Square Online vs. WordPress

Weebly is a great platform if you need a brochure-ware website. It's got some great features and you can't beat how easy it is to use. On the downside, the blog and e-commerce functionality is limited. Although there are several fairly easy to use platforms out there, I use it for many of my clients that are just starting out or need one they can eventually manage and update themselves as their businesses evolve -- which is especially true in the beginning or at the startup of a business. However, it can also scale, since you can create almost any number of pages and add content like audio and video. Additional functionality may be added through embeds.

Incentivized

In my opinion, smaller organizations with simpler layouts would be well suited to use WordPress, however, larger organizations with more advanced website feature needs may need another product. We found the website to be great at first, but as we grew, we needed more options that were not fitting for the product we had with WordPress and had to look at alternatives.

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• Weebly makes it easy for users who are not very tech savvy to create a site that looks professional and well thought out.
• Weebly provides users with a variety of templates for creating new pages quickly and efficiently.
• The software allows users to make updates to their site and pages quickly and changes are published immediately.

Incentivized

• Easy to use User Interface
• Coding / Plugin Implementation is awesome
• There's always a solution available for the platform
• Security is easy to use and robust
• Implementation with 3rd party platforms, such as Google's variety of tools
• Can download and host on your own server or use their hosted servers

Incentivized

• Plugins leave a lot to be desired. Not a ton of custom options and many require additional subscriptions.
• SEO options are also pretty elementary - if SEO if a focus for you, avoid Weebly
• Overall templates are pretty boring compared to something you could create on WordPress

Incentivized

• WordPress breaks often so you need to have someone who understands how to troubleshoot, which can take time and money.
• Some plugins are easier to customize than others, for example, some don't require any coding knowledge while others do. This can limit your project if you are not a coder.
• WordPress can be easily hacked, so you also need someone who can ensure your sites are secure.

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Weebly is consistently adding features that line up with our needs. The ease of use makes it the perfect program for us since we have users of multiple age brackets and knowledge of web design. We love that we can give users access to only the pages they are affiliated with

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As time goes on, websites will become less focused on paged content and more immersive. At the same time, the need for security will only go up. While WordPress has served the web community well for over 11 years, it's probably time to look for other better platforms.

Very easy to use and intuitive to design after all of our business needs. From the website and POS system to how we represent ourselves internally and to our customers... Square is second-to-none in helping our business and others in our same boat become the kind of businesses we want to be when it comes to our inventory and sales of these kinds of products.

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WordPress has excellent UX/UI, mainly because it's familiar. The platform is still a bit dated on the back end, but it has improved from the past. I wouldn't give it a 10 in this area because it does require some coding and development knowledge. You can't just jump in and create a website with confidence, like you would with Jimdo, Squarespace or similar tools.

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Anyone can visit WordPress.org and download a fully functional copy of WordPress free of charge. Additionally, WordPress is offered to users as open-source software, which means that anyone can customize the code to create new applications and make these available to other WordPress users.

Mostly, any performance issues have to do with using too many plugins and these can sometimes slow down the overall performance of your site. It is very tempting to start adding lots of plugins to your WordPress site, however, as there are thousands of great plugins to choose from and so many of them help you do amazing things on your site. If you begin to notice performance issues with your WordPress site (e.g. pages being slow to load), there are ways to optimize the performance of your site, but this requires learning the process. WordPress users can learn how to optimize their WordPress sites by downloading the WPTrainMe WordPress training plugin (WPTrainMe.com) and going through the detailed step-by-step WordPress optimization tutorials.

WordPress itself only has community service so your experience will depend on where you turn. Online, through forums and community boards, support is rudimentary but effective. You can easily turn to your local community and find exceptional individuals who know and use WordPress regularly for more advanced, inexpensive, support. I'm rating this less than 10 because of the lack of any formal support provided by a company.

Varies by the person providing training. High marks as it's incredibly easy to find experienced individuals in your community to provide training on any aspect of WordPress from content marketing, SEO, plugin development, theme design, etc. Less than 10 though as the training is community based and expectations for a session you find may fall short.

It is very easy to find online resources to learn how to do just about anything with WordPress.

WordPress is not a great solution if you have: 1) A larger site with performance / availability requirements. 2) Multiple types of content you want to share - each with its own underlying data structure. 3) Multiple sites you need to manage. For very small sites where these needs are not paramount, WordPress is a decent solution

Overall, Weebly is a fantastic app to integrate into the classroom or school setting. I usually give students an option when designing web pages/websites and Weebly is often the choice. However, when it comes to pure blogging and older students learning how to track their digital footprint, I usually lean toward having them use WordPress. But Weebly is simpler with less time needed to get started as opposed to WordPress. Students need to understand simple HTML, embedding other tools/apps, and the basics of web design without the coding/HTML background and Weebly helps support this.

Incentivized

There are no other site builders/platforms that stand up to the ease and versatility (heavy custom coding and customizations included) as Wordpress. Drupal is clunky and outdated, as is Joomla, and while Wix or Squarespace may be sufficient for someone with very low web needs, much like Shopify, it's incredibly limiting and either requires hitting it with a hammer and hacking code together to do what you want, or relying on often shoddily-built third party themes and liquid scripts.

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WordPress is completely scalable. You can get started immediately with a very simple "out-of-the box" WordPress installation and then add whatever functionality you need as and when you need it, and continue expanding. Often we will create various WordPress sites on the same domain to handle different aspects of our strategy (e.g. one site for the sales pages, product information and/or a marketing blog, another for delivering products securely through a private membership site, and another for running an affiliate program or other application), and then ties all of these sites together using a common theme and links on each of the site's menus. Additionally, WordPress offers a multisite function that allows organizations and institutions to manage networks of sites managed by separate individual site owners, but centrally administered by the parent organization. You can also expand WordPress into a social networking or community site, forums, etc. The same scalability applies to web design. You can start with a simple design and then scale things up to display sites with amazing visual features, including animations and video effects, sliding images and animated product image galleries, elements that appear and fade from visitor browsers, etc. The scaling possibilities of WordPress are truly endless.

• Weebly has saved us a lot of time with site maintenance - if we need to make a change, it's easy to get in and out without spending a lot of time trying to code.
• Weebly is cost effective, and right now we're getting just about everything we need from the tool so we're saving money (compared to other products).

Incentivized

• Allowed us to being all websites under a single umbrella, saving costs on similar products.
• It's increased our website turn time and made us faster and more efficient at launching websites.
• Edits and tweaks happen much faster as we have a customized environment.

Incentivized