Website Building For Dummies

Last term, I found myself taking a history course in UBC with students of various majoring backgrounds. When I learned that one of our term projects called for showcasing our content on a website, I grumbled inside. I foresaw myself spending hours just trying to make the aesthetics of the website convey the already prepared content. Interestingly, during my internal debate between using Wordpress or Blogspot, I found a prevailing amount of students in the room using a site-builder called “Wix“.

Wix is a free website-builder. The beauty of Wix is that it requires no programming. Users like me, who have very little website-building background, do not need any hard skills to build an aesthetically appealing website. The created website is very intuitive – drag and drop, click and type, insert and delete – right on the website layout. As well, it is search-engine friendly.

Wix is applicable to businesses who are looking into starting or updating their websites. For a monthly fee, Wix offers businesses (or individuals) a unique domain, unlimited bandwidth, Google Analytics site stats, hosting, extra storage, Wix support and no ads.

I think Wix can be a great tool for businesses starting to look into how they want to establish their online presence. Because of its user-friendliness, anyone can change/update it. This eliminates the scary and inflexible reliance of that one single person in the company. The Wix support team also helps by directing users to other appropriate website support functions such as more specialized widgets or email support not offered on Wix. Furthermore, Wix users can hire from a list of available freelance designers for even more customization.

The downside of using Wix may include the difficulty of potentially moving the website off the Wix hosting site and being limited to what is currently allowed to function on the Wix websites (such as establishing a more complex E-business structure). Nonetheless, for companies who have a bit of website-envy, no staff with the hard skills and a little bit of marketing budget to splurge, Wix may be the right solution.