Why would they need or want to go public? It sounds like they already have a great product and they're profitable. Do they need to raise money for something in particular?
10 years ago only enthusiasts could create a website. 5 years ago more people could thanks to Wordpress. What will come in 5 or 10 years from now? I feel like Weebly is coming close to that <i>99% consumer's needs</i> tipping point.
I think that building sites and applications with tools along the lines of Weebly is going to become fairly mainstream even for people who call themselves software developers.<p>My question about Weebly: how do I create my own widgets? I saw something on a page at developers.weebly.com that said something about emailing someone, I think his name is Chris?<p>I am working on my own system based on Node.js/HTML5 which will be totally open and make it easy for developers to create and publish their own widgets/plugins right in the interface with their github accounts. I am extremely early on but I am hoping by the 7th I can have a very basic demo ready. The code such as it is is at <a href="https://github.com/ithkuil/cureblog" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ithkuil/cureblog</a> .. on the remote chance that anyone has any thoughts related to my project.
Two things for weebly to improve IMO:<p>More templates. You just can't have too many.<p>A better undo when editing. It seems to not work sometimes. Also it would be great if it had versioning so if an employees totally goofs I can just revert.
I had not heard of Weebly before. I just looked at their website and two things turned me off:<p>1. No pricing information, other than “It’s Free”. Is everything in Weebly free? If it is, I assume there is not much it does, which makes me lose interest in it. If it is not, I want to know the details before signing up.<p>2. aboutus.php: Can Weebly not do clean URLs? If it can, then why do I see “.php” on the Weebly site itself?
How is this different from Geocities or the half-dozen other me-too free, easy website providers we had the last time around the internet bubble merry-go-round? The feature lists even look pretty similar.<p>Or is that too long ago for anybody to remember? I worked for a startup that was racking up millions of hits a day and chewing through tens of millions of dollars in funding in <i>1999</i>. Guess what? It's really hard to make money this way.<p>I'm starting to suspect Prince knew a lot more than he was saying when he wrote that song.
Weebly is awesome. I recommend it to every non-techie friend who asks me for help setting up a website. So happy to see them doing well building a solid fundamental technology.
If you want an interesting puzzle from Weebly, check out their jobs page:
<a href="http://www.weebly.com/jobs.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.weebly.com/jobs.php</a><p>Prior HN Discussion on the Puzzle:
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1892693" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1892693</a><p>I just spent a solid 2.5 hours working on it... Fun stuff and I learned a lot about the Chrome Developer Tools!
For a (way too long) moment I thought their Designer Platform cost [1] $7.95/month for 15 <i>domains</i>... The fact that it isn't the case hints that they may provide reliable hosting.<p>[1] <a href="http://designers.weebly.com/designer_pricing.php" rel="nofollow">http://designers.weebly.com/designer_pricing.php</a>
I've not actually heard of these guys before (maybe I've not been paying enough attention) but this looks like a fantastic product/service.<p>This looks to be perfect for me to recommend to friends and family who want me to create them "a quick website", with minimal costs.<p>The iPhone app video looks pretty compelling. Congrats.