Double Feature: What I love about Weebly – What I hate about Weebly

When I confronted my course Presenting Content this semester with the basics of HTML and CSS, they and I had a couple of frustrating sessions. I’m doing this for some semesters now and never had quite such an experience. I was thinking: Am I this bad a teacher to not get the stuff across (it’s not that hard, after all) or did I hint at Weebly.com too early and most of the classes just switched off as early as this?

It also made me think about Weebly.com itself, I mean, from the perspective of a web designer. So here are two lists: „What I love about Weebly“ and „What I hate about Weebly“.

What I love about Weebly

quick results that look nice
you can concentrate on the content more
no need to have a deep insight into HTML and CSS (which was the killer reason for most in my courses this semester to use it)
no need to deal with HTML and CSS at all if you don’t want to
it doesn’t need to be tweaked to get a ’normal‘ website, like you would tweak WordPress (you know, get rid of the calendar, the comments on each page and so on)
you have a couple of options that would require some work to include it in an HTML document of your own (Google maps, YouTube videos, etc.)
it’s free (and in most cases you don’t need the pro features)

What I hate about Weebly

invalid HTML (try validating a Weebly page… I mean, <font> in an XHTML 1.1 document? <style> within the <body>? Come on!)
invalid CSS
you can still do everything wrong concerning a clearly structured layout
no need to deal with HTML and CSS at all if you don’t want to
the fact that you can include so many different (multimedia) elements leads to the fact that they are often used in abundance, i.e. too often
using Weebly is not a guarantee to create a usable and well designed website

It might seem a bit harsh to only pick up Weebly and thrash it like this, however, I will do the same with other website generators with a focus on websites and not so much on blogs or wikis (like webs.com, which also has a free option, or squarespace.com, which doesn’t have a free option) in some of the next courses. If you have any suggestion which generators I should have a look at, please feel free to write a comment.