Weebly’s powerful WYSIWYG site builder gets a white-label option for designers

If you’re not already familiar with Weebly, let’s start there. It’s a WYSIWYG website editor, loaded with features and templates that you can drag and drop to customize. It includes loads of multimedia features, hosting is covered by Weebly itself and the company presently plays home to over 7 million websites.

To round it up, Weebly lets you create wesbsites quickly and easily, and they actually look good. For many users, reverting to something like WordPress offers either too much depth or it isn’t suited to what they do. As Weebly COO and co-founder Dan Veltri posits, “it’s not necessary to have a PHP-powered site. Most businesses need websites that are easy for them to update” and that’s exactly what Weebly offers.

Weebly appears to aim directly at small businesses, giving them a feature-rich website without the hassle that’s normally involved. In fact, Veltri says that the company found that website designers were actually using Weebly to design client sites and it was with that knowledge that Weebly’s white-label Designers Platform was born.

I spent some time with Veltri looking at the options that are in Weebly and it’s obvious that the company has spent a huge amount of time in providing the right elements for small to medium-sized businesses. I can also tell you, as Veltri was screen sharing with me, that the company is putting a huge amount of effort into providing more and better site templates to give designers and customers more choice.

For designers, the deal stays the same as it always has on Weebly. You have a back end dashboard where you can rebrand the entire Weebly experience to fit your company.

As you sign up clients, they’ll appear in your dashboard and you can allow a staff to have different levels of access to the entire back end. In essence, you’re able to do in a couple of clicks what would typically take months to develop.

The idea, on the whole, isn’t new. In fact, if you look at what Weebly is doing, it’s an ages-old concept on the Internet. Years ago, sites such as Tripod or Geocities would allow people to build rudimentary web pages with WYSIWYG designers, and these drag and drop systems are still around today in more refined forms.

What is new about the system is the fact that Weebly is placing all of the power of its platform into the hands of enterprising website designers. For a mere $8 per month per site, designers can quickly turn out websites that have the right capabilities and features, instead of being over or underwhelming.

Weebly’s Designer Platform launched only a few minutes ago, so make sure to drop by the site and see if it’s the right choice for you. Veltri knows that not everyone will want to use Weebly, but for those who need reliable, simple websites that they can update themselves, it’s an invaluable option.