My Saga with Finding an Easy Website Builder

frustrated with website building
Waiting on hold for customer service
I have tried for years to"get a website going" but was often  overcome with frustration.  First I tried Go Daddy's Website Tonight plan, which sounded SO easy.  I found the structure to be convoluted, and the process to be VERY slow...long waits on the phone for customer service, not to mention constantly being logged off without my knowledge or request--a top bar still said "logged in" at GoDaddy when they had indeed logged me out.  

I found Website Tonight to have very limited features and a pretty lame group of templates to choose my site layout from.  And they don't tell you that their free version of Website Tonight is ad-based (meaning tons of ads with products that directly compete with what my website offers pop up whenever anyone goes to my site). Their hosting plans would require me to know Dreamweaver or some sort of HTML code and CSS stuff I didn't want to learn.

I am not much of a techie, and I don't know much code.  I want to spend my time CREATING poems, and CREATING a poetry website that is a positive experience for the people who come to it...and still have time for swimming, hiking, composing music, playing with my black and white cat, and generally lounging around and daydreaming up new ideas.


Earlier this year, long after giving up on Go Daddy (except as a domain name registrar where I keep my domain names), I again started online searching for where I might build the easiest website possible that included beautiful templates. 


I kept seeing Site Built It (SBI) testimonials everywhere--how wonderful, easy, and beautiful their sites were, blah, blah.  I was finally convinced and plunked down $300 to have a site for one year.  They promised to guide me step by step.  Well, I found out they have hundreds and hundreds of pages just about building the first page.  The information is never-ending, with video links, article links, tips links, what to do on Day 1 through Day 10 of building a site, etc., etc....BUT they forgot to mention the VERY MOST IMPORTANT, BASIC piece of information about building a site with them:  SBI does NOT have WYSIWYG!!
WYSIWYG means "what you see is what you get," similar to creating documents in Microsoft Word.  It lets me copy and paste info from a Word document right into my Weebly website without any problems.

Thousands of pages of hype and excitement led to an old-fashioned website building template where content must be built in HTML CODE!  (HTML Code means I had to put in certain things like "<br>" at the end of each line of text or it would all just run together, and other <><><><> with letters between them to make bold letters, italicized words, different colored words, and then put </> with certain lettered code in between to stop the next word from being bold, italicized, and so on.)  

It took me months to build this little site.  And I would have to wade through hundreds of more pages to figure out how to add more basic features.  SO...I started surfing the web again for the easiest website to build, easy website building, website building for daydreaming poets...any keywords I could think of...and I found several free ones but they were ad-based.  I found Squarespace.com which looked cool but was a little expensive. 

Then I found Weebly.com, and tried out their free website building.  MY OH MY, was I surprised to find a website with easy, intuitive page builders--and everything in WYSIWYG!  I could have a free site if I put weebly.com after the website name I chose. Or for $3.99 per month, I could get Weebly Pro and use one of my existing domain names as my website name, which would make it look more professional.  And Weebly Pro has a bunch of other extra features, like advanced audio and video capabilities.

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So I kept my domain names with GoDaddy.  I can renew them online or call their customer service which is 100% USA-based with people I can understand.  

You could get your domain name at Weebly, but the cost is $39.95!!

I prefer to save $32.46 per year and keep mine at GoDaddy.

Here is a link for getting a domain name at GoDaddy in case you need one:  http://x.co/ZVPP 
or click below...you can check and see if the domain name you want is available there too.
Weebly has many short instructional videos that quickly showed me how to choose a template,  build pages, point my GoDaddy domain to my Weebly site, add my own photos or free photos from their huge library to illustrate my web pages, and much more.  Here is a link to see how Weebly works: