Let’s talk about Wix, baby

As I sat down with excitement to my latest website build project, a little, nagging thought floated in my left ear, across my mind, then out the other side:

“Why should people pay me to build them a site, when they can do it themselves on Wix?”

This was followed by: “surely Wix makes its money somehow”, which then started off a rather unplanned research mission into what Wix offers, with the hope to verify my suspicion that it can’t be all that, otherwise people like me would have gone out of business long ago.

Here’s what I found:

1.Wix says it’s free, but it isn’t

If you rummage through their site for long enough, you’ll eventually find their pricing page which interestingly enough doesn’t say what their “free” solutions include, but gives enough info about the “premium” options to deduct that:

• Your free Wix site will be pumped full of their ads
• You won’t be able to hook up your own domain
• It won’t be terribly fast, though luckily they throttle your storage so at least you can’t overload the poor wee thing

2.You can’t really customise a Wix site

I actually discovered this when a friend asked me to “fix” a site they’d built on Wix and foolishly I’d said “oh yep, should just need a little CSS”. Wix will not give you access to the code – funnily enough that’s one of their selling points – so either you embrace all of the good and bad things included in the template they provide you, or, well, there is no or. Just deal with it (who needs continuous enhancement + optimisation anyway??).

3.Scrolling Dots

Hot from the press (aka Wix’s “features” page): Scrolling markers that appear on your site (while on mobile devices) will no longer stack and cover up your beautiful images. This isn’t particularly useful info, I know, I just put it here because I thought it was funny that this constitutes a “feature”.

Anyhow, now that I’ve suitably sated my curiosity and validated the worth of what I’m doing here, I’ll be on my merry way. Wix sure seem to be doing well since their inception 11 years ago, but I’m comfortable that their DIY solutions won’t be taking over the web any time soon.