

Weebly (YC 07) Launches Whitelabel Platform for Designers - drusenko
http://blog.designers.weebly.com/1/post/2011/08/introducing-the-weebly-designer-platform.html

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sahillavingia
Weebly is _the_ most under hyped YC company.

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OmarIsmail
Wow, this is pretty huge. There's a big gap between designers and developers
particularly in the smb market. Youll have designers that don't know how to
develop make brochure-style sites that business owners don't know how to
develop. Or you'll have developers make an editable site that looks like crap.
If you want both you have to pay a lot of money.

For designers Weebly now takes the place of the developer and gives the
designer the ability to make a great looking site that is easy to maintain and
manage.

This is genius and is going to be very big.

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lovskogen
Problem is some companies wants to go outside the 'template', and that's where
direct manipulation gets really tricky when you got a different customer every
month.

I work as a product designer for a norwegian CMS, and I would die to make it
drag'n'drop direct manipulation-icious. But almost all of our BigCo customers
demands solutions outside the regular blog/template, which then would give us
two options.

a) Customize direct manipulation for each customer (expensive)

b) Semi-direct manipulation which launches TinyMCE and other micro controls
when a users clicks a particular part of content.

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bobfunk
You should checkout <http://www.webpop.com> (disclaimer, I'm the co-founder).

We've managed to make a dead simple on-site editing interface that works with
any design, without any need to stick to any 'template'.

Our goal is to allow designers with a knowledge of HTML and CSS to make
completely custom designed websites that a client can easily (and safely) keep
up to date.

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lovskogen
That's what I meant with b), which is how we do it too. But it's not the best
solution, which is direct manipulation – no 'form window' to edit the content
of a page.

Which, as stated, is hard when you got demanding customers with very different
needs for a website.

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bobfunk
I'm not actually convinced a) is the best solution though. For some things it
is, but once you work with structured data that might show up in different
places and might be displayed in different ways in those places, it's not
always the best.

It works for simple pages where there's no real separation between content and
design, but once you have text that's transformed to uppercase in one place
because of a "text-transform: uppercase", or a long blog post that's only
shown as a summary on the home page - editing directly in place becomes
problematic.

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lovskogen
Yes, but most of the time direct manipulation is king, so I hold that as the
best solution.

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fourspace
This looks fantastic, just what my company was looking for to quickly develop
websites for the small business clients we deal with. They all want a CMS, but
the value proposition just isn't there for us for a $2,000 project that
requires all custom design work.

Nice work! Signed up immediately.

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quizbiz
This compelled me to play around with Weebly for the first time.

I created a quick landing page (<http://prototypecases.weebly.com/>). Easy to
add built in contact forms, integration with Google's web fonts was nice,
built in SEO tags to paste html. Tons of layouts to pick from and a super easy
way to add images.

I was very impressed by how easy it was to put together and how fast
customizing the site is. Classically, when it comes to this sort of thing, I
think Wordpress but drag and drop is a very marketable feature for Weebly. I'm
impressed.

I do have to note that the control panel timed out and the site displayed some
sort of app disconnection error several times.

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ujeezy
"Weebly powers around 2% of sites on the web" – wow, really? I did some quick
Googling, but couldn't find the survey. Someone got it handy?

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drusenko
Here it is:
[http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/07/08/july-2011-web-s...](http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/07/08/july-2011-web-
server-survey.html)

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ujeezy
Thanks David, but I actually still don't see it on there. No biggie; it's just
such an impressive stat that I want to see it with my own eyes :)

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drusenko
"In the July 2011 survey we received responses from 357,292,065 sites."

We're using the total published sites on the Weebly platform divided by that
number to get our percentage of the total.

We could probably use active sites and put up a higher percentage, although
that number is much harder to calculate...

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ujeezy
Gotcha – very cool, and well done!

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arkitaip
Seems like you've created a very polished control panel. I'm working on a
wysiwyg web editor so I'm curious to know which javascript/css frameworks
you've used.

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drusenko
We started in 2006 and Prototype was the dominant framework back then, so
we're still using that for the editor. Everything else is custom written.

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petenixey
Beautiful work guys. This going to be such a big deal.

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dannyv
Thanks Peter! We're stoked to have this out the door and excited by the
potential.

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BvS
I'm not sure if I get the pricing right: using Weebly pro I'm paying 4,58 US$
a month max. and can use it on 10 Domains. If I use Weebly Designers I pay up
to 24,95 US$ for a single domain. So the possibility for my own branding
justifies a price increase of up to 50x or am I missing something?

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orangeturtle
I'm with you...with this price structure, I don't think the whitelabel upside
is worth the extra cost. I'd rather create my client his/her own website in a
Pro account and let them worry about the reoccurring annual fee. Plus, it
appears that the designer is billed, when I'd much rather it be direct billing
to the client.

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dennisgorelik
<http://www.quantcast.com/weebly.com> "Traffic data has been hidden by the
owner."

Could the founders explain why it's hidden?

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mistermustard
Well done, Dave. This looks like an amazing solution for designers looking to
jump right into client work, and at an incredible price point, too.

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noodle
the only feature i'd like to see is the ability to plug in functionality, like
the ability to create your own front- or back-end plugins or an app store type
of thing similar to shopify.

of course, i know that this isn't a simple request or even a likely one, as it
causes all kinds of issues, but i'd start using this immediately if it were
provided.

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rlpb
Is there any plan for a designer API? I'd love to automate some of the
functions on the designer platform for an idea I have.

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drusenko
Absolutely, it's in the pipeworks!

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luke_osu
This seems very similar to a product called LightCMS, which I have used
before. Weebly seems to have better pricing though.

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pdelgallego
Are you planning to have a market where designers can buy and sell
themes/templates or even components?

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gustaf
This is awesome! You're killing it!

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inthewoods
How does Weebly make money? I guess this Designers platform is the first step?

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drusenko
Weebly has been profitable since 2008. We make money by selling Pro accounts
and domain names.

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inthewoods
Where are the pro accounts? I can't find a pricing page on your website (by
design I assume).

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kyro
(Your 'About Us' link from the designer blog isn't working.)

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drusenko
Whoops, thanks for the heads up. Fixed!

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d0m
A little bit like emacs, it seems to do everything? : )

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drusenko
I'm actually a vim user :)

So we're trying to tackle all of the hard problems with creating a website.
Sometimes that means we develop very specific tools that just don't have a
good solution yet, like our written-from-scratch ImagePerfect image editor.

In this case, we think designers still have it a bit rough. They end up doing
a lot of things that aren't related to designing, like managing a hosting
environment, or upgrading Wordpress when new vulnerabilities come out (or
recovering from a hacked site). Then they have to continue doing inane little
tweaks to the website on an unrealistic budget.

We're trying to make the designer's life easier with an integrated solution,
and their clients happier by letting them log on and update their website
themselves.

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klbarry
This would have been soo helpful years ago when I started out doing web work
for small businesses. Instead I used trash like webstarts.com

