Weebly offers free, easy Web site creation

Weebly, a start-up that lets you easily create Web sites with the latest Web 2.0 tools, has raised seed cash from YCombinator, and moved to San Francisco.

The company is just three people from State College, PA. Co-founder David Rusenko originally told VentureBeat he would move to Mountain View. He changed his mind, he said, because he found a vibrant Internet start-up ecosystem in hipper San Francisco — the latest sign that San Francisco has become more of a magnet for these kinds of companies.

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Providing similar Web-based tools to create Web sites are four-year-old Santa Clara, Calif.’s Sitekreator and South Africa’s Synthasite — and the biggest of them, Google Page Creator.

Of all of them, Weebly is most oriented around easy AJAX-based dragging and dropping of elements on a page. For example, if you want a Google Map, you drag the Map icon onto the page where you want it, select the map coordinates you want shown, and that’s it. Weebly supports any Javascript-based elements.

Even Google Page Creator doesn’t let you drag maps to your page. Google requires you to get the HTML code from Google Maps, and paste it in.

Weebly has also just opened its software interface (open APIs), so developers of widgets can allow users to add them directly on to Weebly. For example, if we created a widget that shows VentureBeat headlines, we could build in an “add to Weebly” button. That way, if you have a Weebly account, you could visit our site, click on the button, and VentureBeat headlines would be automatically added to your Weebly page.

The only question is, how will Weebly make money? Weebly’s Rusenko said the company is considering a number of options.

While some aspects of the site are intuitive, some others are not. It helped to watch the company’s various demos, including the main one below:

Techcrunch reported on the company here.