NamesCon and DomainInvesting.com will be working together to share more information about the companies sponsoring NamesCon. This morning’s Sponsor Spotlight interview is with domain industry veteran Chris Sheridan, who is Head of Channel Sales at Weebly.
NamesCon 2017 will be taking place at the Tropicana Las Vegas Hotel from January 22-25. Tickets to this year’s conference are on sale now, and we are running a special Veteran’s Day offer today, November 11th (read more on NamesCon.com).
Thanks to the team at Weebly for participating in this interview.
What is your company’s mandate; what sets you apart?:
Our mission is to help the world’s entrepreneurs succeed.

We believe very strongly that creating a website, blog, or store should be a very simple and very easy process.
Who benefits from your product or service?:
Anyone who desires to be online and have a professional, modern looking website can benefit by using Weebly! Weebly supports 40M customers in our direct Retail business. Our Weebly Cloud offering currently supports 200+ Resellers globally with more going live each month.
What factors have contributed to your company’s growth and success?:
Our vision from Day 1 was to have a clean simple Editor experience. This is a goal that remains true to this day, almost 10 years since our founding. We want to keep the web building experience simple for our customers and entrepreneurs. At the same time, we remain committed to constantly evolving the product with more features and benefits. This a delicate balance – keeping the experience simple while adding lots of functionality — however, we enjoy the challenge!
What’s the story behind how your company was founded?:
Our founders Dave Rusenko, Chris Fanini, and Dan Veltri attended Penn State. They wanted to launch a web site and could not believe how difficult it was to get a site published online in 2007. Thus the idea was born to create a better and more user-friendly experience for future entrepreneurs. Thus Weebly was launched!
How would you define your company strategy and vision?:
Our mission is to help the world’s entrepreneurs succeed. Everything we do has that goal in mind. Thus we strive to continually evolve our product with the goal of bringing more “offline” users “online”.
What major milestones has your company accomplished?:
Achieving 40M users under management is big milestone for us. It demonstrates that our drag and drop experience is simple and easily allows people to publish websites quickly without sacrificing any quality or modern look & feel.
How will your company engage attendees at the upcoming NamesCon?:
We plan to exhibit and network throughout the event. We are particularly excited about reconnecting with customers who enrolled in Weebly Cloud at Namescon 2016 in January.
How has (or will) NamesCon helped your company achieve its goals?:
We work with many domain Registrars and New TLD Registries. This is a great chance to reconnect with these folks outside of attending an ICANN meeting :–)
What are your thoughts on the new TLDs?:
We are favorable toward New TLDs. We participated in the .CLOUD pioneer program and registered “weebly.cloud”
What are you most looking forward to at the upcoming conference?:
We are really excited about the attendance numbers. This seems to be the biggest Namescon yet — we are hoping to connect with a number of International based registrars — seems like there will be a number of large overseas registrars in attendance. We think that is a great sign!
Where can attendees find out more about your company, product or services while at NamesCon?:
Please visit www.weebly.com/hosts
If you have a company representative speaking at NamesCon, is there anything you can share about what to expect during your session or keynote?:
Chris Sheridan will not be speaking at the event but will be available at the always-rocking-Weebly-booth !!!
I have sometimes used Weebly. Weebly is definitely good. From what I have read, it is also the easiest to use among its peers. As with anything, there is also certainly room for improvement or tweak enhancements.
There is one problem, however, so hopefully someone with Weebly will see this.
The one problem I would mention is that the controls which appear on the left side of the screen are barely readable due to the developers deciding to impose some kind of “cool” extreme lack of contrast and barely visible font. Also, a second problem really in that the controls window keeps popping open when you don’t want it to if you move your mouse too far, and it’s very hard to avoid that and very annoying and time consuming. It would be better to simply include a control feature allowing that to be disabled, or make it less “hair-trigger” sensitive.
Regarding the UI, it seems and I know I’m far from alone in this realization that developers tend to assume that just because they may have the eyesight of Clark Kent and the Bionic Man, everyone else does too. So they assume everyone else will be fine with text that is *extremely* muted with very little contrast visibility against a black background. I’ve seen this over and over. People who think that way never seem to consider that not everyone is so fortunate, and that their super-power eyesight is part of what makes them able to be such successful developers to begin with. There is nothing “cool” whatsoever about doing that, only a problem for those who don’t have the same attributes. RegisterFly was doing the same thing for a while too – everyone remember RegisterFly (gulp)? I even saw someone addressing this very issue the other day in the reader comments somewhere else. I’ve also noticed this tendency in TheGrid, and in WordPress – it’s like a fad. Don’t get me wrong – I love the “cool” quality of black, but I also like being able to see the font on it really well, not with barely any contrast to it. Haven’t even tried SquareSpace or the other Weebly alternatives yet to see what they do except WP. At least in WordPress, you do have a setting with which you can change this to a degree (though more is needed) so that the controls and menu text is not so nearly invisible to anyone who is not like Superman.