I just spent the night building a website with Wix. It was nice. I told it I wanted a certain kind of website with certain pages & features like a forum & groups & poof I had one. What took me all night was I not only had to whip up some pages & blog posts, but I also had to whip up some forum & group categories & posts. Plus, I tweaked a whole lot of settings.
About the time I had it looking pretty good I dared to both check out the pricing & also Google it. Wix is not a software you can download like you can WordPress. It’s a site builder they only have on their site. So if you outgrow their free or so-called cheap plans you can’t just up & move it somewhere else like you can with WordPress.
Other people have asked about it & there aren’t many good reviews. But even if it was perfect & had zero bugs if you can’t back it up, download it & move it with you it’s worthless. Especially if you’ve got a bunch of pages, blog posts, groups posts & forum posts. So I deleted it before anybody got a chance to join it & add anything.
I’m not a programmer/coder…I don’t have the photographic memory for it. In 2003 I think I used MS Publisher or something which produced very basic html web pages. I uploaded maybe a handful of pages & the same of images that were in a folder. If I recall it didn’t work at first because I neglected to name the home page index.html. But I fixed it & my former boss’s site was live. I’m not sure who was more amazed – me or him?
Looking back now…man that was a boring site. No bells & whistles what-so-ever. Worst of all, every time he wanted to change something I had to download the page(s), edit the page(s) & reupload them again. Not long after my mom died I discovered discussion forums which require software & databases to run. I’ve been hooked on software & databases ever since.
When I first met WordPress I wasn’t much of a fan because it was just a blog. But then they added pages making them a website with either a blog or a news & announcements feature. Add a theme & some plugins & you could have any kind of site you want. That’s why, whether you realize it or not, so many websites on the net are powered by WordPress.
The best thing of all is there’s no downloading & uploading required. Hosts like SiteGround at worst will have a button you can click to install it & at best will install it for you. Other than creating email addresses, everything else is done through the “backend” from changing themes to adding plugins. You can update the software, themes & plugins with a click of a button. It’s easy to add pages & posts. Then the only thing you have to upload is multimedia content like images, videos & audio files. And you’ve got a WYSIWYG editor to do it with. It’s as simple as using MS Word or posting something on Facebook.
It’s the set up & tweaking the settings that’s time consuming. Especially when you’re teaching yourself as you go along. The more plugins you add the more-so this is. Plus, some plugins don’t get along with the software or another plugin. So, if you add too many you risk ending up buggy. Figuring out which plugin did it is time consuming as well.
