit richer by some multiple of the original value. In a hot IPO market you generate what Adam Smith(a pseudonym) called "Supermoney" in the late 1960s. A company which catches public's fancy can generate market values hugely over what the company would be worth in a private sale(think NFLX, think AMZN, most likely Facebook shares and so on). The liquidity and with it coming diversification is a nice plus but not the sole reason. Of course, the company can fall from grace at some point, but even then it retains a premium over what it would be worth as a private company. This is almost by definition, otherwise the company does get taken private.
septerr 14y ago
This does seem like the perfect solution for recommending to or building quick websites for friends and family!
septerr 14y ago
This does seem like the perfect solution for recommending to or building quick websites for friends and family!
septerr 14y ago
This does seem like the perfect solution for recommending to or building quick websites for friends and family!
demetris 14y ago
I had not heard of Weebly before. I just looked at their website and two things turned me off: 1. No pricing information, other than “It’s Free”. Is everything in Weebly free? If it is, I assume there is not much it does, which makes me lose interest in it. If it is not, I want to know the details before signing up. 2. aboutus.php: Can Weebly not do clean URLs? If it can, then why do I see “.php” on the Weebly site itself?
- furyofantares 14y ago
  I had not heard of Weebly before, either. Usually I would check out their web site like you did to evaluate it and I bet I would have had a similar reaction. But lately I've decided to evaluate new products by downloading their mobile app, because I think that's how more and more people are being introduced to products and services. If I had known before embarking that it was a blogging service I definitely wouldn't have done it this way. When I think blogs, I think of the past, I think of desktop browsers, and I definitely I don't think of mobile. So, I downloaded their iphone app. Probably less than two minutes later I had a blog running on their site with its first post.
- talmand 14y ago
  Why is showing the file extension a bad thing? Why do you care if you see ".php"?
  - artursapek 14y ago
    These are definitely a hacker's complaints. Your daughter's piano teacher won't give a shit, and he'll love that it's free.
    - alanh 14y ago
      Perhaps, but that doesn’t make it the right choice.
  - alanh 14y ago
    It’s a good question. It is best practice to have well-thought-out URLs that do not have extensions. The reasons include: - If your site’s back-end technology changes, all those URLs will either break, or need redirected, or be specially handled with have extra cruft forever. - It takes longer to type and is harder to remember. - It makes your technology obvious instead of receding into the background. - It limits your ability to make awesome URLs, because now your URLs are dictated by how you name and organize your server-side scripts. (URLs are a user interface, just like GUIs, though they don’t get as much attention! http://alanhogan.com/url-as-ui http://alanhogan.com/url-as-ui) - There is no benefit to outweigh the above negatives.
ilaksh 14y ago
I think that building sites and applications with tools along the lines of Weebly is going to become fairly mainstream even for people who call themselves software developers. My question about Weebly: how do I create my own widgets? I saw something on a page at developers.weebly.com that said something about emailing someone, I think his name is Chris? I am working on my own system based on Node.js/HTML5 which will be totally open and make it easy for developers to create and publish their own widgets/plugins right in the interface with their github accounts. I am extremely early on but I am hoping by the 7th I can have a very basic demo ready. The code such as it is is at https://github.com/ithkuil/cureblog https://github.com/ithkuil/cureblog .. on the remote chance that anyone has any thoughts related to my project.
- jordo37 14y ago
  Would love to talk. I work for another YCS11 company and we have some APIs for turning widgets / apps into content sharing and advertising tools. Let me know if you want to talk more. Looking forward to seeing your demo.
  - ilaksh 14y ago
    Cool I am looking forward to my demo also. LOL. What is the name of your company so I can google it, and what did you want to talk about? Oh actually it says on your ycombinator. NowSpots. Interesting. Actually to be honest, you could create a plugin/tool/widget that would make it easy to select NowSpot ads to drag onto their site or integrate the NowSpot Composer or something right into their site, because basically my plugin frontends are just whatever jQuery you want that will fit in with the tools panel somehow (and the backend is whatever Node.js you want), but I am not sure that would be that great to come out with this platform and have one of the first things people notice is that the blogs made with it are full of ads. Just to be honest. Having said that, the goal is for this to be a totally open platform, ideally most widgets would be MIT licensed (the part they expose at least), and my goal is to only remove plugins from the database if they are completely junk, i.e. people were just testing something and the widget just says 'Hi there testing asdf' or whatever. And adding plugins with new widgets/tools/components is going to be just a matter of entering a github login and a name for a repo and pressing the publish button or something like that.
gcheong 14y ago
I hope I can buy their stock long before Wall Street starts to take them seriously.
tocomment 14y ago
Two things for weebly to improve IMO: More templates. You just can't have too many. A better undo when editing. It seems to not work sometimes. Also it would be great if it had versioning so if an employees totally goofs I can just revert.
ezequiel-garzon 14y ago
For a (way too long) moment I thought their Designer Platform cost [1] $7.95/month for 15 domains... The fact that it isn't the case hints that they may provide reliable hosting. [1] http://designers.weebly.com/designer_pricing.php http://designers.weebly.com/designer_pricing.php
staunch 14y ago
Just gotta say congrats to these guys. Such a beautiful example of determined and consistent execution.
theunixbeard 14y ago
If you want an interesting puzzle from Weebly, check out their jobs page: http://www.weebly.com/jobs.php http://www.weebly.com/jobs.php Prior HN Discussion on the Puzzle: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1892693 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1892693 I just spent a solid 2.5 hours working on it... Fun stuff and I learned a lot about the Chrome Developer Tools!

