Weebly’s designer platform gives designers an easy button for success

Weebly, a startup that offers popular easy-to-use website building tools, launched a new designer platform today aimed at helping designers build sites faster, manage more clients and retain their own branding.

The Weebly Designer Platform is a content management system (CMS) that integrates website design, hosting, and client management into one package.

“Even someone without a ton of web design experience in small town America can jump on the platform and can basically start building websites for their local business clients,” said Weebly CEO David Rusenko.

Rusenko said the new designer platform offers advantages over using WordPress for both designers and their clients. Unlike with WordPress, designers can brand the CMS that clients use with their company’s logo and colors. Also, the platform doesn’t require a separate hosting solution, which means clients have more money to spend on a good designer.

Weebly’s simple, drag-and-drop interface website builder powers over two percent of the world’s websites, according to the company. With that kind of infrastructure already set up, its web hosting infrastructure will offer plenty of stability for even the most trafficked websites, Rusenko said.

Entry level plans for Weebly’s new platform start at $7.95 per month for 500 Mb of storage, 15 pages and unlimited bandwidth.

Having witnessed a demo of Weebly’s new designer platform, I can say with a fair bit of certainty that it’s far more intuitive than Drupal or WordPress — at least from the perspective of managing the backend of several clients’ websites. Reasonably, clients can log into the CMS to make changes without needing much technical knowledge.

The company was incubated by Y Combinator and has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Sequoia Capital, Steve Anderson, Ron Conway, Mikes Maples, Aydin Senkut, Rajeev Motwani and Paul Buchheit.

Check out screenshots and a demo video of Weebly’s Designer Platform embedded below.