Senior Project; Weebly

Alright! This is my last blog post about a new platform; this week's being Weebly.

Weebly is yet another cloud based platform. Setup was very similar to the previous two, but with many themes that were also categorized and able to be freely browsed.

Also like the other platforms, editing the pages is extremely simple with drag and drop stuff from categories. Quite unlike the others, Weebly features 3rd party extensions and apps; even ones that are drag and drop. There is also support for youtube clips, misc files on your system, and file documents. Unfortunately, just like the other two, there is no CSS or HTML access. But most minor things can be fixed using Weebly.

Now, you may notice the lightning bolts above "audio" and "hd video". This brings me to the fairly negative part of Weebly: There are dozens of features that bring you straight to a paywall.
Almost exactly like a mobile game, there isn't a feature shown that just asks for money when you try to use it, and most of them don't express the fact that they are premium until after they have pulled you to the payment screen. It's a waste of time on the user's end and a waste of data.

Images let you upload your own, or browse the internet for specifically pictures on their own popup browser, which would add content to your website so that you don't have to worry about copyright stuff. They also offered pictures that were high-resolution, free of copyright, and professional; They were also 5 dollars a piece. For a picture. One of the ones I viewed was at a 2000x2000 resolution, which frankly isn't that high considering Wikipedia offers copyright free photos at up to 6000.

Weebly was really just frustrating in the end. It's a superior version of the other two platform's I used, but for a startup you really have to put money down for it be useful in the end. For 150 dollars for their "Pro" package, getting most of the premium features but without being too costly, for a freelance it isn't too bad if there is already some steady income. For a startup I would disagree, because it would be cheaper in the end to setup a free platform I covered earlier.

Weebly does offer pages that can be restricted either to users of the site or to members of the site administration, but it's also behind a paywall, and that's something Joomla and Drupal do for free.

Like the other two, this is the URL i set if you would like to browse what I toyed around with. As if a  final reminder, clicking "Continue" in the dialogue box that appeared would take me to a payment screen. You have to click that small little X in the top right corner to make this box go away.

The next time you hear from me I will compile my final thoughts on this project as a whole and on each platform vs eachother AND what is best for whom. That sorta thing.