New Weebly App Lets You Build a Website Using the iPad

The iPad is no longer just for consuming media and the Web; it can also be used as a content-creation tool, as evidenced by apps like Microsoft Office and the recent Adobe Premiere Clip. But today, Weebly launched an iPad app that bestows on the iPad one of the most frequently needed types of content-creation: website building.

Weebly is one of the more popular site-builders, with free and subscription options. In fact, today Weebly also announced some pretty impressive usage numbers: more than 25 million sites created and over 200 million unique monthly visitors to Weebly sites. That compares with just 2.4 million sites built with heavily advertised but also slick competitor Squarespace.

The new Weebly app for iOS 8 features nearly all of the site-creation, content, and design tools as the browser-based version, though it lacks that platform's commerce capabilities. It does let you change fonts site-wide, change SEO settings, add pages, and upload photos and video. The app uses clever, touch-optimized user interface tricks such as swiping in menu panels and drag-and-drop editing.

I spoke with Weebly co-founder and CEO David Rusenko before the launch, who stressed that building the iPad app was no mean feat. "We spent a lot of time completely rebuilding Weebly from the ground up for the iPad." He noted that the underlying code was native code for speed, though it still needed to incorporate HTML5, since it was working with website creation.

Rusenko also said that "60 percent of Weebly users are entrepreneurs." In this day and age, you don't exist if you don't have an e-commerce site, so on-the-go, intuitive site editing is a must.

Competitor Jimdo has an iPad version of its site builder, while Squarespace and Wix do not. Weebly already had an iPhone app, but only for blog updating, photo uploading, checking site traffic, and the like.

Weebly offers free site creation, with upgrade options for custom URLs and heavy-duty e-commerce at the $4, $8, and $25-a-month price levels.

Weebly's clear, usable interface, attractive themes, strong commerce features, mobile capabilities, and site portability earned it a PCMag Editors' Choice for modern site builders. To find out why, read our full review of Weebly.