Weebly, a start-up that lets you easily create Web sites with the latest Web 2.0 tools, has raised seed cash from YCombinator, and moved to San Francisco.
The company is just three people from State College, PA. Co-founder David Rusenko originally told VentureBeat he would move to Mountain View. He changed his mind, he said, because he found a vibrant Internet start-up ecosystem in hipper San Francisco — the latest sign that San Francisco has become more of a magnet for these kinds of companies.
Providing similar Web-based tools to create Web sites are four-year-old Santa Clara, Calif.’s Sitekreator and South Africa’s Synthasite — and the biggest of them, Google Page Creator.
Of all of them, Weebly is most oriented around easy AJAX-based dragging and dropping of elements on a page. For example, if you want a Google Map, you drag the Map icon onto the page where you want it, select the map coordinates you want shown, and that’s it. Weebly supports any Javascript-based elements.
Even Google Page Creator doesn’t let you drag maps to your page. Google requires you to get the HTML code from Google Maps, and paste it in.
Weebly has also just opened its software interface (open APIs), so developers of widgets can allow users to add them directly on to Weebly. For example, if we created a widget that shows VentureBeat headlines, we could build in an “add to Weebly” button. That way, if you have a Weebly account, you could visit our site, click on the button, and VentureBeat headlines would be automatically added to your Weebly page.
The only question is, how will Weebly make money? Weebly’s Rusenko said the company is considering a number of options.
While some aspects of the site are intuitive, some others are not. It helped to watch the company’s various demos, including the main one below:
Techcrunch reported on the company here.
13 Comments
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Alison McNeill said:
I’m a big fan of SiteKreator. I actually use it to build layered reports for client relations, complete with forums, blogs, mailing lists for updates, image and file sharing, etc. It’s all done with one click…Oh, and I can easily customize the site designs with my branding (so it’s transparent to my customers). While Weebly seems cool (and congrats on their funding), I think the bigger need/opportunity is to serve SMBs with online solutions that engage, incite, and spark relationships with customers to keep them coming back. There’s just so many online builders for “everyone else” these days - with or with a 2.0 infrastructure. I also just got back from CES, and Microsoft was proactively offering free professional business web sites through Live…very interesting landscape ahead.
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shanmugasundaram said:
I WANT TO MAKE FREE WEB IN MY NAME OF SHANMUGASUNDARAM
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sridharkumar said:
i want creat website
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création site internet said:
Weebly is a cool concept..
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Leah said:
wow your thing is cool as fcuk lol ha ha
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FlyingWulf said:
I just may check out weeblyfor some of my clients to use. thanks for sharing
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FlyingWulf said:
On a seperate note what is the plug-in / addon you are using for your comments,. I love the fact you have “Was this comment useful to you ?” yes/ no . VERY NICE
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ali alharby said:
قصائد عربية للاستماع والمشاهدة
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Trent Emal said:
my bands site
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nzsmostwanted said:
I went to the weebly website after I saw it in a web creators magazine.I put in my details,went to sign up.and it didn’t do anything.Yet I can click on other sites and they’re ok.Any ideas why it doesn’t work? I think I picked up sp yware virus from that site too,according to trend micro.
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Edem said:
I need to create my own website for advertising my products. Does yours allow that?
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Craig said:
I have just found out about this fantastic site and have already built myself a new website. Check it out http://www.redfoxmarketing.co.uk It only took me a day to make.
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Joe said:
I believe Weebly has many nice features. It’s the “human” part of Weebly that sucks, though. Support is bad and getting an offensive (or illegal, for that matter) page taken down, is basically impossible. I DO NOT recommend Weebly until they get their act together.
4 Trackbacks
7:48 am
Iceberg and the war on custom enterprise software » VentureBeat said:
[...] We’ve written about companies like Weebly and SynthaSite, which want to give the average Joes the tools to create their own good looking websites without hiring a designer or writing a line of CSS or HTML. But this trend is extending. [...]
7:54 am
Iceberg and the war on custom enterprise software : VCsAndAngels said:
[...] We’ve written about companies like Weebly and SynthaSite, which want to give the average Joes the tools to create their own good looking websites without hiring a designer or writing a line of CSS or HTML. But this trend is extending. [...]
8:45 am
Iceberg and The War on Custom Enterprise Software - CRM Mastery e-Journal - Commentary and Musings on CRM Best Practice and Industry News said:
[...] article by Dan Kaplan, of VentreBeat, Iceburg and the war on the custom exterprise software: We’ve written about companies like Weebly and SynthaSite which want to give the average Joes the tools to create [...]
3:54 am
Startup Meme » Blog Archive » YCombinator - A Force to Reckon With, A Model to Replicate said:
[...] be used elsewhere. Weebly also lets you manipulate standard text, images, RSS and even google maps. Venture Beat notes that Weebly’s support of Google maps is even better than Google’s own Page [...]