Wix is widely considered as one of the
better and more popular of the free website builders, with a reputation built
on creating stunning websites with no coding knowledge.
Free Website Builders: Wix
There are hundreds of designer-made
templates on offer, with free reign given to the user to change the colors,
text, backgrounds and upload pics using the easy-to-navigate user interface and
drag-and-drop features.
On the whole, Wix is fairly good; designers,
photographers, restaurants and small businesses will no doubt be very enamored
with the pretty aspects that Wix has to offer, especially as there’s no
developer overhead to worry about. However, you’ll find that as you delve
deeper into the core functions of Wix, there comes with it a substantial
learning curve that will eventually, more than likely, put the casual user off.
For those of you who have used Wix in the
past and appreciated its Flash website building powers, the new look and design
of Wix will certainly be right your street. While Flash may have gone or is
going the way of the Dodo, Wix has since redefined itself into an
HTML5/JavaScript site builder and in doing so has managed to stay in the
competition.
Wix
is fairly good; designers, photographers, restaurants and small businesses will
no doubt be very enamored with the pretty aspects that Wix has to offer,
especially as there’s no developer overhead to worry about
When signing up for a free account, you're
offered a selection of categories to choose from: Business & Services,
Music, Entertainment, Online Shop, Photography, Personal and so on. Within each
of these categories are numerous templates, which do a decent job of reflecting
most of the popular sites that the majority of users are likely to be creating.
After making your choice, you're then asked which of the free template designs
you would like out of the many that are available for that category.
This is where Wix shines, as the choices
are vast and within a few minutes you could easily have a snazzy-looking site
or, if you’re feeling a little braver, then you could always opt for a blank
template and begin the design process yourself. The overall experience is aided
by the reasonably good help system, which can either be viewed as a video at
the start of a web page creation or is built directly into the user interface
as you navigate through the various functions of the building process. It’s
quite intuitive and, to be fair, very useful, but there are occasions where you
can become a little lost among the many choices you have available.
When
signing up for a free account, you're offered a selection of categories to
choose from: Business & Services, Music, Entertainment, Online Shop,
Photography, Personal and so on.
Unfortunately, there are a few issues with
Wix, which may deter the average user. For starters, there’s the Wix
advertising that appears as a permanent bar along the bottom of the screen and
as a smaller logo in the top right. Although they won’t generally cause too
much of a problem on the average site, there will be instances where the
advertising can ruin the aesthetics of a well-designed site. To remove the Wix
advertising, you’ll have to go for the paid version which can range from $10.32
to $18.78 per month.
The
Wix editor isn’t too bad. Functional and effective
Secondly, once you’ve chosen your theme or
template, there’s no going back unless you delete the site from within the My
Account settings page. It’s seems a little odd that a company that goes to such
lengths to make a web design suite doesn’t employ a function to switch between
templates while keeping the core content.
However, despite these couple of bugbears,
Wix is a very good and straightforward free website builder. There’s plenty of
support for social media and a collection of Wix apps to add to your site, but
if you require more depth and coding access, look elsewhere.
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Details
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Price: free
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Manufacturer: Wix
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Website: www.wix.com
Scores:
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Quality: 7/10
·
Value: 8/10
·
Overall: 8/10
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