
Weebly CEO David Rusenko: It’s Time to Take Us Seriously - tikhon
http://allthingsd.com/20120502/weebly-ceo-david-rusenko-its-time-to-take-us-seriously/
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AndrewWarner
I just booked an interview with him for Mixergy.

Anything I should know about Weebly? Or that I should ask about?

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jamiequint
They run 2% of the websites on the internet:

<http://www.weebly.com/jobs.php> => "Running 2% of all of the websites on the
Internet presents some very interesting technical challenges."

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cyanbane
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?

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dsandl20
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/> 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).

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Alex3917
Isn't this the number of domain names that point to a nameserver rather than
the number of websites?

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

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shasta
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.

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endtwist
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.

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Danieru
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.

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bo1024
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?

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mhartl
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.)

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bo1024
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?

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pg
No. You don't get any richer by a trade at market price. The goal is usually
diversification.

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sireat
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.

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ivankirigin
His point is that going public increases liquidity on static wealth. The act
of going public doesn't make more wealth, even if it lets people convert stock
notes to dollar notes.

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fennecfoxen
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!

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DevX101
it's a little silly, but not much more so than 'google' or 'yahoo'.

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famousactress
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.

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salemh
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)

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tomkin
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.

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jordanlev
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.

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andyking
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?

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mesuva
I very much agree with 12345j, creating templates is really clean and easy
with concrete5. A basic concrete5 theme has 4 lines of php: one to include
header scripts, one to include footer scripts, one to create an editable area
(like a widget area) and one to display it. To add further editable areas, you
add the same two lines.

With Wordpress, theming is very well documented, but there are a bunch of
different files for the posts/categories/comments/etc. I know wordpress themes
can be very simple too, but I'm convinced that to a newcomer it's more
complicated than concrete5.

Areas in concrete are way more flexible (and easier to understand) than Widget
areas. When I first started using Wordpress I couldn't believe I couldn't
easily set up different sidebar areas for different pages - it took extra
plugins and config.

There are so many things in concrete5 that I've found that solve typical
development 'problems' that other systems don't handle well. In particular,
the Composer, custom block types, page attributes and block template
overrides. All these things come into play when you have a client that wants
to adjust something or have an easy way to add content. They're things you
might not see straight away with the system, but when you find them, you're
really glad they are there.

If you are a programmer, it's an incredibly powerful and well designed system.
You don't have to learn at all at once too, you can learn how to create
'block' templates to tweak up some output, move on to overriding block
functionality and then on to creating your own blocks.

So I'm very happy using concrete5 - it's easy for clients, easy to theme and
highly customisable.

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ilaksh
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> ..
on the remote chance that anyone has any thoughts related to my project.

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jordo37
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.

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ilaksh
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.

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tocomment
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.

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demetris
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?

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talmand
Why is showing the file extension a bad thing? Why do you care if you see
".php"?

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alanh
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>)

\- There is no benefit to outweigh the above negatives.

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talmand
These are excellent points. A few of them I would have a small bit of
disagreement over the perceived negativity, but they are too small to bother
with. I would say it's more like there is not enough benefit to outweigh the
perceived, possible, and/or actual negatives. But that seems a silly statement
to make in of itself.

I think it revolves what your website actually is and how deeply invested you
are in your URLs.

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

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

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

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cageface
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.

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revorad
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.

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theunixbeard
If you want an interesting puzzle from Weebly, check out their jobs page:
<http://www.weebly.com/jobs.php>

Prior HN Discussion on the Puzzle:
<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!

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ezequiel-garzon
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>

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robgough
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.

