by Simon Wright

Created on: September 24, 2008

Weebly is a website that enables you to create personal websites. I actually first heard about it via another article on Helium and thought I'd check it out. I had previously had a free website where the hosting had been provided by my then ISP provider. However, they had just abolished the service that I was on and rather than starting from scratch with their new packaged, I decided that I would try to find someone who could offer a better service.

One of the appeals of Weebly is that it's a free service. They do try to cross sell you a number of additional premium services that have costs attached but the bottom line is that you can create and maintain a website with them for no cost. There are, of course, quite a few sites that offer free website hosting so it was more than just the price that made me decide to try them out. The main attractions was the range of website templates that they offered. My previous personal website had been called Paperbackwrighter and I wanted to keep this name. I found a website template on Weebly that incorporates a pencil against a blue/grey background. It was perfect and so much more professional looking than the other free hosting websites that I had looked at.

Creating a website with Weebly was a pretty easy process. You don't need any computer programmer skills, you just pick a template and then click and drag to insert paragraphs onto the site. Then you just start typing whatever content you want. In a few minutes you can have the first pages set up and have the site published! It's also easy to add additional pages and the service is flexible enough to allow your site to evolve. It also allows you to create a blog as part of your website, which is cool.

The other thing that you need to do is to create your website address. All Weebly websites have an address format that ends with .weebly.com at the end of it. You just decide what site name you want to precede the Weebly part of the address. So, in my case, my website address became http://paperbackwrighter.weebly.com . If your site name hasn't already been taken, they will also offer you the opportunity to purchase a non Weebly address. For example, I might be prompted to purchase www.paperbackwrighter.com but there would be a cost attached. Some people might find it a bit annoying the way that Weebly constantly ask you if you want to add advanced functionality that comes with a cost. However, considering that you're getting the basic package for free, you can't really

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