Wix! An Unstructured Website Builder
The most important difference between Wix and other website builders is that Wix is an unstructured editor.
But I've rated Wix 4 stars— why not a perfect 5 star score? Unfortunately Wix can feel chaotic and disorganized. It's blank canvas editor often creates more problems than it solves and the interface can overwhelm. But if you can overlook these challenges, you'll love Wix's flexibility and features.
The Editor Wix is a blank canvas. You can drag any element anywhere on a page— like how you might edit a Powerpoint presentation. If you take one thing away from this review, let it be this. Most website builders like Squarespace and Weebly let you drag elements— but only within a preset grid. Wix's blank canvas editor definitely offers more flexibility than these competitors, but in this section I'm going to explain why that flexibility might not be such a great thing. The upside to Wix's blank canvas editor is clear: it's freeing and flexible. There's no constraints— who wants constraints? But editing a website is not like editing an image in Photoshop or a presentation in Powerpoint— websites are structured documents and Wix's blank canvas editor often messes with the structure. For example, when I add more text to this page (below), the image below the text also moves down— handy, because I obviously don't want the text and image overlapping. What's less obvious is that the image doesn't retain the same distance from the footer— instead it's flushed up against the margin of the footer. These knock-on issues can feel like playing whack-a-mole: make one change and something else pops up to be fixed.
Elements If there's a word to describe Wix, it's freedom. Wix aims to give as many options as possible and then leave it to the user to choose between them. For example, there's a huge selection of elements to build your website— different navigation elements, menus, boxes, buttons and more:
The sheer amount of options occasionally weighs down Wix. Options are not always presented in a cohesive, easy to understand whole. Instead Wix occasionally feels bloated: features feel shoehorned into the design. For example, in the blog editor there's an option to turn off the sound that beeps when a new order from your ecommerce store happens. Why is that the place for that option?
Menus and small icons pop up from everywhere. There are often several menus for each element and it's seldom clear where to find options— especially for features in the Dashboard which occasionally fan out into pages and pages of menus.
Wix also provides features that support specific businesses (examples: hotels and restaurants). Here's a few of my highlights:
Restaurants — Wix includes restaurant menu elements, online delivery features and a reservations app (it lets customers make reservations from your website). It's a surprisingly flexible, niche feature set but it can also be tricky to get the hang of.
Music — Besides having the widest selection of audio players among website builders, Wix also lets you distribute music (like you would on Distrokid or CD Baby) and they provide custom audio analytics.
Bookings — You can offer appointments, classes and workshops that customers can book from your website. You can accept bookings from the Wix mobile app, automatically send email reminders about appointments and take payments.
Events — You can connect to a payment provider, sell tickets, create email invites and track a guest list.
Forums — Visitors can become members, join conversations, follow posts, upload videos, leave comments and more.
Art Store — You can sell digital images (commision free), connect to a print-on-demand service, brand images with a watermark and create digital licenses.
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