This article contains content that is written like an advertisement .(September 2018) |
Type of site | Web hosting service |
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Founded | March 29, 2006 (Beta) |
Founder(s) |
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Parent | Block, Inc. |
URL | weebly |
Weebly is an American web hosting and web development company headquartered in San Francisco, California and is a subsidiary of Block, Inc. It was founded in 2006 by Chief Executive Officer David Rusenko, Chief Technology Officer Chris Fanini, and former Chief Product Officer Dan Veltri.
The company's primary focus was to create software that made it easy for individuals to build personal websites. Formal development of Weebly started in January 2006, with an invitational beta release announced in June 2006 and an official private-beta launch in September 2006.
Throughout its history, Weebly has received funding from various investors, including angel investors and venture capital firms. In 2018, co-founder Dan Veltri left the company.
In March 2007, Weebly re-launched with its "WYSIWYG" editing interface, [2] "Pro" accounts and Google AdSense monetization features, as well as compatibility with Google Chrome and Safari. [3] In 2010, the company added French, Italian, Spanish, and Chinese languages, [4] followed by integrated JotForm software into its services. [5] On October 1, 2015, Weebly Carbon was released to allow plugin integration among other features. In 2016, Weebly began focusing on its e-commerce offerings with the release of Weebly 4 and Weebly Promote, an integrated marketing tool. [6]
As more sellers began using the company, the company created features for doing taxes, integrations with Shippo, a Facebook Ad creator, email marketing and lead capture, abandoned cart features, the release of Mobile 5.0 to help sellers run their store from anywhere, and deep integrations with Square payment processing.
Weebly initially faced criticism for its lack of CSS/HTML editing support, but this functionality was added in 2009.
The company expanded its offices, including a 36,000 square feet warehouse in San Francisco, to accommodate its growing team. Additionally, Weebly opened a Berlin office in 2015/2016 to offer European-based support and marketing.
In 2018, Weebly was acquired by Square, Inc. (now known as Block, Inc. [7] ) for approximately $365 million in cash and stock. At the time of the acquisition on June 4, 2018., [8] Weebly had millions of customers and over 625,000 paid subscribers.
Weebly's website creator operates in a web browser, using a widget-based site builder with drag-and-drop [9] [10] functionality. Storage is unlimited, but the service restricts individual file sizes. [11] It automatically generates a mobile version of each website, supports blogging and e-commerce. Users can have various domain endings, including .weebly.com, .com, .net, .org, .co, .info, or .us.
Weebly also provides Android and iPhone apps for monitoring website traffic, updating blog posts, managing e-Commerce stores, and more. [12] [13] Users can incorporate advertisements on their websites and track visitor statistics through Weebly's tracking tool or Google Analytics. The platform also offers integrated newsletter marketing features and supports multiple languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Polish, Norwegian, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and Turkish (as of 2020). [14]
Weebly has received recognition for its contributions to web development, including being listed among TIME'S 50 Best Websites of 2007 and receiving mentions in Forbes and Business Insider . [9] [15] However, it has faced censorship in some countries and has implemented geo-blocking in several regions.
In December 2014, the Indian government blocked Weebly in India, due to fears that ISIS propaganda was being spread through the site. [16] On December 31, the site was again made available throughout India. [17]
Weebly also applies censorship to its availability with a wide selection of geo-blocked countries where Weebly is unavailable to internet users. Site owners are unable to log in from these geo-blocked locations to administer the site just as internet users cannot reach the site. According to Weebly's official support forum, the exact list of blocked countries is secret, but the employees confirmed the blocking of Côte d'Ivoire, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, as well as much of the Middle East, West and Central Africa. [18]
GeoCities, later Yahoo! GeoCities, was a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites for free and to browse user-created websites by their theme or interest, active from 1994 to 2009. GeoCities was started in November 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner, and was named Beverly Hills Internet briefly before being renamed GeoCities. On January 28, 1999, it was acquired by Yahoo!, at which time it was reportedly the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web.
Webs, formerly Freewebs, was a freemium, primarily static site-only web host founded in 2001. The service offered free and premium website hosting plans, and their own templated website building service. Unusually, Webs does not offer any dynamic content support aside from their own dynamic "apps", despite offering FTP access and allowing HTML uploads.