162 points by tikhon 14y ago

How is this different from Geocities or the half-dozen other me-too free, easy website providers we had the last time around the internet bubble merry-go-round? The feature lists even look pretty similar. Or is that too long ago for anybody to remember? I worked for a startup that was racking up millions of hits a day and chewing through tens of millions of dollars in funding in 1999. Guess what? It's really hard to make money this way. I'm starting to suspect Prince knew a lot more than he was saying when he wrote that song.

AndrewWarner 14y ago

I just booked an interview with him for Mixergy. Anything I should know about Weebly? Or that I should ask about?

pg 14y ago
This is one of the startups that applied to YC at the last moment. IIRC David applied about half an hour before the deadline and didn't even have time to tell his cofounders he was doing it.
- AndrewWarner 14y ago
  I usually ask YC founders why they think you picked them. I wonder the reverse. Why you picked him.
  - pg 14y ago
    For young founders (they were still in college) they seemed unusually formidable.
timjahn 14y ago
Looking forward to that interview. Weebly is the kind of company we should hear more about.
jamiequint 14y ago
They run 2% of the websites on the internet: http://www.weebly.com/jobs.php http://www.weebly.com/jobs.php => "Running 2% of all of the websites on the Internet presents some very interesting technical challenges."
- runn1ng 14y ago
  I would be really interested in their metric of "counting websites", especially in today's mostly dynamic internet. Do they count Facebook/Google, too?
- cyanbane 14y ago
  I have heard these guys run a great service, however that seems like an amazing statement. 2% seems like a massive amount - especially considering the international reach that I suspect would be needed. Anyone have any stats to back that up or how they came to that number?
  - citricsquid 14y ago
    I'd be interested too, if we assume 1 user = 1 website, that means they have 20% of the websites that webs inc has (http://www.webs.com/company.htm http://www.webs.com/company.htm) which translates as webs inc running 10% (!!) of the internet's websites, which is an incredible figure too.
    - user-id 14y ago
      One user can have up to 10 free websites in their account (and unlimited "designer platform" websites too) so more than 1 website is the average per user.
  - dsandl20 14y ago
    I spoke with David a few months ago. He said that the percentage was based on the number of active websites, which according to http://www.whois.sc/internet-statistics/ http://www.whois.sc/internet-statistics/ is 139,902,673. I don't know for sure if Weebly uses this number to calculate the percentage. But probably not, since it only indicates ~2.8 million Weebly websites, and they claim 11 million (7.8% of that active domain number).
shareme 14y ago
I did not have a good impression, they tried to get me to apply and interview through a recruiter and one of my pet things is if someone uses a recruiter they better sell me in to becoming a user of the product or service in first paragraph...the recruiter they were using did not..
brezina 14y ago
Ask about how and when they scaled their team. They built this beast on a small amount of angel money, by keeping a small team. Their profitability allowed them to scale the company how and when they wanted to. I'd also ask them about their price/funnel/etc optimizations. These guys have a lot of traffic - so small changes have moved the needle a lot. Easily one of my favorite business in San Francisco.
revorad 14y ago
Jessica Livingston interviewed him a while ago. You could pick up the thread from there. Edit: Here it is - http://vimeo.com/10123713 http://vimeo.com/10123713
architgupta 14y ago
David has written a bit about how they got their initial traction in his blog. Can you ask him to comment on how Weebly got their users later on - word of mouth (they have a very high net promoter score), SEO, etc? I am a huge fan of David. He helped us in a moment of crisis purely in a pay it forward way.
tikhon 14y ago
ask about the company culture. they have a really great and interesting one.
- AndrewWarner 14y ago
  Thanks. What's interesting about it? What should I know about the culture?
krschultz 14y ago
He spoke at YCNYC and really hammered on the 'trough of sorrow' where they didn't think it was going to work out. I think there is definitely some inspiring back story there.
waterlesscloud 14y ago
Ask what he believes drives his 80 percent Net Promoter Score. Also ask if in that number matches with his actual experience (IE, is that how they're seeing growth actually come in).

