Sounds like Viaweb, a generation later. Congratulations, guys.

Surprising that they would choose not to take a cut of sales, as it seems like a natural opportunity to earn some revenue. Then again it might make people more willing to get started and then find themselves needing the Pro features further down the line.

It is also technically far trickier to do all the payment processing and take cuts and make sure everyone is paid and happy. This way they can let Paypal/GC do all that work and focus on making a great product.

There would also be an expectation of more features -- inventory management and such. I expect they will do it soon enough.

I consider myself to be a highly competent web developer/designer hybrid. But is it getting to the point where even for experienced developers, it makes sense to use something like Weebly? Especially for projects that don't require much customization?

You don't have to do one or the other -- there is a huge middle ground. For the time being, a service like Weebly can't give you a great looking, completely custom design, and may never be able to (design is a very human process).

However, why go through the process of inputting all of the content yourself? You include a few tags, bunch everything up in a .zip file, and hand the theme off to the client, who can upload it into Weebly and create the rest themselves. One bonus: never having to deal with clients that require constant wording changing or fixing spelling mistakes.

Also, want to create a simple site for a hobby, to put your resume on, or to host an open-source project? Weebly is perfect for that, outputs nice, standards-compliant code, and you don't have to waste a lot of time hacking up a design by hand (even if you could). For the more involved site (your startup's site, for example), it will still make sense to start from scratch.

Experienced developers should have enough code lying around to make simple projects quickly. From my experience typing code is much more efficient then using visual interfaces(Textmate <> Dreamweaver).

I was struck with the idea of doing a dead-simple e-commerce app a few months ago. I can think of so many ways that a powerful and simple WYSIWYG can be turned into a revenue generator. Congrats on implementing something great!

A WYSIWYG for restaurants is also a nice target (built in menus, pricing, etc.). Perhaps with a built-in reservation system.

yeah this sounds like something that could totally take over the current model of Weebly; not in the sense of a new business model (they are still charging for domain / DNS services) - but I think this could bolster that model up so nicely - they may have to focus on this more, thus becoming their core offering.

Startups making easy to use stuff that actually solves someone's problem? Hm.

Interesting.

Weebly really seems to be kicking ass. Nice job guys.