Weeblys Quirks; Site Update
I've updated my website some with new content. You might notice the art section of my site has changed. Before I kept everything under a single section, but now that I've begun to make progress towards my goals and have more types of art I want to put up, I decided to break everything out into sections. One is for a character design portfolio whereas the other is for general art. My personal art section is a little empty at the moment as I wanted to take things in a new direction and I've been super busy with other things like creating a character design portfolio. Now that I'm done with that I can focus more on getting back to doing personal art which I'm looking forward to. You'll also notice my home page has been redesigned. There was only a single image up there as I wasn't sure what to put, but now that I've gotten my personal brand built up a little further I figured it was time for redesign.
Now besides that, Weebly has a couple of pain points I’m not a big fan of it.
Its editor is pretty easy to use and the ability to edit HTML/CSS manually for custom design is great, although I find I have to do it a lot because Weebly is relatively bare bones. The templates aren’t that plentiful and the ones they do have tend to look the same, so you really have to dig in there with custom code to vary it up. There’s also the issue of the header which is fixed in place and scrolls with the page. That was a nightmare to fix via CSS, but it had to be done.
Next up is the issue of content management. Nothing you upload gets stored as there is no content library. That means every time you upload a new image or any other file, it wont be saved. You’ll have to reupload it which is a pain when you have to redesign a page and it requires you to re-add your content back to it. With other website editors like Wix, you have an actual content library so it makes redesigning pages much easier as you only need to reselect your already added content to add it back on the page. You might wonder, well why not just use Wix in that case?
The primary issue is that its WAY too slow.
Its slow to the point of being unusable and I have no clue why. I’ve researched on why that is and never got an answer. If anything after all the research I did, what I learned the most was that practically everyone else who uses Wix also said it was slow with no known way of fixing it. Another issue, albiet not as big, is that Wix’s page container can’t be expanded past 980 px. The company said its because they want their websites to work well on mobile and web although to me that seems to be one of the worst approaches by forcing the user to stick to 980px or go full screen rather than access a lot of that inbetween space. Case in the point the typical monitor resolution in todays day is 1920 px. Being forced to choose between 980 px at most or just jump to 1920 px leads a lot of whitespace on the screen that could be used. Maybe for most people its not a big deal, but for artists and other creative types we like to have as much usable space as possible. Between these two issues, it’s enough to keep me away from Wix, especially given Weebly allows for HTML/CSS and JS custom code to edit your site however you want.
A third issue is image caching. I’ve noticed Weebly is one of the few editors where when you upload an image to replace the current one, if both files have the same name, the new one will not be uploaded. Come to find out after some research, this is a caching issue as Weebly apparently doesn’t clear its cache whenever you upload files. The only way I’ve discovered to fix this is to remove the image in question, clear your browser cache, then close out of it, start it up and then reupload your new image. Its a pain to have to do for every little mistake you spot, but unfortunately Weebly doesn’t automatically clear the cache so you have to do it manually.
Still, despite its faults I think its one of the best editors out there.