Friday, January 27, 2012

Weebly

Like Wix, Weebly - found here at http://www.weebly.com/ - is a free tool that teachers can use to create their own websites. Whereas Wix allows teachers (and users in general) to create websites by choosing from a series of Flash-based templates, Weebly provides users with a more traditional approach to website creation and maintenance.
Weebly provides more than 70 colorful designs that are mostly based in HTML and CSS.
Using Weebly, teachers will have to ability to create attractive, organized, and highly functional websites (sites that adhere to a more "traditional" (not Flash-based) approach to web development than Wix). Here are some examples of great sites created with Weebly:

http://webii.weebly.com/

http://paddyspoetryandprose.weebly.com/

http://cadsuite.weebly.com/index.html

I love Weebly for their unbelievably innovative and flexible drag & drop website editor. Basically, Weebly allows the user to choose between a variety of content types, like text areas, videos, music and audio, documents, and even maps. Once you choose your content type from a top navigation view bar, you can click this feature and "drag" it into an interface that represents the space (size and shape) of your website. So, you can position and place your desired content areas anywhere on your web page. Once you have your desired content areas positioned in the area that will be your website, you can then either import files of that same content type into those area (by "browsing and selecting" from files on your local computer) or even automatically "embedding" web content from web 2.0 media sites (like Youtube). Please click on the image below to see a screen-shot of the interface:


Advantages: On top of an amazingly easy-to-use interface, Weebly offers tons of features that would be very useful for Teachers - many more than Wix makes available. For example, with Weebly, teachers would have the ability to create contact forms to receive secure emails from parents and students, accept payments (either through Google Check-Out or PayPal) for fields trips school supplies from parents, and forums to facilitate open communication on a subject area. Weebly even contains a whole section in your website editor called "Revenue," which contains various ways you can generate income from your Weebly site, such as contains easy procedures for adding "Google Ad Sense" and product blocks. If I were to create a Teacher website, I would certainly use Weebly over Wix for its wide variety of features (and because Flsh can be kind of cheesy).

Disadvantages: Not too many at all. Like Wix, if you want to use a custom URL (one that does not contain the . . .weebly.com/ suffix), you'll have to "upgrade" to a pay account. But it is cool that they even offer this feature for an reasonable fee.


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