I’m a bit of a technology snub. There’s no point in denying it. I resisted switching from a straight-up, manually coded website to a WordPress site because of this arrogance. To this end, I resisted again when my employer asked all employees to set up websites for our classrooms via Weebly. I was wrong for resisting.
Drap-and-Drop with Caveats
Weebly.com is a website-buiding platform that uses a drag-and-drop interface to help users to design sharp and effective websites. Their platform is pretty impressive, both with its ease of use and the visual quality of the websites produced. Check out the gallery below to see some behind-the-scenes screen caps of my website building progress.
That’s not to say that there aren’t drawbacks. It has an adequate blogging feature, but let’s not confuse Weebly with a platform for power-bloggers. Also, ChurchMag’s fearless leader, Eric Dye, offered an important caveat that Weebly does not create websites with any sense of SEO. Add to that my frustrating failed attempts to add customized CSS to my theme, and it’s enough to give a major web designer pause.
But that’s not who I’d recommend Weebly to as a website solution.
Weebly for Churches and Kids
There are far more small churches than there are medium to larger churches. These small churches could, generally speaking, benefit from a website but don’t usually have the people or resources to spend on building/maintaining a complex, high-end website. Thinking back to my own church, we could have definitely used a well-designed website long before we got one, long before we had a person who design and maintain one. Weebly would have provided anyone on our staff (at that time) a way of providing us with a website.
Similarly, I think that Weebly would be a great way for kids to get started with websites. It’s way easier than Tripod or Geocities, which I cut my HTML teeth on. And that right there might be a drawback because Weebly doesn’t require you to know how to code, though there are ways to insert custom HTML into a page or post. Personally, I don’t think that coding HTML is going to be as crucial as time goes because so many CMS are evolving (WordPress, Joomla, etc.) that don’t directly require it. However, coding is still a generally useful skill that does help increase one’s logical thinking and problem-solving skills.
Costs and Services
Weebly does offer a free, limited service. Your website’s domain is “yourname.weebly.com” and your max individual file upload limit is 10mb. For a kid, that’s all you need. A church is going to want a cleaner domain name and probably some more features. Weebly offers three paid plains (Starter, Pro, and Business) with increasing costs/options. I think that most churches would be content with the Starter plan, which costs $4/month and can have a domain—purchased from NameCheap or GoDaddy because Weebly charges a lot for domains—pointed to it.
Websites are important, but there’s no need for the technically-inclined in the church to snub our nose at a simple tool that could really help smaller churches join the rest of us in bringing some light to the comparatively dark spaces of the Internet.
Eric Dye says
It’s easy for us to be tech snobs. I’m glad you covered this Phil. 🙂
Phil Schneider says
T-shirt Idea: “Ugh. Your code is deprecated.”
Eric Dye says
Me likes.
Grace says
I enjoyed that, Phil.!
You said Eric said (he said, he said?), “Weebly does not create websites with any sense of SEO.”
That’s enough for me to continue favoring WordPress.
After all, a primary reason small churches decide to begin investing in taking their church online is so that they can be found. I don’t really know anything about Weebly, and so don’t understand exactly what Eric means (Eric, I hope you’ll shed some light).
But, if users can build websites for free that people will ultimately have trouble finding, that seems like a waste of valuable time to me. And, that’s not an insignificant resource, given that many of these sites are created by overwhelmed, time-poor pastors.
Phil Schneider says
Great point, Grace, about spending time building a site that can’t be found. I’d imagine, though, that if your church is so small and so tech-limited that you’re going to use Weebly, you’re probably not counting on the random search engine user. I would think that such a church would be using a site as a reference point/information hub. For that, SEO wouldn’t matter much.
At the same time, I’d still rather a church use WP, if they can pull it off. 🙂
Thanks for the comment!
Grace says
Reference point? What do you mean?
Okay. I see. You seem to be approaching this from the perspective that small church pastors know what you know when they choose a website builder, but they don’t.
Most small church pastors either wanting to jump online, or wanting to switch service providers usually don’t know the right questions to ask FIRST. So, they often begin by asking their peers (other small church pastors and leaders) to make a recommendation.
It’ll go something like this, “My church needs a website. Can someone recommend a low cost, easy way to build it?”
I see it all the time. And, their peers, who usually also don’t know what you and I know, can only recommend what they currently have their hands in.
Small churches want very much to be found online. They desperately want to welcome new visitors and add members to their congregation.