justin 14y ago

Weebly website creator for iPhone is an amazing experience. The hands down easiest way to make a website that I've seen.

shasta 14y ago
I assume you mean it's the easiest way to make a website from your phone. Which is like being the easiest way to cook in the shower.
- endtwist 14y ago
  Just because you don't want to get clean and make scrambled eggs at the same time doesn't mean others wouldn't like to.
  - lupatus 14y ago
    Add a way to cook bacon, and I would buy one of these.
  - Danieru 14y ago
    Personally I prefer to do my dishes in the shower to save water and soap. I tried scrambled eggs but the egg packet drop rate was worse than wi-fi.
- pg 14y ago
  More like the easiest way to cook using microwave radiation.
  - shasta 14y ago
    That's too far toward useful. Over a campfire, maybe.
- goblin89 14y ago
  If someone found yet another task that today's small computers could be used for—great. The fact that these computers are also commonly used to call and text doesn't matter (we do that from their bulkier counterparts as well). I believe a lot of opportunities in the world of mobile computing are missed because many of us can't stop thinking about modern mobile devices as ‘phones’. See also: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/03/welcome-to-the-post-pc-era.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/03/welcome-to-the-post... Also, > Which is like being the easiest way to cook in the shower. is a kind of response I think you'd get if about 30 years ago you say PCs could be used for publishing.

tomkin 14y ago

10 years ago only enthusiasts could create a website. 5 years ago more people could thanks to Wordpress. What will come in 5 or 10 years from now? I feel like Weebly is coming close to that 99% consumer's needs tipping point.

jordanlev 14y ago
I agree. I build expensive beautiful custom-designed websites on open source CMS platforms (mostly Concrete5 these days, which is ideal for the kinds of sites I do). But 90% of people don't need that and I refer a lot of people to Weebly. And it seems that most of the innovation in CMS's these days is happening with hosted services, so it will be very interesting to see how things play out over the next 5 years.
- andyking 14y ago
  How do you find Concrete5? I discovered it relatively recently and I've been investigating it in comparison to WordPress, which is starting to feel more than a little bloated. (A WordPress installation with a bunch of plugins installed starts feeling like a Windows installation with a bunch of crap set to start automatically, with everything putting its little infobox, ads, and all manner of dross all over the place. I was turned off it totally the other day when a plugin update filled my entire screen with an ad.) I'd love to jump ship to something a little more modern, that's been developed from scratch with today's tech instead of patched together over the years. Do you find Concrete5 a decent replacement for WordPress for relatively simple content sites?
  - CWSpear 14y ago
    As a developer, I like it because it's more extensible and well structured than WordPress, and focuses more on plugins (they don't have to be a bad thing!) rather than baking all of the functionality into a theme. As a user, I like it because it's smokin' easy to use!
  - david_nash 14y ago
    I'm a wordpress developer and am currently finishing a C5 site. At first it looked awesome, then as I got into the template development I was less impressed. It's just not as polished as wordpress. I totally agree that wordpress is bloated, but C5 expects a lot more understanding of PHP and C5, which can be hard at times, because there documentation isn't very up to date. It may have just been me but I came across a couple of problems that should have been trivial to fix, or at least document, and that I had to search through forum posts for the answer. For one I actually had to post in the forum (ie the location of the dashboard URL, I couldn't see it in any of their docs). I recommend trying it out for now, but I personally wouldn't build a business around it (as a developer - it's pretty good for content admins and users).

