I talked about Weebly in a previous post and have now had more time to play with it. It's a nice system and I have several test sites running on it. In fact, I was ready to switch several sites to it when I read their section on AdSense revenue sharing. What they say is they alternate showing ads with your ID and theirs. That means they receive half of any AdSense income generated.
I have sites that make more than $1,000 per month so that didn't look like such a great idea. I toyed around with limiting the kind of sites to those which generate their income from the Ebay EPN network and/or sites on which we sell our own products. That would work, but many sites earn from all three and I have to loose that.
I finally emailed their tech support and was told that as long as I insert my own AdSense code instead of using thier AdSense widget all the revenue will come to me. That is a much more satisfactory arrangement! Now I can get serious about building sites there.
I have purchased some old (1921, 1923) books on Silversmithing which I plan to use as the basis for a website about making money by doing simple silver work at home. I think it will make a great topic for these uncertain economic times because it includes aspects of precious metals investing, small business development, and profiting from a craft business.
I scanned the first one today and saved it as searchable PDF files. I uploaded one of those files to the Silversmith's Handbook using the embedded document widget. The file was large (51 megs) but uploaded without a problem. The Weebly system then said it was formatting and was busy for a while. Eventually it finished and I published the page.
The text/images I uploaded are now in a Scribd box that can scroll, display full screen, show multiple pages, and has a functioning search box. There is also a download button which is greyed out on my system but would be live if I had a Scribd account (I think).
What I need to figure out next is what a search engine spider will see when it looks at that page. Will it pick up all the text as part of the page, or is that an inline frame or other structure that the spider can't deal with. That makes a lot of difference in how well the site will rank.
It was a lot of work making the PDF and I am not sure I want to make it so easy for anyone to download. I need to play around with various ways of presenting the information before I finalize a layout.
In any case, this is still looking like a tool that will help me build a lot of nice sites quickly.
I just discovered Weebly (Yes that is an affiliate link) and I may have to change my mind about the need to develop custom coded solutions!
After three days of testing it feels like what our custom code might have grown into given a couple more years of development and the full-time efforts of three to five programmers. I keep finding more and more features which we had talked about in terms of "nice to have, but later" are already available.
Their claim is that anyone with the desire to build a website can build one for free with their system. I can no longer judge how true that might be because I have been building sites with more complex tools for several years now.
What I am finding is that while I am not a proficient programmer I have learned a few things and I have a well developed vision for how I want my websites organized. The best analogy I can think of is learning how to use your first word processor. That is hard. However, when you have done that and the time comes to move to a different word processor, the learning curve is much flatter. You already know many of the terms and concepts. Instead of learning what a global replace is you are looking for how to do a global replace with the new system.
Weebly makes it easy for me to find the features I want to use and drag them into place. If I want to insert a paragraph with a photo, I just drag that Icon onto the page where I want it inserted. If I want to move it, I just drag it to a new location.
Best of all, I no longer have to put off adding features to my websites while I wait for the code to be developed. So far, all the features I have wanted to use are already there. This is tremendously helpful because I can focus on building the sites and not get distracted by other concerns.
Of course, many features I want to use are part of the "Pro" package, but the cost for that is reasonable. Since the sites are hosted on Weebly servers I will be able to drop some of my current hosting, which will narrow the price differential. Once I am confident their system and company is stable I can buy longer term accounts with Weebly and save another 25% on the cost. That will bring it down to about thirty cents per website per month which seems very affordable.
I have not tested extensively, but I built one page with 40 elements, including a lot of pictures and it loads quickly. It seems to load faster than the Wordpress pages on this site for example.
I will write more about Weebly as I get farther into it, but at this point it looks very promising. My next tests will explore the power of their PayPal button implementation to sell stuff!
