Nowadays, almost everyone has a website. If you do not wish to miss out, but are somehow clueless where and how to get started, services such as Wix are a huge help towards the right direction. Wix is a powerful and easy to use free website builder that enables its users to launch their ideas or businesses online with as minimal effort as possible but still leaving room for a ton of customization. Wix also by default creates a mobile site version of your website, making compatibility with smaller screen devices a breeze. The best thing about Wix? It allows anyone to build and launch a professional website for free, inclusive of everything including web hosting. Here we take a deeper look into Wix and see if it is actually worth your hard-earned cash and time.
Getting Started
To start using Wix, users first need to sign-up using their email, Facebook or Google credentials. Upon doing so, users are asked what type of website they are looking to launch, with categories ranging from business, music, entertainment, online store, and personal to choose from. Users are then free to choose the website template to use for their website, with lots of free options available. After choosing your preferred design, you can then choose to edit the template using the service’s Wix Website Editor, and you’re pretty much good to go.
If you feel that the free subscription plan available upon sign-up is not enough for you, you have a variety of premium subscription options with Wix. The most basic option is the Connect Domain tier, which is pegged at $4.08/month and comes with 1GB of bandwidth and 500MB of storage space. The next available option is the Combo tier, which at $8.25/month offers 2GB of bandwidth and 3Gb of storage. It also comes with a free domain for 1 year and displays no Wix ads. For entrepreneurs and freelancers, they have the Unlimited tier which at $12.42/month comes with unlimited bandwidth and 10GB of storage space. Their most expensive offering, dubbed eCommerce tier, is priced at $16.17/month and has online store capabilities. All except the Connect Domain tier comes with a $75 Google Adwords voucher.
Interface
Wix’s website-building interface, similar to other popular offerings today such as Weebly and Squarespace, offers a very clear and intuitive user experience. A control bar is always present at the top of the page, and it is what you use to navigate, perform search within pages, undo/redo changes, set rulers and guides, and of course, to save or launch your website. Along the left-side rail are edit controls for pages, design, items you can add, and overall site settings.
Wix offers a lot of customization options to building your site. Several page types are available to users as starting points, with newly created pages maintaining your chosen theme. Editing anything just requires users to point and click. Pretty neat and straightforward, especially for those who hate tinkering through settings and long lines of code.
Add-on 3rd party web services such as PayPal, Skype and most social networks are available for integration on Wix. A dedicated app store is even dedicated to let you load customizations directly to your website, everything from form builders to social network feeds. A nifty feature that I very much appreciate in Wx is the Feedback feature, which lets users send a short link, and a friend or colleague can comment on specific spots on your site. You’ll even get an email notification letting you know that comments have been submitted. Site History is another handy Wix feature that lets you revert your site back to the way it was before you bungled it up.
Launching Your Site
Finally, publishing your website in Wix is very clear and simple. Click on the Publish button and users are given choices for allowing search engine crawlers to index your site and to enable an optimized mobile view of the site. Once you’ve made those choices, vola! You get the link for the page you published so you can see it as anyone on the Web would.
Final Thoughts
After tinkering with Wix, and trying to create a test website myself, I can definitely say that Wix is a very simple yet powerful tool for literally anyone to launch the website of their dreams in just a matter of seconds. Customization options are plentiful in Wix, which means you are not left with a very generic website template that 1,000 other users are using as well. The free tier is a very good way to try out the service and get a feel of what they can offer, and the many upgrade options are very welcome especially those who are sensitive about costs. All in all, Wix is a great way to create your web presence in this day and age when anything and everything is on the world wide web.
Wix is awful for SEO. If you care about traffic from Google, don’t use it.
I think Wix serves a purpose by letting small business owners manage their websites. There are folks who enjoy managing their website with Wix. However, the number one reason why most small businesses fail is because owners tend to get consumed by things they are not good at. A business owner who want to manage their website will also have to manage the online marketing, social media and bunch or other things to make the whole thing work. Is that really the best use of their time or they should be focused on running their business?
I have met business owners who feel proud that they can manage their own website but fail to recognize downside of spending their time managing a website and not being able to focus on their business.
Key to success in business is to do what you do best and surround yourself with people who are good at what they do.