Do You Weebly?
In the past I’ve written that one of the best ways to test out a business idea is to throw up a quick website for it. This is inexpensive and will help you get feedback for your idea and possibly your first few customers.
In the past it took me about 4 hours using Wordpress and I thought that proved how easy it was. Well now you can do it in about 30 MINUTES!
I came across an really cool service yesterday called Weebly. It does the Wordpress technical mumbo jumbo for you (uploading files with FTP, etc) and gives you a totally graphical way to install and build the site!
It is super easy and well designed. In about 10 minutes I was able to create this test site with a professional layout, contact forum, blog, complete forum, and blocks for Google Adsense.
They will host the site for you for about $4/month and you can pick your own domain name. Now you have NO EXCUSE not to get your business idea going!
One final bonus trick: pick a domain name that contains the primary keyword you’d like to rank for in Google. This will help you get on the first page of Google for that search term - which means customers! Boom, you have your own business.
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caleb said,
Wrote on November 18, 2008 @ 3:54 pm
Would you just use Weebly for testing business ideas, or would you say it surpasses Wordpress and it’s time to upgrade?
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Brian Armstrong reply on November 20th, 2008 3:22 pm:
For throwing up a quick site I would probably use this. I think it’s still using Wordpress underneath so Wordpress is still great. This just handles some of the technical stuff for you. If you needed to switch over to your own setup later you could probably export it.
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Caroline said,
Wrote on November 19, 2008 @ 4:42 am
There seems to be more and more online applications available. There was a show on recently talking about cloud computing and the battle between Google and Microsoft for dominance.
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Brian Armstrong reply on November 20th, 2008 3:24 pm:
Mmm, interesting. This weebly thing probably wouldn’t fall under cloud computing (at least as I understand it), but you’re right there are lots of cool apps coming out every day that are making it easier and easier to get a business going online!
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Matt Thomas said,
Wrote on November 22, 2008 @ 4:20 pm
I would think that this service would be especially useful for throwing together quick landing pages for PPC advertising…testing or maybe even for longer term. Thanks for the tip!
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Brian Armstrong reply on November 23rd, 2008 4:14 pm:
Yeah, they make the adsense block easy (although it looks like they take 50% of the revenue?!? so may want to place the adsense code in manually).
Any ideas on how you’d get good content on the site or traffic?
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Paul said,
Wrote on December 1, 2008 @ 3:29 pm
I’m evaluating launching a business website, but it differs a bit from the examples I’ve seen from you.
The website content will include text, photos, audio, and video. But subscribers will pay a monthly fee for access to the good stuff. (And, no, it doesn’t involve porn.)
Do services like Weebly and Wordpress have easy add-ons that allow you to take payment for subscriptions, and then restrict certain content only to subscribers?
If not, any suggestions on services that would do this cheaply and allow for best “speed of implementation?”
Thanks,
Paul
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Brian Armstrong reply on December 1st, 2008 7:02 pm:
Hi Paul, sounds like a good business idea. I’ve never used it but it looks like there are “membership” plugins for Wordpress like this:
http://www.bloggingpro.com/archives/2006/07/17/wordpress-plugin-paypal-membership/
Might need to Google around a bit to find a good one and get it working right. That’s how I’d approach it. Good luck and let us know how it goes!
Brian
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