The truth is, many small church leaders choose Weebly for reasons that have nothing to do with a well-thought Web strategy and purpose. They know nothing of that.
It’s free and easy and recommended by their peers, so that makes it good enough for them.
Phil Schneider says
I agree with all of that. I don’t quite see what you’re arguing with? It doesn’t really matter why Weebly is chosen. I still think it could fill a need for some churches as a first step on to the Internet. I’d rather churches move to better platforms, but I’d also rather churches do a lot of things that they don’t do.
Grace says
Phil, I’m not arguing with you. If you knew me better, you’d know that I’m just as passionate about the reasons small church leaders make their choices as I am about the choices they make. But, we need not go further about that.
I appreciate your heart.
Phil Schneider says
Same here, Grace! 🙂
Chris says
I would disagree with weebly not having good SEO at this point. It is about content and using header tags appropriately. Weebly has increased it visibility to add these to posts and pages.
For ministries, every dollar counts and to spend a few hundred dollars on a website that is promoted to its members organically and also used strategically with SEO, is a dollar that could be used more efficiently in ministry.
The beautiful thing with technology is that the better it gets, the lower the price point. We are there with website development, hosting and maintenance.
Phil Schneider says
Great points, Chris. Perhaps it’s time for an update.
Jerrell says
What is SEO? I am just curious.
PD says
I’m working with a team to re-do our church website and Weebly Business looks really appealing right now. We are in the investigation/planning stages. We aren’t going to add staff to do a full design and manage the site; we want something easy to set up that can be managed by existing office staff after a little training & with basic software customer service support. Weebly Business would allow us to get up all the content we need, do some optimization (the Weebly blog had a good post recently with lots of ideas about that), and have members only areas with groups and specific permissions managed by our administrator. I honestly can’t find anything else as simple to use (caveat, I’ve only used Weebly and WordPress, personally, but have poked around a lot recently) with the same membership capabilities. We need something that we can train our current and future office staff to use effectively and easily, and where we won’t be dependent on an external designer for every content and/or design update. It looks like Weebly Business would only wind up costing us $315/year (for hosting, software, and domain registration); whether we would want to do the initial design in-house or pay one of their designers remains to be seen.
Am I missing anything?
Phil Schneider says
Well……
If you’re thinking about a paid Weebly plan, I’d make sure you’re getting the best deal for the features you really want. Have you looked at Squarespace?
Weebly sounds like it would work, but I want you to make sure you get exactly what you need.
P D says
Yes, Square Space doesn’t have the membership functionality that Weebly Business offers.
Phil Schneider says
That’s a good point, but can I ask what you want a membership area for? Have you looked at getting a ChMS to manage membership functions? Something like Church Community Builder or Fellowship One? They can manage groups, attendance, finances, and so on. I don’t know that Weebly is quite that powerful or that attuned to church needs.
P D says
Oh, yes. We already have software to manage giving, attendance, membership info and data tracking, etc. This is more so that all members have a username and can log on and view documents such as the directory, council/meeting notes, budget spreadsheets, prayer lists etc. depending on what committees and teams they are apart of.
Phil Schneider says
Oh, well, it looks like you’ve got your answer.
Charmayne Artis says
I am planning to use Weebly for our church website and we need it to be simple to setup and manage. I’ve used it before a while back for school. It was rather easy then but I want to know has it updated some from maybe 5 yeas ago. Also what does ChMS stand for? Not familiar with all the new initials. Would you prefer weebly or google for an easy to use website? Just looking for suggestions.
Phil Schneider says
I would prefer WordPress, but Weebly is simpler. I haven’t used Google to build a website. (Not entirely sure how that would work). Great question about ChMS. The acronym “CMS” is a standard tech term for Content Management System. We use “ChMS” for Church Management System.
I hope that helps.
Jerrell says
Phil, do you feel that using Word Press is the best option for small churches to launch an initial website?
Phil Schneider says
I do, but I’v also heard about some churches using domain names to redirect to their Facebook pages as a placeholder. I think we discussed this is in a recent CMag Podcast, but I can’t remember which episode. (Was probably a side-point)
Weebly is a great start-up site, but I think that WordPress is the best long-term solution.
Jerrell says
Do we still have to use a separate entity to host the website even after the website template has been chosen?
Phil Schneider says
I’m sorry, Jerry. I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at. Every website must have a host, and the website template isn’t a factor in that.