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic and also the mobile app traffic & events, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin.
YouTube is an American online video sharing platform owned by Google. Accessible worldwide, YouTube launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States, it is the second most visited website in the world, after Google Search. YouTube has more than 2.5 billion monthly users, who collectively watch more than one billion hours of videos every day. As of May 2019, videos were being uploaded to the platform at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute, and as of 2021, there were approximately 14 billion videos in total.
Zoho Office Suite is an Indian web-based online office suite containing word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, note-taking, wikis, web conferencing, customer relationship management (CRM), project management, invoicing and other applications. It is developed by Zoho Corporation.
Vimeo, Inc. is an American video hosting, sharing, and services platform provider headquartered in New York City. Vimeo focuses on the delivery of high-definition video across a range of devices. Vimeo's business model is through software as a service (SaaS). They derive revenue by providing subscription plans for businesses and content creators. Vimeo provides its subscribers with tools for video creation, editing, and broadcasting, enterprise software solutions, as well as the means for video professionals to connect with clients and other professionals. As of December 2021, the site has 260 million users, with around 1.6 million subscribers to its services.
Homestead Technologies is a web hosting company based in Burlington, Massachusetts.
Google Sites is a structured wiki and web page creation tool included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google. The service includes Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Drawings, Google Forms, and Google Keep. Google Sites is only available on the web. These sites allow users to create and edit files online while collaborating with other users in real time.
Opera is a multi-platform web browser developed by its namesake company Opera. The current edition of the browser is based on Chromium. Opera is available on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS. There are also mobile versions called Opera Mobile and Opera Mini. Opera includes a feature called Opera News, which is a news aggregator app that utilizes AI technology.
Wix.com Ltd. is an Israeli software company, publicly listed in the US, that provides cloud-based web development services. It offers tools for creating HTML5 websites and mobile sites using online drag-and-drop editing. Along with its headquarters and other offices in Israel, Wix also has offices in Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Lithuania, Poland, the Netherlands, the United States, Ukraine, and Singapore.
Jimdo is a German website builder privately held and headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, with offices in Munich and Tokyo. Jimdo has two products, Creator and Dolphin, offering free and paid plans.
Yola is a website builder and website hosting company headquartered in San Francisco. However, it was founded in Cape Town, South Africa. People without programming and graphic design skills can make web sites using Yola. Its drag and drop system allows users to incorporate widgets without knowing HTML. Yola also integrates e-commerce and blog software and acts as a domain registrar. It competes with other web hosting and creation such as Wix, Weebly, Jimdo and Webs.
Block, Inc. is a U.S. listed company founded by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey in 2009. It is a financial technology conglomerate. The company reportedly serves 56 million users and 4 million businesses, and processes payments worth US$228 billion annually as of 2023.
Webnode is an online website builder system, and developed by Westcom, s.r.o, a company based in Brno, Czech Republic. It can be compared with other online systems like Weebly, Metaconex or WIX.
Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information like recipes, home, style, motivation, and inspiration on the internet using images and, on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboards. Created by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, Pinterest, Inc. is headquartered in San Francisco.
In electronic commerce, conversion marketing is marketing with the intention of increasing conversions—that is, site visitors who are paying customers.
Squarespace, Inc. is an American website building and hosting company based in New York City. It provides software as a service for website building and hosting, and allows users to use pre-built website templates and drag-and-drop elements to create and modify webpages.
Jotform is a San Francisco–based company for building online forms. Founded in 2006 by Aytekin Tank, Jotform also offers a mobile app builder, a PDF editor, and electronic signature collection services. As of September 2023, it has more than 20 million users.
Advertising revenue is the monetary income that individuals and businesses earn from displaying paid advertisements on their websites, social media channels, or other platforms surrounding their internet-based content. In September 2018, the U.S Internet advertising market was estimated to be worth $111 billion, with market share being held mostly between Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft. These companies earn revenue through online advertising but also have initiated pathways for individual users and social media influencers to earn an income. Individuals and businesses can earn advertising revenue through advertising networks such as Google AdSense, YouTube monetization, or Outbrain.