"I am going to tell a phenomenally successful company what they are doing wrong"

Standard fare for the Hacker News crowd, of course, but complaining about a file extension? If you're even aware of that stuff then you're clearly not in Weebly's target market.

“If you're even aware of that stuff then you're clearly not in Weebly's target market.”

How do you know that? How does that follow from what I wrote?

Maybe I am a web designer, or maybe I am a web-publishing consultant looking for good services to recommend to people asking about something affordable.

If Weebly cannot entice me enough to get me past their sign-up form, then I will not try their offering and I will not be able to recommend it to others either.

As for “complaining about a file extension”, see alanh’s comment.

I had not heard of Weebly before, either. Usually I would check out their web site like you did to evaluate it and I bet I would have had a similar reaction.

But lately I've decided to evaluate new products by downloading their mobile app, because I think that's how more and more people are being introduced to products and services.

If I had known before embarking that it was a blogging service I definitely wouldn't have done it this way. When I think blogs, I think of the past, I think of desktop browsers, and I definitely I don't think of mobile.

So, I downloaded their iphone app. Probably less than two minutes later I had a blog running on their site with its first post.

Why is showing the file extension a bad thing? Why do you care if you see ".php"?

It’s a good question.

It is best practice to have well-thought-out URLs that do not have extensions. The reasons include:

- If your site’s back-end technology changes, all those URLs will either break, or need redirected, or be specially handled with have extra cruft forever.

- It takes longer to type and is harder to remember.

- It makes your technology obvious instead of receding into the background.

- It limits your ability to make awesome URLs, because now your URLs are dictated by how you name and organize your server-side scripts. (URLs are a user interface, just like GUIs, though they don’t get as much attention! http://alanhogan.com/url-as-ui)

- There is no benefit to outweigh the above negatives.

These are excellent points. A few of them I would have a small bit of disagreement over the perceived negativity, but they are too small to bother with. I would say it's more like there is not enough benefit to outweigh the perceived, possible, and/or actual negatives. But that seems a silly statement to make in of itself.

I think it revolves what your website actually is and how deeply invested you are in your URLs.

These are definitely a hacker's complaints. Your daughter's piano teacher won't give a shit, and he'll love that it's free.

Perhaps, but that doesn’t make it the right choice.

Here you go - the difference between the free and pro account: http://kb.weebly.com/faq-pro.html