I’ve been assisting my town with their web site which is on the Weebly platform. I am not a coder.
Weebly’s customer service has become dreadful. I’ll spare you the details.
Does anyone here have a recommendation for a similarly user friendly service?
We’ve been using Pair since the 1990s. Although I am risking the Malocchio/Evil Eye, we have not had any complaints. Their help has always been quickly responsive and very helpful. Pricing is reasonable and has been the same for years, and we never got hit with any extra charges. If you use WordPress, for a slightly higher fee you will also get specifically trained WordPress support, and either way, you can have more than one WordPress site for one price.
We initially chose Pair way back when because I got good recommendations from TidBITS Talkers as well as others. And I asked because in the 90s there weren’t all that many hosting services that were Mac friendly; Pair was, and still is, very Mac friendly. We’ve also recommended Pair to others, and we have never heard of any complaints.
If you’re seeking a free option such as the one offered by Weebly, then I’d recommend Wix.com, yes of those endless YouTube ads, it’s simple and straightforward to use. My students all use it but tend to migrate to a paid for solutions when they graduate.
Our town actually has a paid account. Weebly has web site building tools that anyone can learn to make a web site in a matter of hours. That ease of learning and updating is what is most attractive to us. The town uses the site for posting legal notices and storing and disseminating town reports, meeting minutes, etc. It is essentially a bulletin board.
The town would like to set up some business tools to issue and pay for building permits and such. Weebly can do that with Square.
I looked at Pair’s web site and it appears to be a hosting site. Weebly’s attraction is its web site creation services and tools.
Pair is a hosting site, and they coordinate with WordPress a blogging and a website building platform. I should have made that clearer.
Look at wix.com. Very similar web creation services and tools. No coding required. In some ways, even easier than weebly. In other ways, the differences take a bit of getting used to. You have a choice of automatically generated stuff (kind of like dealing with a ‘wizard’), which I found more confusing than helpful for my particular needs … or drag-and-drop web site building, which is very cool.
Thanks very much to all for this advice.
Once again, TidBits to the rescue.
I am trying to use Weebly to rebuild my web site, which I had written with the Sandvox a Mac WYSIWYG app that no longer runs on current Macs (although it is still being sold). So far it seems much more accessible than WordPress, but still has a significant learning curve.
Weebly is offered by my hosting firm, SiteGround, which charges for the paid versions of Weebly. It also offers WordPress. I have yet to try Weebly’s help.
I’m running Sandvox on a MacStudio with no issues that I am aware of. It is not a universal app, so it does require Rosetta2 to run.
Since it does appear to be abandoned, it would be nice to have some easy conversion tools to a fully supported app.
I misremembered the details. Sandvox does open in Big Sur 11.6.7 (although it said it crashed I could still try to use it to upload files) , but it cannot upload anything to my web host SiteGround because the password is not recognized (although it’s correct). I suspect it may be trying to use FTP.
I looked around in the fall and could not find any Mac software that could convert Sandvox files. I investigated RapidWeaver, which does not appear to be abandoned, but it would require manual conversion, and I did not want to get stuck in another dead-end app. I downloaded files from my web site and am now using them to rebuild with Weebly.
I would love to find a simple way to convert files, but I was told that Sandvox used some odd code.
In rebuilding my web site, I discovered that if I copy the text from the old Sandvox site that is still on the web, I can paste it into Weebly text fields and it will retain features such as Bold and Italics. I’m still working on make the type solid black and seeing if I can paste in links as well.
FYI RapidWeaver is far from abandoned and not what would constitute a dead-end app, just announced major new versions this past week. It’s one of the most vibrant software ecosystems, a plethora of developers around it developing plug-ins, stacks and themes. If you had interest in developing sites within an app rather than a browser window, it’s highly recommended.
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There appears to be a major split in the Rapidweaver world in the last few months. It’s expected that a new app, probably named Stacks, will be introduced, splitting the developer community. Plug-in developers are opting to maintain compatibility with one or the other, but it’s likely that any interoperability will not last long, if at all. Looks like it’ll be a bumpy flight.
Big changes are a’comin’!!
Where are you reading this, Dana?
I would look at WordPress.com, WordPress.org, Blogger, or Squarespace.
WordPress.com will charge for a site associated with a domain. WordPress.org requires a hosting account, but the software is free. Blogger is free, but very minimalist. SquarSpace is full-service, including newsletters, domains, transactions/stores, but is pricey.
The difficulty with Wix and Weebly is that getting your data out is tricky, so is backing up your site.
Here is info & references, from both “sides”:
From: Joe Workman <support@weaversspace.com>
Subject: This Week in Weaver’s Space No. 38
Date: April 19, 2022 at 2:07:50 AM EDT
[…]
Stacks 5 News
Stacks 5 has been making some great progress! In case you missed it, Stacks 5 will be its own standalone application. I don’t have any juicy screenshots of insider information to share with you just yet. But I have curated some FAQs and posts from around the web that should help answer some of your questions.
• Weaver’s Space + Stacks 5 FAQs
• Official YourHead Stacks 5 FAQs
• Isaiah’s AMA (ask me anything) on Stacks 5
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