Me: Oh my God! When did that happen? Why didn't I get an email.

Me:  Oh, you mean I need to extend my service. I knew about that. I was waiting for payday. But why are you giving me a warning that it's currently suspended.

Weebly: Currently suspended, expiring soon.. it's like you say tomato and I say tomato.

Me: Really?

Weebly: No, not really. Actually, our marketing team has decided to use scare tactics to get people to renew.

Me: Really? Hows that working?

Weebly: Soso. Siteground has created a page that tells our users this is a prefect time to change hosts. 

Me: I was thinking the same thing, but I'm going to wait until this ball of irritation passes and then decide.

Weebly: Hey now, we're just trying to prevent churn. (Churn is the rate users quit us.)

Me: Head-desk, head-desk.

My irritation is two fold. Since Weebly updated their site, I have had to update flash every time I wanted to upload a photo. This is true for all the computers I use. That's the first fold. The second fold is their help department  also known as the let-us-tell-you-why-it's-you're-fault-guys. For whatever reason Weebly ignores trouble reports. Oddly enough, my last blog yapping about the woes of Weebly bugs resulted in a lot less bugs.

So, here's why I love Weebly. When it works, it's great. Here's what I love and hate about Weebly. If users (like me) blog about the troubles we have with the service, the corporate powers that be take notice and the issues get fixed. However, I dislike blogging about Weebly Woes.

Finally, because I like to eat my cake too, can someone fix the auto save bug that makes it hard to edit blog titles? Maybe delay the auto save feature a second or something? I don't know.

Thanks!

Updates:
1/31/2014- Still having photo upload issues. Uninstalled/ reinstalled flash for the millionth time, cleared browser cash, and logged back into Weebly. Finally able upload a photo. Needless to say, this is a pain in the *. 

2/09/2014- The  bug with editing titles seems to have been fixed.  However, I still can't upload photos without reinstalling flash.  Fix it Weebly, I beg of you.

3/6/2014- I have un-installed and reinstalled flash halve a dozen times since I last posted about this issue. I finally emailed Weebly who has responded by confirming that Weebly doesn't work on Explorer. What? I use Firefox but I've had this issue on Chrome as well as other browsers. Anyway, so far their solution is: Weebly is not the problem, though perhaps using Chrome will solve the problem after I uninstall  and reinstall the browser. Yes, their solution to my problem with having to uninstall/ reinstall flash is to uninstall/reinstall Chrome.

5/6/2014
The uploaded was working pretty good-- I've only reinstalled flash five times since I posted about this issue in March and seems to be primarily limited to Sexy Computer. Big Bertha hasn't had any problems since I purchased her three weeks ago after giving up on the <s>{work computer}</s> dinosaur. Can't really blame Weebly for the up-loader not working on that. A lot of things didn't work right on that computer. However, for the last two weeks I've been having up-loader failure on the desktop. I ignored it, worked around it, and finely sent an SOS. To be fair the SOS started with, I'm probably wasting my breath but....

Weebly responded with a copy and pasted message about Bit Defender. I stopped reading after, "Unfortunately, if the issue persists, you'll need to contact BitDefender's support for assistance."  (I wonder if customer support  is replaced with robots would  the responses will be less robotic?) Three days later I got a chance to rank the helpfulness of this message.  I replied like this: Bad

Anyway the head of support offered to help. "Help included the following:  we have millions of happy user; We offered to help you more at the end of our copy and pasted solution. ( I stopped reading the "solution" that didn't apply. My bad.) You didn't explain the issue clearly enough. (Or perhaps, support didn't read my issue , opting instead for copy and paste); You haven't contacted us about this issue since March. (Clue gun: When customers stop trying to get help, that means they feel like asking for it is pointless.)

8/11 2014
I have no major complaints against Weebly at this time. Photos are loading on every computer except my work computer. I like their new feature which allows users to drop photos into text, but I dislike that I can only drop one photo into a test box and thus must create multiple text boxes to get the picture text affect. There used to be a feature that allowed you to create columns. Now they have a "smart column feature" and I think it's "intelligence" is one reason you can only drop one photo into a text box. It creates a new column when you try to drop a second picture.  Titles still auto-save any minute change. This makes editing the titles a bit like whack-a-mole. Often I just delete the title and retype a new one. However, it's better than it was so... small steps, I guess. 

