Weebly

I've been playing with a web app called weebly (www.weebly.com). It's a nice and extremely capable website creator. So far I've created 3 different sites with it. A personal site, www.ifoxxy.net, a church site, currently vcftampa.weebly.com, and a worship team site, worship.vcftampa.com. It offers all kinds of blocks based site construction and the use of templates. The templates aren't terrible, but they aren't stellar either. I would say they are about average, but, when you consider that it is a free template based site creator, that's pretty good. The two most useful widgets in my opinion are the columns and html. With columns you can do exactly what it says, create columns. I just wish you could change it to three columns instead of two, but there are workarounds. The other nice widget is the one for raw html. With this one, you can add customized html code. On my pages, I used this to link to picasaweb albums and videos from youtube and google. Even though weebly includes the ability to add google and youtube video natively, I like the results much better when they are added with raw html. All this is a free service. If you want a custom domain, you can buy one through weebly. If you already have a custom domain, you have two incredible options. You can change your dns settings to point to weebly and use it as your host, or if you already have a host, you can download your site once its built and then upload it to your own host. The second option not only allows you to use your own host, but you can make the base site, download it, and then edit it in your favorite website software to further customize it. The only drawback I have found to weebly is that there is no way to create a secure area on your site. Other than that, weebly is a great tool that I look forward to using quite frequently in the future.

• Ben