What about Wix? It's time we focused on creative, design, content and strategic marketing—not co
Wix.com Ltd. (Nasdaq: Wix) has reached a significant milestone, surpassing more than 100 million registered users. Entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, artists and businesses around the world are now using the Wix platform for website design, brand management and operations. The company has doubled its registered user base in the past two and a half years, with the United States being one of its fastest growing markets.
About Wix.com
Wix.com is a leading cloud-based web development platform with more than 100 million registered users worldwide. Wix was founded on the belief that the Internet should be accessible to everyone to develop, create and contribute. Through free and premium subscriptions, Wix empowers millions of businesses, organizations, professionals and individuals to take their businesses, brands and workflow online. Wix ADI, the Wix Editor and a highly curated App Market enable users to build and manage a fully integrated and dynamic digital presence. Wix's headquarters are in Tel Aviv with offices in Be'er Sheva, San Francisco, New York, Miami, Berlin, Vilnius and Dnepropetrovsk.
I was skeptical like everyone else. Templates? "Build your own beautiful website on Wix for free". What was going on? How can a client who knows very little about marketing communication, photography, illustration, design, typography and certainly nothing about coding and programming, build their own website?
The bottom line is, you probably can't. At least not anything that's beautiful, well structured, creative, and crafted for business success. Or, maybe you can do that, but it will take you a ton of time. That said, give it a shot. See what you can do.
Here's what I learned we can do.
We can learn the Wix interface ourselves—the ins and outs, the nuances, its strength and weaknesses. We can design a site without being locked into their templates, virtually doing anything we want. We can implement really impressive imagery throughout the site. We can use our creative and communication skills to craft content. We can inject SEO onto the site and track site visitors. We know the available apps and features and vet their effectiveness. How did we learn to do this? By building over 25 Wix sites in 12 months. By becoming a Wix Pro provider with access to quick-response tech support, and establishing a comfort level within the cloud-based framework this web development tool offers.
Does it do everything that a PhP/CSS/Javascript site can do? No. HTML code can be used, but in an iFrame, so it doesn't adjust to a mobile device with certain APIs, for example. It also doesn't give you access to the code to be able to host independently of the Wix servers. But rather than focus on what it can't do, let's appreciate what it can do, for your small- to mid-sized business. It allows a design firm, like Design Design, to build you a site with a relative ease compared to the hand-coded, custom sites of the past. It allows clients to make their own content revisions, even more easily than WordPress since the user-interface is more visually interactive and engaging.
Maybe more importantly, it allows Design Design to design, build, launch and manage your site for a lot less money than even 5 years ago. And every day, Wix is adding apps and functionality across the board. Although, with more functionality and capability, the complexity increases. We devote about 10-15 hours per week in building, managing and researching features and functionality of what a Wix site can do so that we can continue to develop amazing websites combined with design and marketing strengths.
More emphasis on where you want to travel, and less on making the car's engine work.