fennecfoxen 14y ago

It's harder to take you seriously when your name is Weebly. Just saying. ;) The websites! They weebly and they wobble but they never fall down!

DevX101 14y ago
it's a little silly, but not much more so than 'google' or 'yahoo'.
- famousactress 14y ago
  I was trying to remember how I felt early on. Google didn't seem silly to me cause it just made me think of the number. I do remember 'Amazon' sounding like the batshitcraziest name you could possibly pick for an bookstore though.
  - salemh 14y ago
    Silly names become brands, wherein the name becomes irrelevant IMHO. I've always thought so thinking about 'Tool' as a band, and how the word itself, is silly. But you wouldn't notice it (symbolism etc. aside)

revorad 14y ago

Weebly is awesome. I recommend it to every non-techie friend who asks me for help setting up a website. So happy to see them doing well building a solid fundamental technology.

robgough 14y ago

I've not actually heard of these guys before (maybe I've not been paying enough attention) but this looks like a fantastic product/service. This looks to be perfect for me to recommend to friends and family who want me to create them "a quick website", with minimal costs. The iPhone app video looks pretty compelling. Congrats.

bo1024 14y ago

Why would they need or want to go public? It sounds like they already have a great product and they're profitable. Do they need to raise money for something in particular?

mhartl 14y ago
Going public creates a liquid market in the company's shares, which allows the owners to convert equity to cash. This ability is especially prized by investors, but founders and employees-with-options also benefit. (It's hard to buy a house with stock.)
- bo1024 14y ago
  So please correct me if I'm wrong, but put more bluntly, you're saying that it is selling your company in order to get rich, no?
  - ahlatimer 14y ago
    Well, you're already rich on paper. An IPO just gives you an easier path to turn that value on paper into money.
  - robryan 14y ago
    Selling a portion of your company to get well off well retaining a large stake. Also good to have employees able to cash out more easily.
  - pg 14y ago
    No. You don't get any richer by a trade at market price. The goal is usually diversification.
    - sireat 14y ago
      I will have to respectfully disagree with pg here. Going public usually involves getting quite a bit richer by some multiple of the original value. In a hot IPO market you generate what Adam Smith(a pseudonym) called "Supermoney" in the late 1960s. A company which catches public's fancy can generate market values hugely over what the company would be worth in a private sale(think NFLX, think AMZN, most likely Facebook shares and so on). The liquidity and with it coming diversification is a nice plus but not the sole reason. Of course, the company can fall from grace at some point, but even then it retains a premium over what it would be worth as a private company. This is almost by definition, otherwise the company does get taken private.

septerr 14y ago

This does seem like the perfect solution for recommending to or building quick websites for friends and family!

septerr 14y ago

This does seem like the perfect solution for recommending to or building quick websites for friends and family!

septerr 14y ago

This does seem like the perfect solution for recommending to or building quick websites for friends and family!

demetris 14y ago

I had not heard of Weebly before. I just looked at their website and two things turned me off: 1. No pricing information, other than “It’s Free”. Is everything in Weebly free? If it is, I assume there is not much it does, which makes me lose interest in it. If it is not, I want to know the details before signing up. 2. aboutus.php: Can Weebly not do clean URLs? If it can, then why do I see “.php” on the Weebly site itself?

