Weebly

Three free services for creating instant Web sites

One of the fastest ways to share multiple documents with a lot of people is to convert the related files into a mini-Web site. Free site-creation services do all the heavy lifting.

Insta-site services range from the no-muss, no-fuss Page-o-rama to the business-focused features of Google Sites. If you can do without advanced features, Weebly's drag-and-drop approach to page design lets you create a fairly sophisticated mini-site in just minutes.

With Google Sites and Weebly, you paste text and images into prefab page templates. As you create new pages, site-navigation links are generated automatically. Page-o-rama is merely an online … Read more

Site creator Wix announces funding, subscriptions

No-brainer Web site creator Wix announced on Monday that it has raised $3.5 million in venture funding from Bessemer Venture Partners and Mangrove Venture Capital, and has also launched a "premium" version of the service geared toward businesses.

Wix's paid service, which costs $9.90 per month, follows a similar model to other Web publishing and productivity services that target small businesses: hosting and no ads. Allon Bloch, the company's co-CEO, said in a release that Wix's premium service will allow participating companies to cut down on the high costs of hiring a professional … Read more

Jimdo: Another super-simple site builder

After I covered Weebly, I got a note from the creator of Jimdo, another easy-to-use Web site creator tool. I took it for a quick spin, and I'm somewhat impressed. It has a lot of very strong features, it makes pretty sites, and it's free.

The service is especially good at handling photos. It does a great job displaying photos that you upload to it, and it also integrates beautifully with Flickr. There are good options for how the galleries are displayed, and when you zoom into a picture, it displays over the page instead of taking you … Read more

Weebly: A good-looking tool for making simple Web sites

If you ever find yourself needing to throw a basic site up on the Web quickly, it would be worth a few minutes of your time to check out Weebly, the 2.0 version of which launched today. It is a free Web design and hosting system that takes nearly all the pain out of creating a site.

Weebly has big gaps in its feature set, but as a quick-and-dirty site host, it's not bad. I really like its simplicity. You can start by selecting a page layout from Weebly's templates (all of which look good), or just … Read more

Stirr wrap-up, part 2: Assorted Web 2.0 appetizers

As I suspected, there were interesting Web 2.0 finds in the audience at the Stirr event. Many of these online products are still being built, but they're interesting to experiment with:

Allth.at: Lets you set up custom, persistent searches. In other words, you can tell it which sites to search (Google, eBay, Technorati, etc.), and which sites to exclude. You can also have the system alert you when there are new results in your searches. Somewhat redundant for those of us who use RSS agents (like Google's) to track keywords on the Web, but has the … Read more