WEEBLY
Basic, but decent, easy and very affordable
Weebly is an American drag-and-drop system that's fairly easy to work with. The templates are good and can be changed without too much difficulty. It allows for the standard features of a website such as text editing, pictures (2 options as to how you want to present them), audio and video, and a few more interesting features.
Weebly offers a free plan with 3 sites included, and the only elements you have to accept for that are the Weebly footer and a website name that's a sub-domain of weebly (e.g. your site name will be www.yoursite.weebly.com). A small price to pay if your needs are limited.
If you want more you can upgrade to Weebly Pro for $54,98 per year. You can then have no fewer than 10 sites, replace the Weebly footer by your own, and have your own site name (www.yourname.com or something similar). The Pro version also allows you to add video and audio to your site, and you can "embed" documents (meaning that any document that's on your site is made "pre-visible" in its own window, so your visitor does not have to open it to see what's in it). You also have "expanded" statistics, but to be honest that's not a real benefit because you can easily integrate Google Analytics, a much more powerful tool that's free to use. Finally you get vouchers to promote your site on Facebook and Google, and priority support from the Weebly team.
Weebly does not have a registration system for your site users. They can not log in and interact with you, although the possibility exists to protect certain pages (or your whole site) with a password, which you will have to provide to those having access to these pages.
The dashboard you will be using is very simple, well laid-out and a pleasure to use. It comes in 7 languages : English, Italian, Portuguese, French, Spanish, German and Chinese. There's 4 vertical dimensions (see screenshot) allowing you to add content divided up in Basic (text, pictures...), Multimedia (Audio, video...), Revenue (if you're selling online), and More (a divider line, for instance....???). All elements are represented by a small icon which you simply grab with a click and drop in a column in your page.
The other buttons in your editor control the way your site will look : selection of the template, your page settings including navigation and password protection, editors to determine who can work on your site, and settings, which is your description, your tags, your site name and the like (optimisation for the search engines).
All in all, a very practically oriented and simple to use tool that allows for very good results. Easy, simple and straightforward, Weebly is certainly a tool to be considered for your site if it does not have to be very sophisticated.