Weebly does eventually fix the bugs. However, I think that bug fixes take longer than they should because they don't listen to average users.

If you don't know, I use Weebly to manage this site. I love that it's drop and drag and I don't really have to know how to write code.

However, Weebly is bug ridden. I've mentioned the bogs and they blame my choice of browser. I use Mozilla most days, but when I use explore, I get the same bugs. The most serious bug I had, almost cause my entire site to crash. This was before I could download a copy of my site. Their response of course was to blame my browser and "There is nothing we can do." To be clear, this issue has been address by allowing users to back up their site on their hard drive. However Weebly still doesn't allow users to archive pages. Once you delete a page it's gone forever. Yahoo and other providers are leagues ahead of Weebly, offering ability to archive as well.

Weebly is on the pricier side and a bit trixy when it comes to pricing. I'm not sure where they get their "ave X% on competition from. Domain registry with other sites like Go Daddy is about $9.00 a year and Weebly is $25.00 a year.

Domain registry is just the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to website services. All it does is give you an address. You don't have a house until you build the site.

And that's were Weebly stands out. It's perhaps the easiest to use website builder out there. However, just because they set a new standard, doesn't mean another company won't surpass them in the future. You can easily import your domain through Go Daddy into Weebly and get access to all the features I have for free.  In case this isn't clear:

Register a domain with Weebly:
-- $25.00 a year
-- free use of standard features
-- add pro for $25.00 a year
Total yearly cost: $50.00

Register a domain with Go Daddy:
-- $9.00 a year
-- Free use of Weebly standard features after you import your domain
-- ad pro features for $25.00 a year.
Total yearly cost: $34.00

Go Daddy offers design programs at a steep additional price and they're mostly for professional designers. This is one reason why many people forward their domain. The other reason is that domain registration is a lot like how phone companies used to be with phone numbers. You could forward your number to a new number, but you couldn't take it with you.

When you register a domain, you're pretty much stuck with that registry service until you die... unless you want to lose the domain. Again, this might be confusing.  So let me use a hypothetical. Lets say Yahoo has a new, improved page builder that makes Weebly look hard. I want to use Yahoo to renovate my site.

- I grant Yahoo access to my domain.
- I pay Weebly $25.00 a year to maintain my domain name.
- I pay Yahoo $9.99 a month to have access to their web builder.
Total yearly cost: $145.00

However, let's pretend I registered my domain with Go Daddy, but have been using Weebly to construct my house.

- I terminate my contract with Weebly
- I grant Yahoo access to my domain.
- I pay still pay Go Daddy $9.00 a year to maintain my domain name.
- I pay Yahoo $9.99 a month to have access to their web builder.
Total yearly cost: $130.00

I hope this paints a clearer picture between website registration and website design I didn't understand how this worked, nor could I find an explanation of this anywhere. When I bought my first domain thorugh Go Daddy, I thought I was buying design tools too. It took me forever to figure out why my site wouldn't work. I had to pay extra for access to a program that would let me build the site.  A lot extra.

Now, Yahoo charges something like $9.99 a month for small business and this includes a program to build pages. The program is pretty easy to use, but not as easy as Weebly.

But remember with Weebly you get the exact same features with a domain registration as you do with a free site. Pro features cost extra. Still, compared to other sites, there may be value here. Except, for example, with Yahoo, you get domain emails with your monthly fee. I think Go Daddy provides free email as well as free sub domain registry.

Weebly does not provide email.

Do not be fooled by this. The box says "Set up email to send and receive emails from your own domain."  If you add this service, you will not get email accounts. You will get a forwarding service. You can set up your emails trough Gmail... this was free but may cost $5.00  per email/per month now. (Yahoo gives I think ten emails, which would cost $600.00 through google.) Finally, you can use gmail's service with any company.

On a side note: if you are using gmail to manage your domain addresses, Weebly's forwarding service will interrupt your company accounts. YIKES.

So, while Weebly makes site design easy, after all the add-ons, direct and indirect, may make Weebly the most expensive choice. I suggest you consider all your needs before upgrading your free account.