I got an email from Weebly.com today telling me about their new features. I used this site builder a while back just to test it and wasn't to impressed, but I took another look just to see if they improved.
On the paper this free site builder looks pretty good.
No forced adds
You can use your own domain with a free account
No page limits , no bandwith limits
Pay pal and google check out integrated with free version
Form builder
The main disadvantage just like before is limited ability to customize weebly templates. Comparing to moonfruit they are way way behind. You are basically stuck with pre made templates.
The form builder is very limited for the free version, they give you only 5 lines to put in one form, to get more you have to upgrade.
Pay pal integration is a plus, as we know moonfruit only lets you do it with their paid plans. But since I figured out how to embed pay pal button into a moonfruit site (using wix.com as explained in one of my previous postings on this blog) I really don't think about it as a big disadvantage any more.
The only big advantage of weebly.com is unlimited number of pages for a free site option. Free web site builder usually give you between 15 and 20 free pages for one web site. If you want more you have to pay for their premium plans. Moonfruit lets you create only 15 pages .
Domains
I have been purchasing my domains from 1and1.com for 6.99 for the first year 8.99 after that . I had great experience so far using my domains with moonfruit.com. They have a very detailed explanation in their support section on how to point your externally purchased domain to you moonfruit site. Even though it says in the instructions that it might take 72 hours to complete this usually takes just couple of hours after you point your domain's A record to an IP adress provided by moonfruit. Aside from no forced adds and great site builder this ability to use your domain makes moonfruit a great choice for creating a free web site. A lot of their competitors don't let you use your own domain unless you are a paying customer.
Site stats
I have been looking for a good program to measure traffic on my sites. I tested google analytics, site meter, goingup, clicky, and 99stats. I need a program which would give me all visitors listed and tell me what pages on my site they went to, how long do they stay and how they got to my site in the first place. Also I need visitors location. I don't have a huge number of visitors so I really don't need programs that do all these percentages, breakdowns etc. etc.
Google analytics gave me tons of info , percentages , breakdowns etc etc, but it failed to give me a simple visitor tracking I need. It was too cumbersome . I don't need to know that one particular page gets 63.33 percentage of all visitors and stuff like that.
Site meter was very good but you can only measure traffic on one page with one sitemeter account. So for a blog or one page site it is perfect. It lists visitors and when you click on a visitor it gives you location, internet provider/company, time spent, referring site.
Clicky would be my best choice for a multi page site but for some reason moonfruit pages get labeled weird in it so you can't determine what page on the site the visitors went to. I used this program on webs.com and it was great. You get a list of visitors and it shows what pages they went to, you get their location, time spent on the site etc. But the fact that it doesn't list moonfruit pages by their name is a deal breaker. I only can see that some page is visited but characters that display don't tell me which one.
Goingup.com
This one was a waste of time. Interface is very very slow, stats are recording with a huge delay and it kept telling me that I need to fix code that I got from them. I would stay away from this one.
99stats
This one is actually good, I used it on one of my blogs, and it works as good as sitemeter. I also tried it with a moonfruit site but for some reason it is not tracking all the details. I will have to find out more about this.
