Submitted by Munir Squires on 30 April, 2009 - 23:43
If you're hosting a site on Kabissa and don't want to pay for a website hosted commercially, Weebly may be the perfect solution for you. These are its main attractions:
- No coding required (easy to use!)
- Custom domain (your-organisation.org)
- Flexible (can include a blog, photos, maps, videos, etc.)
Every organisation can use a website. Some organisations (such as Kabissa) need complex, interactive websites for which they hire multiple IT specialists. For small organisations that simply want to have a way to have their information online, hiring an IT specialist is usually out of the question. For all of you, Weebly can help!
All you have to do is visit weebly.com and sign up for an account. Once you do, you'll be able to choose one of many designs (and change it later if you wish) and start adding content.
If you had a website hosted by Kabissa you can simply copy-and-paste your information on your new Weebly site.
If you own a domain name (such as your-organisation.org) you can have it point to your new Weebly site. If your site is now at you-organisation.kabissa.org you can have your new site at that address as well. (Before you change your settings on Weebly, your site is hosted at your-organisation.weebly.com)
If you are the person in charge of IT for your organisation, or want to convince that person that Weebly is a good idea here is some useful information:
- All members can add & edit content (if given the password)
- This means you don't have to bother the web administrator just to add a new link or upload a picture
- HTML and CSS are editable (through advanced settings)
- If the built-in designs don't suit you, or you want a particular colour scheme, anything's possible!
- What you build is yours
- Your entire site can be exported to a zip file - including all the HTML, CSS, text and pictures. You can then host it on a different service if you're dissatisfied with Weebly or they unfortunately go out of business.
- Embed any widget
- If the built-in map, flickr, youtube elements don't suit you, there is a Custom HTML element you can include in any page
- Superb support
- My experience with the support team at Weebly has always been great. Email them your questions and they'll do their best to help you out.
Browse their help page if you still have questions, or post a comment to this blog entry. If enough people show interest, I'll write a follow-up explaining in more detail how to sign up, create a site and map it to your domain.
Hope this is of help to you and good luck!
If you are still interested and haven't already signed up, watch this 5 minute video:
Comments
This is really very useful, Munir. Many thanks for sharing!
What I particularly like about Weebly is that it is very user friendly, but also that it is possible to use it with your own domain name.
You did this with http://ymcamadahills.kabissa.org today and it looks terrific!
For the benefit of others that may want to try this, Instructions for how to do this are here: http://www.weebly.com/support/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=4
For domains registered through Kabissa or kabissa.org subdomains, just let support@kabissa.org know the IP address on Weebly and we will activate it for you.
Generally, I am exploring options for Kabissa member organisations that enable them to have great, effective websites and email, all with their own domain name for free (or at very low cost).
WordPress.com also offers a service like this but it is not free to add a dedicated domain name.
Google Apps Standard Edition is free and also handles mail and various intranet needs (eg shared calendaring, documents, etc) as well as free sites through their sitebuilder. I find Weebly to be more user friendly at first glance, but several members have successfully moved their websites to Google Apps as well.
Cheers,
Tobias
I'm sorry I didn't make this clear in my post - Weebly & Google Apps is not an either/or decision. It is possible to have a domain linked to Google Apps (which is a great idea for email, calendar, etc.). The main page for the domain though can still be a Weebly site. (Weebly does not provide email addresses, etc.)
For example, I'm involved in Leap Sri Lanka which has a Weebly-designed site at leapsrilanka.org and a Google Apps account (for email, calendar & wiki). It all works together really well!
That is a fantastic video and tell you what I already have my own weebly webiste account. Also the great thing about weebly is that its very user friendly even the most novice person can understand how to create his/her own website on weebly and add content and publish. You have basic drag-drop features and the website terms and conditions are just about nothing. Keith
This is very interesting. Another free editor you can use is NVU but it is very limited and can be frustrating to use. It will not do as much as you would like. I also find worpress and blogger very easy to use. In fact, blogger can create a simple page for you in just a few minutes.
Hi Higgey -
Thanks for sharing your experiences. I like NVU - it's actually a freely distributable open source application that you can download and install on your computer. You can then use it to create and edit HTML web pages and upload them to your traditional hosting provider. Its competitors are prgorams like the industry standard Dreamweaver and Frontpage (does anyone still use Frontpage?).
Wordpress and Blogger are closer to Weebly, though they are oriented mostly to bloggers who want to simply present themselves online and post a stream of posts/articles. I really recommend Wordpress to bloggers and to organizations that don't want to create particularly complicated or interactive websites. At http://wordpress.org you can download the software to host on your own server, or, for a really turnkey experience, at http://wordpress.com you can set up and run an account directly through their service.
I have added NVU to the webmasters wiki - please take a look and let us know if you know of other useful resources for webmasters.
Cheers,
Tobias
If you have bandwidth problems, I would actually recommend Blogger over WordPress. WP's feature-set is unparalleled, but the administration is javascript dependant, and the libraries are big. Blogger's a bit quicker. And of course, Maneno (http://maneno.org) is the ultimate low-bandwidth blogging solution.
Hi Theresa - thanks for the feedback regarding Blogger over WordPress on low-bandwidth/slow connections. I had not realized that. I guess you could use a blogging client to get around WordPress big javascript libraries, but that won't help when you're setting up your blog.
I have not experienced maneno from the backend, but I very much like the Africa-tailored platform. I will get in touch with the folks at maneno to get them to explain their offerings to the Kabissa community, who we've been talking alot with about potentially collaborating or integrating our platforms.
Kabissa may soon also become a better blogging platform. We are currently testing a new feature which would give each group its own email address (eg kabissa_web_hosting@groups.kabissa.org). Since we're all using email all the time anyway when communicating about what we're doing and thinking, it will be a great new way to also share with the Kabissa community.
Thanks,
Tobias
ps - to make a more legible comment, when replying by email, replace the subject line with your comment title.
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