Why Wix?
Breaking my Wordpress Habit
Don't get me wrong – I'd been using Wordpress for years and had become pretty competent on the platform. I had become a big fan of Elementor, which is one of the leading editor front ends used widely to build Wordpress sites today. And therein was the problem: on Wordpress, you start off with an inherently unintuitive platform and you are then continually bolting things onto your site – first a fancy editor to build it, then another plug-in to manage SEO and, before you know where you are, things have become ridiculously complex and, if the person building your site has used any of the premium versions of these plug-ins (which they often will), you have also lost the ability to make minor edits and mods to your site yourself...unless you want to buy a license.
I have lots of stories about people who have lost control of their site for some reason. Some have been deliberately hacked, but most couldn't maintain their installation and one day the site just failed...and at that point it can be hard to recover.
And beyond those dire stories, there are 10X more people who reach out to me to help them change the copyright footer at the bottom of their site, or something similarly mundane. They're asking me to do things that they shouldn't need help with...but Wordpress is more complicated than it first seems. I ran into to someone recently who objected to using Wix, as it's a little more expensive than a Wordpress hosted site at a cheap host, so I looked at their web site and it was completely non-functional. They later mentioned that the person who set it up and disappeared. Don't be that person.
On top of all that, Wordpress is not the most secure web hosting solution out-of-the-box. Making it secure will require that you're an expert in these things – you only need to google for "How do I make my Wordpress site more secure" and you'll see what I mean. Now this is no big deal for me, but for the average person, it's too much. You need to keep your Wordpress site safe, and those who have learned this lesson the hard way, contract someone to do it for them. Unfortunately most people don't want to do that...so they get in trouble. Job security for Wordpress developers but bad news for business owners.
I have been developing websites for about 25 years – I bought my first domain in the mid 90's, when the internet was still quite young. I set up a site to share photos with my family, who we had left behind in the UK when my wife and I moved to California.
In 2020 I started doing freelance web development work. The first client I engaged with was working in Wix already, and wasn't completely happy with his design. I started to try to talk him into switching to Wordpress but he persuaded me to at least give Wix a once over. I agreed...and that was the beginning of the end for Wordpress for me. You can check out Wix by clicking here.
Over that time, I've used a vast range of page creation tools, including developing many sites on Wordpress, which has grown to be the biggest creation platform in the world today.
Wix is Powerful...Yet Simple to Maintain
With Wix, everything you need is built in. The editor is built-in (there is a choice between two different editors actually). SEO is built-in. Databases are built in. Forms are built in. Blogging is built-in. Arranging events is built in. Video is built-in. eCommerce is an add-on but it's not expensive and it's highly integrated. And if you find something that isn't built in, an expert can add it for you, as the Wix platform has a highly advance coding capability built-in too.
I was a "beginner" programmer when I started freelancing but I am now a certified Wix Velo coder and include some javascript on every site I produce. Sometimes to add visual bells & whistles, sometimes to push data gathered by the site to other places in the cloud, so you don't have to re-enter information elsewhere. This is an example of making your web site work harder.
Editing text on the site is as easy as clicking it and typing...then you press publish and your change is live. If you click on the footer of your site, when you need to change the copyright date, it'll be live on every page in seconds. In Wordpress, most people can't even find the right place to find this widget to change.
That's not to say that Wix is easy to learn...it is a very powerful tool that offers a unique set of layout tools, databases and programming. But when the site is yours, you will only need the most superficial understanding of those things - your developer (hopefully me) will set all that up and you will then be in maintenance mode. You will be in control.
And your site will look good on every device your site visitors are using - be it a PC or an iPhone...as Wix takes care of all that for you. This is especially true of the new Editor X engine, used on this site, which, though a little more expensive to run, allows me to create the most beautiful sites that scale to different device sizes flawlessly.
Check out some of the sites that I have developed by clicking the relevant button below. All my clients have been very happy with what I have delivered - if you're interested in working with me next, contact me with the link below.