furyofantares 14y ago
I had not heard of Weebly before, either. Usually I would check out their web site like you did to evaluate it and I bet I would have had a similar reaction. But lately I've decided to evaluate new products by downloading their mobile app, because I think that's how more and more people are being introduced to products and services. If I had known before embarking that it was a blogging service I definitely wouldn't have done it this way. When I think blogs, I think of the past, I think of desktop browsers, and I definitely I don't think of mobile. So, I downloaded their iphone app. Probably less than two minutes later I had a blog running on their site with its first post.
talmand 14y ago
Why is showing the file extension a bad thing? Why do you care if you see ".php"?
- artursapek 14y ago
  These are definitely a hacker's complaints. Your daughter's piano teacher won't give a shit, and he'll love that it's free.
  - alanh 14y ago
    Perhaps, but that doesn’t make it the right choice.
- alanh 14y ago
  It’s a good question. It is best practice to have well-thought-out URLs that do not have extensions. The reasons include: - If your site’s back-end technology changes, all those URLs will either break, or need redirected, or be specially handled with have extra cruft forever. - It takes longer to type and is harder to remember. - It makes your technology obvious instead of receding into the background. - It limits your ability to make awesome URLs, because now your URLs are dictated by how you name and organize your server-side scripts. (URLs are a user interface, just like GUIs, though they don’t get as much attention! http://alanhogan.com/url-as-ui http://alanhogan.com/url-as-ui) - There is no benefit to outweigh the above negatives.

ilaksh 14y ago

I think that building sites and applications with tools along the lines of Weebly is going to become fairly mainstream even for people who call themselves software developers. My question about Weebly: how do I create my own widgets? I saw something on a page at developers.weebly.com that said something about emailing someone, I think his name is Chris? I am working on my own system based on Node.js/HTML5 which will be totally open and make it easy for developers to create and publish their own widgets/plugins right in the interface with their github accounts. I am extremely early on but I am hoping by the 7th I can have a very basic demo ready. The code such as it is is at https://github.com/ithkuil/cureblog https://github.com/ithkuil/cureblog .. on the remote chance that anyone has any thoughts related to my project.

jordo37 14y ago
Would love to talk. I work for another YCS11 company and we have some APIs for turning widgets / apps into content sharing and advertising tools. Let me know if you want to talk more. Looking forward to seeing your demo.
- ilaksh 14y ago
  Cool I am looking forward to my demo also. LOL. What is the name of your company so I can google it, and what did you want to talk about? Oh actually it says on your ycombinator. NowSpots. Interesting. Actually to be honest, you could create a plugin/tool/widget that would make it easy to select NowSpot ads to drag onto their site or integrate the NowSpot Composer or something right into their site, because basically my plugin frontends are just whatever jQuery you want that will fit in with the tools panel somehow (and the backend is whatever Node.js you want), but I am not sure that would be that great to come out with this platform and have one of the first things people notice is that the blogs made with it are full of ads. Just to be honest. Having said that, the goal is for this to be a totally open platform, ideally most widgets would be MIT licensed (the part they expose at least), and my goal is to only remove plugins from the database if they are completely junk, i.e. people were just testing something and the widget just says 'Hi there testing asdf' or whatever. And adding plugins with new widgets/tools/components is going to be just a matter of entering a github login and a name for a repo and pressing the publish button or something like that.

gcheong 14y ago

I hope I can buy their stock long before Wall Street starts to take them seriously.

tocomment 14y ago

Two things for weebly to improve IMO: More templates. You just can't have too many. A better undo when editing. It seems to not work sometimes. Also it would be great if it had versioning so if an employees totally goofs I can just revert.

ezequiel-garzon 14y ago

For a (way too long) moment I thought their Designer Platform cost [1] $7.95/month for 15 domains... The fact that it isn't the case hints that they may provide reliable hosting. [1] http://designers.weebly.com/designer_pricing.php http://designers.weebly.com/designer_pricing.php

staunch 14y ago

Just gotta say congrats to these guys. Such a beautiful example of determined and consistent execution.

theunixbeard 14y ago

If you want an interesting puzzle from Weebly, check out their jobs page: http://www.weebly.com/jobs.php http://www.weebly.com/jobs.php Prior HN Discussion on the Puzzle: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1892693 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1892693 I just spent a solid 2.5 hours working on it... Fun stuff and I learned a lot about the Chrome Developer Tools!