Thursday 29 March 2012

9 Weebly Websites That Actually Don’t Suck

Weebly. Isn't that the free site where people who don't know how to make websites go to make websites? Well, Dave covered Weebly as a blogging platform, and Erez covered Weebly in 2011. It's clear from Erez' examples that he does know how to design a decent website, but if you explore most of the Weebly sites that are out there, they make some of the old MySpace pages look well-designed. Okay, maybe not that bad, but you get my point. If you explore the world of xx.weebly.com sites, you'll see what I mean. They are almost all sites with horrible color schemes, mismatched fonts, unprofessional headers and overall, they just look like the sort of websites that were created back in the 90s, before we had widespread use of CSS formatting and easy to program page scripting. Weebly Websites that Are Pretty Good Instead of focusing on the negative, I actually wanted to try and scour the Internet for any Weebly based sites that stand apart from the majority of other Weebly sites. These are websites that are well structured, aesthetically pleasing and could pass as a professionally designed website – if it weren't for the ".weebly.com" at the end of the domain. The first one up is DEA Design . The site was created by Danuta Antas-Wo?niewska of Poland, who – not surprisingly – is a graphic design artist. Through the site, she's offering her graphic design expertise to companies and businesses for advertising development. The site is written in Polish, but that's nothing a quick Google Translation can't cure. The header design is very clearly professionally done, with the background shades blending well with the overall color scheme of the site. The placement and font style of the menu, headers and text are all really well done and make this a clear choice for this list of great Weebly sites. Next up is JP Custom Apparel , a website created by Justin Prime, yet another artist. In this case, rather than electronic art, Justin creates art on clothes and features them on this site. I love the creative use of the text design in the right column, the well-designed header image, and the professionally done top menu. The background color is a little bit hard on the eyes, but at least it matches the header text inside the content area. Another beautiful Weebly site created by yet another artist, is ShellysCreativeSide . The design is extremely simple, but that's what makes it beautiful. With a well-scripted drop-down menu for navigation, Shelly offers a peak into her creative pastimes including photography, Photoshop, hand-crafted jewelry and even sculptures. The header is a cool font, and the floating box has a cool frame to it that gives it a professional touch no matter how large or small you size your browser window. Another site with a fairly professional design is a real estate agency called Kanata Homes. The only hint that the site is amateur is the misspelling of "Angents" in the title. Other than that, the title font and logo is cool, the header image is really nice, and the menu is pretty neat – it highlights with a header bar that points to the active selected menu item. Pretty sweet! Another interesting Weebly site for a lot of different reasons is A Banned Cribb . This site is the creative product of what appears to be a decent comedian. He created an avatar that looks like a mix between Leisure Suit Larry of Sierra fame and Elvis Presley. The site is infrequently updated – the last post was in December. However his writing is actually pretty funny, he offers a "Girl of the Month" section, and most importantly the overall site design is clean with colors, headers and fonts that blend well and look good. Proving that artists make for the best Weebly website designers, another decent site is Bibi's Custom Hand Painted Art . In addition to the beautiful header that displays a sample of the hand-painted art, the site lays out other samples of art in a nice, professional format. The one drawback of the site is that it is exceedingly simple and plain – but the clean design places it on the list of the best Weebly websites. Another interesting Weebly site design is that of Urban Decay 39 . Urban Decay 39 offers designer iPhone cases, t-shirts, messenger bags and other products featuring interesting urban graffiti designs. The owner is a young kid with a blog that he also runs on the same site. I couldn't find his name – but you can find his photo on the About Me page. It isn't Amazon – but it's a decent business site built on Weebly, complete with the ability to make purchases, even though the actual purchase takes place on Zazzle and not on the site itself. I think my favorite Weebly site of them all is definitely Stick and Strum . This is a site created by Shane Nicholas who teaches guitar, drums, piano and even ukulele for over 7 years. The site is where Shane features his students, shows highlights from his student recitals, and offers his own blog. I love the theme – how the header image floats over the dark graffiti backdrop and how the background blends from dark to white as you move from left to right. Very cool stuff. Another clean, professional design is that of Magnolia Visual Arts , a photography site that seeks out clients for modeling shoots, family portraits and even pet portraits. The main site features a slideshow portfolio of some of the model clients, and links at the bottom take you to samples of landscape, pets and other photography samples. There is also a parallel blog site that offers even more stunning examples of the photography captured by the artist of Magnolia Visual Arts. If you look through other Weebly based sites on the Internet, you'll see how hard it is to find sites like the ones I've listed here. Quality isn't usually a word you would use to describe them – that's all I have to say. So, while the sites above may not be the best sites on the Internet, within the painfully inadequate world of Weebly web design, these web designers performed some impressive feats considering the limited tools offered at Weebly. Have you ever made a Weebly site? Do you know of any that are actually pretty good? Share your own thoughts in the comments section below. Image Credit: Under Construction Via Shutterstock




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