<![CDATA[SLG Works Publishing Consultants

In my never-ending quest to both waste time and find new, useful tools online I spent some time looking for online website builders/hosting. I have tried three so far. Here is what I found.

First, up front, I am not on an affiliate or other revenue plan with any of these companies, not sure they even do that sort of thing. I have used all three services and host sites with some of them as follows:

Wix
San Jose Comics Festival - www.sjcomicsfest.com (this will be moving soon to either our own server or one of the other services listed below).

Squarespace
SLG Art Boutiki - www.artboutiki.com - This is the website for SLG’s San Jose Gallery and Company Store.

Zombie-O-Rama - www.zombieorama.com - This is the website for our annual downtown San Jose Zombie Crawl

Club Tiki Press - www.clubtiki.com - Our tropical drink and pop-culture publishing imprint.

Weebly
Santa-Go-Round - www.santagoround.com - Our upcoming Santa Mob event in Downtown San Jose

SLG Works Consulting - www.slgworksconsulting.com - Our consulting company.

Slab Yard Sound - www.slabyardsound.com - SLG’s record label (still in the process of being built).

SLG Retailers - www.slgretailers.com - A website for retailers to get information on upcoming SLG releases (still being developed).

Secondly, if you are reading this and you are a web-developer or designer, Flash developer or someone else who makes their money designing websites for a living, please leave your snide remarks about the generic look and canned feel or other derogatory comments about these kinds of things to yourself. I understand that a professional designer is going to come up with something a lot cooler and probably more functional that what you can get from these companies. But your average blogger or small business also can’t afford you, otherwise we would not go looking for these kinds of services. So, seriously, don’t waste our time with comments like “Weebly sites all look like shit” or “Squarespace is for babies” (all of which I have read as I researched these systems), nobody cares.

On to my article.

Wix. This is a flash-based, hosted, site design and hosting company. It looks cool, but it’s ALL in Flash, meaning that if you are working on a website that you intend people with iPhones or iPads to look at you are shit out of luck. So, as much as I love all those little dancing Flash icons you can pile on a web page with Wix, I cannot recommend using it. That is why the title of this article is Weebly vs Squarespace.

Weebly and Squarespace are two web-hosting and site-building applications that we have used here. Both do essentially the same thing, give you a choice of modifying a group of templates to create websites, blog sites or gallery sites without knowing much html or css. Both do different things well so the one you use will depend on what you are looking for out of one of these things. So, here is my pound for pound match-up.

1) Cost. Weebly is free and Squarespace is not. The lowest price version of Squarespace is $8.00 per month, which is really not much at all for hosting. Weebly has a pro version which at $4.99 per month allows you to host up to 10 sites, putting them all on one control panel style page where you can access them all at once.
Squarespace has a 14 day trial which they extended once when I got distracted putting my site together. One thing that irritated me about the free trial is what you get with it. The trial version of Squarespace includes every possible option that the software offers. However once you decide to upgrade to a paid version you will encounter (as I did with every site I put there) that your site includes features which are not available with the package you selected, so what you thought would be an $8.00 per month investment will quickly turn into a $20-30 per month investment (or more) depending on the things that are important to you on your site. Still not a lot for hosting and for the robustness of the software behind it, but still annoying.
Weebly’s deal of free, or a paid subscription of 10 sites for $4.99 is a lot better from the finanacial end. The paid version is a lot less than Squarespace’s and includes some features that you only get with a higher-end package from Squarespace (including being able to build a site that is password protected).
So, should be a slam-dunk right? free or $4.99 versus a service that starts at $8.00 per month and goes as high as $50? Depends on what you are looking for. AT this point I am going to call it Advantage Weebly, but read on.

2) Templates. The Squarespace templates are better, slicker and more modern on almost every level than Weebly’s. In a couple of cases I swear I have seen Weebly templates on one of the many Free Dreamweaver template sites. In addition to being better, Squarespace is MUCH easier to customize. Nearly every page can be changed and you can manage some things right down to the pixel in an interface that requires you to have absolutely zero knowledge of html or css. Not the case with Weebly, simply adding a background image to a page or changing the background color required knowing the css code and where to change it. The custom html/css button makes it easy to access this kind of thing, but if you don’t know this stuff you will find yourself doing all kinds of research on things trying to make simple changes to a template. End result, Weebly sites all tend to look the same since the people who use them (like myself) tend to be cheap and lazy.
Advantage, BIG advantage, Squarespace.

3) Tools and features. I am going to write about the Pro version of Weebly here since it is the version I use. Weebly has way more going for it in some ways than Squarespace. The elements in Weebly are all drag and drop and dropping a Blog on to a page, for example, results in not only a blog page being created, but an RSS bug on the page and categories ready for you to set up.
Weebly also includes a built-in e-commerce system (linking to Paypal or to Google Checkout) which Squarespace does not, a way to plug your Flickr streams in directly to a page as well as Youtube videos and google maps. You can embed pdf files or any number of other documents directly into a page and you can upload sound and video onto a page or even put an audio player to play samples of songs. Using Squarespace you can put in pretty much any html element you would like onto a page, but you need to get that code from elsewhere.
Squarespace has a much better file management system, seems like for Weebly you need to re-upload an image every time you want to use it on your site, huge time waster. There is a work around I think, but my point is that there should not be a need for a work around. You can also resize images from within Squarespace, this is a huge time saver, and uploading a zip file full of images to a gallery page automatically creates a new gallery.
Weebly has a much nicer form builder and submission system than Squarespace (Squarespace has one, but it comes with the package that starts at $30 per month). The other cool thing about Weebly’s form submission is that you can access the form data from the admin side and download the data to your computer for import into whatever spreadsheet or data base you might be using. Not sure about what Squarespace offers because I have never set one of those up there.
Weebly also allows you to register a domain name from within it’s software and set it up all at the same time. Downside of course is that you are pretty much tied to Weebly forever (or the life of that site). Upside is that it is easy, cheap and fast to do.
Advantage here, Weebly, slight, possibly a toss-up.

So you would think that Weebly has an advantage over Squarespace. Well, it doesn’t, not a clear one anyway. In a perfect world I would combine the two services best features (oh, if only that were possible with a lot of things) and offer them at Weebly’s price. The internet is a visually driven world, so the image editing, layout and design power of Squarespace, plus their higher quality templates, cannot be undersold. If the visual is the most important thing in your web plans, then I would say Squarespace is a better solution for you as long as the cost does not become an issue.

However if you want quick, fast and functional and you don’t mind a more generic look to your sites, or you know a little more about html and css than your average person then Weebly might be your better bet. For me, I use Weebly for most things as the built-in ecommerce is going to be important to us.

Check them both out.
www.squarespace.com
www.weebly.com