My Online Journeys

A blog is the first answer when you need to add something interesting, new, and active to the content you want to promote. You can add a blog to your website (sometimes called a money website or even a landing page) or use an external blog as I showed with examples of WordPress in Blogspot.

If you need to refresh your knowledge, here are two examples (different from those already presented):

What's the difference between blogs and static pages?

When you write a blog, you are supposed to post something new now and then. Some people have so much to tell, that they post several times per day. In my case, it can pass a few years between posts but you got the picture.

When you put up a static website, you generally just make a menu with obvious stuff like OUR MISSION, ABOUT US, CONTACT, etc.

Of course, you can always add a blot to your static website and you can always run a blog with one or more static pages, but in essence, website builders are much more oriented to static pages which are not changing too often, and blogging services are focused on non-stop addition of fresh content.

This would be a graphic comparison:

Search engines prefer blogs because they always offer something new. At least they should. On the other hand, a static website serves as a kind of authority hub where you can always check for info which should be more reliable than information in blog posts.

Both web entities can achieve very authoritative positions but every addition of the post causes a dispersion of the authority of the blog through all posts. If you have one hundred posts already and you add the next one, all older posts lose a bit of their authority.

I prefer static websites for situations where I already know how will the final result look like even before I start. Blogs are less predictable.

So here we are - which free service should we use to build static websites? WordPress and Blogspot can both do the trick but are not built for this. They are easier as blogging platforms, especially for beginners.

I did a short research and the answer was simple. Everybody claimed that Wix is the best. It's free, it's easy to use, and it looks great. Well, most of these 'reviews' were mere paid commercials. A lot of them. They were everywhere.

So I tried it and discovered that these claims are only partially true.

This name is Weebly.

So I gave it a try and it worked.

Here is the result.

As you'll notice, the menu doesn't only open new pages, it has submenus as well. Good luck making such a menu with WordPress or Blogspot!

Weebly is robust, and reliable, and it delivers even in free mode. There are no fancy elements where you spend a few minutes for formatting and editing just to enter one word. You just point it, drag it, and click it. Or maybe the other way around. You should try it. It's worth your time and you'll have a nice static website in no time. With some luck (and decent keywords and a few backlinks) you'll get traffic from search engines as well. I know I do.

Now you know. Weebly became the third member in my collection of free web services and number one among free website builders. But beware! Weebly was acquired by Square in 2018. Such changes are not necessarily good news for users but so far I am still satisfied with the service. In my next posts, I will present some of the competitors to Weebly and you'll know even more.