Weebly is a low-cost DIY website building tool. If you’re a new business owner, this drag-and-drop tool makes it easy to build your own website or online store. By choosing the right setup and then using their editing tools, your Weebly site can be customized to fit your company’s needs and your brand style.

Weebly was recently purchased by Square, a credit card processing company. Because of that, Weebly is particularly good if you have an e-commerce site. But you can use Weebly even if you’re not selling anything from your website.

Choose Business vs. Personal Website on Weebly

When you first create an account with Weebly you’ll be asked what type of website you want to create. These send you down two different paths and according to Weebly forums, it’s nearly impossible to switch from one type of account to another once you set this up.

The Weebly ‘business’ websites focus more on e-commerce. They heavily push options concerning products, categories, and online bookings but you can ignore those features if they don’t apply to your type of business. If you want to add a blog to your business website it will be called ‘stories’.

The Weebly ‘personal’ websites focus on more information or brochure-style sites. If you want a blog on your personal site it will be called ‘updates’.

However, you can add online selling to a personal site and you can turn off online sales on a business site. With the ‘personal’ site you can sell products and put them into categories, but with a business site, you can more easily handle online bookings or other types of online sales. If selling is central to your website functionality, definitely choose a business site.

Really you’re choosing two types of editors. The personal site uses Weebly’s old editor and the business sites use Weebly’s new editor. Because the functionality and pricing of each type of website are really very similar, it’s a better choice to choose the Business site, which is also called Square Online.

Weebly is low-cost, but don’t choose the free plan

You can set up and edit your site for free, but eventually, you’ll want to choose a paid plan. While there are free plans on Weebly, choose at least their professional level. Avoid the lower-level plans because they show Weebly ads on your site.

The Weebly ads on your website do not look professional; it’s announcing to the world that you care so little about your brand that you won’t even pay for a website to represent your company.

Customize your Weebly web design

To begin building your website with Weebly, you create an account and tell them what you’re selling (or nothing). On the next screen, you should choose ‘full website’ if you want to have more than one page on your site.

Then you choose your style. This controls the overall fonts and colors as a group. This also sets the overall design for your site.

But keep in mind that everything can, and should, be customized by you.

Create a site to match your brand

What’s most important is that you design your website to create a consistent brand image with any other brand touchpoints you’ve developed. So you’re going to want to choose the exact fonts and colors for your brand. Don’t just rely on the default ones that are presented.

Choose the right colors

Use the Design menu to customize the design. You should know the exact hex # color that is your corporate brand color.

Choose or upload fonts in Weebly

Ideally, your brand font is one that Weebly has on its long list. If that’s the case, use that as the base font. If they don’t have your desired font you can either choose something similar, or you upload a font. To choose a good match for your brand typeface, look at the font’s characteristics: serif or sans serif, italic or straight, heavy or light, etc. If you want to use a Google font—for example, if you had a font recommended from your Branding Compass report—this blog post shows you how. We recommend using the exact font that you’re using in other materials.

Add pages and adjust the layout of your Weebly site

Weebly makes it very easy to add pages and then add sections to any page.

You can choose from pre-formatted types of content such as your Instagram feed or a gallery. Or, you can more manually add text and images in whatever format looks best to you.

With sections you can easily add:

• videos
• photos
• text
• lists
• forms

Think about what information you want to convey to your website viewer.

And equally important, think about the feeling you want to convey through colors, fonts, visuals, and words.

Understanding your brand first will help you build a better Weebly site

Your Weebly site can be customized in nearly any way you imagine. If you don’t have a clear vision in your mind about how you want your website to look, it can be easy to just choose some pre-built styles and content blocks. But your website is an important part of your visual identity. It should represent your brand traits, attract your ideal customers and stand apart from your competitors. If you are choosing stock elements, they probably are not in sync with your core brand.

It’s better to use a tool like Branding Compass to clarify what your brand is all about and get professional recommendations on the right colors, fonts, and visuals to represent your brand. Then, with those insights and details in hand, you can use a tool like Weebly to create a website that successfully promotes your product or service.