2016 Year in Review
2016 was a powerful, transformative year here at Weebly, and we have even bigger plans for 2017. This past year year we took things to a new level with Weebly 4 and Weebly Promote, moving towards a world beyond the website builder, and help you do more with your business and website than ever before.
As always, we love hearing what you’d like from us next year. Your thoughts directly influence what we decide to work on, so keep the comments and feedback coming!
To celebrate 2016 and set the stage for an amazing 2017 here’s a quick summary of our biggest releases from the last 12 months.
- Weebly 4 - A massive upgrade to the Weebly platform, bringing you the best in modern web design tools with sections, video backgrounds, flexible headers, parallax and reveal scrolling effects, along with the flexibility of product and category elements, a new shipping system with real time shipping and rate management tools, new tax system featuring the automatic tax calculator, tools to drive eCommerce sales with custom gift cards and abandoned cart emails, and don’t forget improved marketing with the SEO Guide, app integrations and smart email updates.
- Weebly Promote - Complete email marketing service with a drag and drop email builder, automated and suggested emails, along with email list building and management tools like smart groups, merge tags, lead capture tool. We didn’t stop there. We also built advanced data tools to understand the impact of email marketing on your business with real-time email stats, funnel analytics and marketing tools like email as a web page, social sharing, Google font integration, subject line emjoi and much, much more.
- Community - Your ideas and feedback are vital to our success, so we really wanted to focus on the community in 2016. We made huge gains with the launch of the Weebly Community, Ambassador Program, Like a Boss Tour and Website in a Night, with more big community efforts planned for 2017.
- International - We officially launched Weebly in ten new languages, improved our localization quality in 14 languages and delivered a major product launch in Latin America and Spain.
We can’t forget about other, smaller feature releases like Domain Transfers, Structured Product Data, Product Import/Export, and Weebly for iOS and Android, along with a multitude of product tweaks and Editor updates each month as part of our goal to constantly upgrade and improve. As we move into 2017, we’re focused on improvements to the core experience, better integration across everything we’ve built and making you even more successful.
Top Apps of the Year
- The App Center took off in 2016! We focused on tighter integration into Weebly with App Dashboard Cards and some amazing third party apps came to life this year. So, along with a list of our major feature releases, we’ve collected the best apps of 2016 to help you grow sales, attract new customers, and improve your website design.
- MarketGoo - A killer SEO tool that lets you monitor search engine rankings, incoming links and uncover actionable tips for improve your website’s visibility in Google search results - $0 to $19.95 per month.
- Tidio Chat - Customer communication at its finest. Connect multiple communication channels in one place, letting your visitors write to you through live chat, messenger or email - $0 to $24 per month
- 123 Form Builder - One of the best form builders we’ve ever seen. Create an array of forms for your site with advanced form customization, data security, reporting and custom notification messages - Free to $4.95 per month
- Lucky Orange - Why do 99% of visitors to your site fail to become customers? Lucky Orange can answer this question and help you improve conversion with heatmaps, visitor recordings, form analytics and much more. This app is truly exceptional - $10 to $50 per month
- InstaShow - One of our best social apps, giving you a super professional and interactive Instagram feed to spice up your site design - $3.99 to $35.88 per year with a free trial
- Animator - Great app from the Waddons Team, take your site design to the next level by animating Weebly elements with scrolling effects that engage visitors - $4.99
What was your favorite feature or app from 2016? And what do you want to see from Weebly in 2017? Tell us in the comments!