Review of Weebly as free website development platform

I have already presented tumblr and squidoo in my previous posts (cool laptop skins project and wii finder). I also reviewed weebly, free website creation service (all services I will be talking about are free). Since I was getting good SEO results from weebly I decided to make a full review.

After signing up you will find yourself in weebly website builder. Basic element of a weebly website is a page. You can choose page layout from many templates that weebly offer. However most of the templates have very similar layout with just slightly different graphics. Two main layouts are navigation menu on the side and the other one on the top. This does not allow for much creativity but it is enough for our niche site needs. The interface is easy and intuitive to use and you should not have any problems creating a site with couple of pages around your main niche.

Google analytics are also easy to add to weebly, you can paste the code in the footer area of site settings.

However there are some cons. First weebly will not allow you to edit html code directly. Second weebly has no support for javascript. That means no fancy effects, gadgets and other javascript goodies. That also means you will not be able to use Adsense directly on your weebly site (update: it's possible now read more here) which is of much greater concern. You can use AdBrite which is natively integrated into weebly.

All in all, use weebly for simple sites, that you do not want to spend a lot of time with. Do not rely on ads, instead use affiliate programs to monetize your site.

Here is a very simply weebly site to get an idea - Wii Finder