Shame on you...Weebly Education

[PVUSDCTE]

So Weebly Education is shutting down, and leaving hundreds of thousands of students who had portfolios on their platform, without their work and not allowing teachers to do outreach and contact students to convert their academic portfolios to a new site... Ok, but then WHY are you still selling the product to programs despite eliminating all student portfolios 

I've researched all the non-Weebly portfolio programs, some are good some are poor, but the biggest win I found was bulbapp.com.My firm manages  over 15 different district portfolio programs, in some cases we are rebuilding alumni on the new Bulbapp.com so students are still connected to their porftolios post-secondary, in others we are simply teaching students about how to transition platforms when one becomes obsolete.  Andrew J. Cary, Senior Vice President, has been dilligently working with his team to help me 'save' the student work and figure out how to not loose all the ePortfolios students have built (here is his information andrew at bulbapp dot com | 443.831.7477).  I tried to meet with Weebly, as a firm that works with student ePortfolios world-wide, but only got customer service, repeating exactly the press release that was sent.

I've used Weebly Ed over 10 years, have been a loyal user,  and have students that have honestly updated their portfolios their entire life that will loose their ENTIRE body of work.  With student privacy laws, I understand the need to be COPPA complient, but effective the day you made the announcement, YOU ARE STILL SELLING WEEBLY EDUCATION,  AND not having a viable transition program in the year when the announcement was made is poor business practices. Weebly onboarded new clients during the pandemic across the US in this Weebly Education platform and now is dropping the program, got their pandemic money from schools and ran. 

That said, I just wanted to post that my experience with bulbapp.com thus far, in working to transition my district and school clients and preserve the student work, have been responsive, fiscally equitable and knowledgable about the unique needs and privacy needs of schools. 

Shame on you Square/ Weebly for waiting til the summer of a pandemic to make this decision, after taking district money through the pandemic,  shame on you for still selling the product to unsuspecting districts and not pulling Weebly Ed when you made the announcement and shame on you for not having partners or a process in place.  You had a 'cradle to grave' pipeline of hundreds of thousands of students that learned web design and WERE loyal to your product  because they used it in schools. Shame on you for not working with educators and firms that specialize in this work to help roll over student work.  In some cases those portfolios were what helped students showcase to college, careers, and are their personal yearbook of academic accomplishments.

[Bernadette3]

Thank you for your feedback. I can understand your frustration, and will make sure to forward this to the product teams.

You can find additional details about the upcoming August 2022 change here. 

Update 9-14-21 

We received confirmation from support that the information in the link I posted previously still applies. We are actively working to establish a partnership with a third party provider -- the goal being to provide teachers with a similar experience for managing student sites in the future. We will have more information on this in a few weeks.

[PaulMathews]

@PVUSDCTE Agree that this move by Square is atrocious but not entirely unexpected. Since the acquisition of Weebly by Square three years ago, all development on the Weebly platform has ceased. The app store no longer accepts new developer apps for the platform. Square communications about the future of Weebly are non-existent. As a professional web designer/developer, I've used many web platforms and am quite familiar with this sort of behavior. Responsible companies will attempt to provide a migration path to other platforms, however, more often than not, little to no effort will be made to assist platform subscribers prior to the wind down of the platform. That's almost certainly the path that Square will take with Weebly (they've slowly but silently set Weebly on a path to obsolescence so they're clearly not going to suddenly become helpful to Weebly subscribers prior to the "Oh by the way, we're shutting down Weebly" notice).

While the entire Weebly platform is almost certainly destined for the same fate as Weebly for Education, the timeline for its termination will necessarily have to be somewhat more protracted given the significant number of paid subscribers. The fact that Weebly continues to be offered as an active website building platform without comment from Square is fairly outrageous but such is the nature of these type of platforms. I've removed Weebly as a website hosting/cms platform choice for my clients and will, in the coming months, be actively migrating my larger, more complex client sites away from Weebly.

[PVUSDCTE]

" I've removed Weebly as a website hosting/cms platform choice for my clients and will, in the coming months, be actively migrating my larger, more complex client sites away from Weebly."

I have a feeling I will need to do the same, both for my District and Commercial/ Small Business clients as well, which saddens me, but I work with platforms/companies that care about the end user, and functionality for ease and use, which Weebly has been superior with prior to the Square buyout.  I hope your predictions are wrong Paul, yet am beginning to also see the writing on the wall. I had touted Weebly for years as a friend to small businesses, and a way to get companies online with a modicum of technology skills.  I forsee this merger eliminating that narrative.  The Square site builder is far less intuitive and creative than Weebly, and not as versatile. 

The fact they are still selling Weebly Ed to unsuspecting clients adds an additional nail in the coffin of this platform in my use as well, of all the demographics to take advantage of post pandemic, academic institutions wouldn't have been my first choice.  I have one client who wants to go to the press, as they will end up forfeiting over $2000 in student licenses they paid for for this upcoming year.  Sad.

[PaulMathews]

@PVUSDCTE Yes, this is very unfortunate but, as I say, I've seen this type of "platform death march" process before and Square is checking off all the boxes for the Weebly platform to ultimately be wound down at some point in the future (no updates to the Weebly site builder in over three years, no new apps allowed in the Weebly app store, a substantial degrading of live Weebly support, no communications whatsoever from Square regarding a roadmap forward for the odd mix of the completely unrelated Weebly and Square site builders).

Remember, Square has their own platform that includes their somewhat limited site editor that fully incorporates the Square ecommerce solutions. Square is an ecommerce solution provider and online sellers can fairly easily incorporate Square as a payment processor in most online ecommerce site builders (similar to the manner that you can easily incorporate Stripe and PayPal as a payment processor in pretty much any ecommerce site building tool).

Square's (sole) priority is to upgrade their website builder so that it becomes a first-choice solution for Square's ecommerce tools (versus online sellers using other website tools like Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, BigCommerce, etc. to build their shops). Accordingly, it makes little sense for Square to run its own ecommerce-focused website builder along with the completely unrelated but considerably more powerful Weebly website builder (particularly since Weebly sites can still support ecommerce functionality).

When Square acquired Weebly, I presumed that they wanted to leverage the considerably more powerful Weebly site builder for their ecommerce website builder ambitions (their own site editor at the time was a fairly barebones affair). I was somewhat surprised that they instead decided to run both editors concurrently but shift all of their development efforts to the Square platform while halting all work on Weebly. Presumably, there are parts of Weebly's infrastructure that were of interest to Square and have since been redeployed to Square. The remainder of Weebly has been left in stasis and that's why I have complete confidence that Square will at some future point make a similar end-of-life announcement for the Weebly website building platform as it recently did with the Weebly for Education component. That being said, I think Square's POS solutions are quite exceptional and I have no problem recommending them. But I'm obviously warning clients and any prospects who inquire about Square/Weebly site building to steer clear of both of those platforms. Square has by its actions abandoned Weebly and I think it is only prudent to follow their lead (it's fairly informative that no-one from Square has responded to Community posts that inquire about what it going on with Weebly and there have been no formal communications about this at all).