5 Reasons Why I'm Switching to WiX

Why am I switching everything to WiX for in-house website building? Short answer: it’s a genuine pleasure to use.

Generally speaking, when you’re a regular person like me (business owner/marketing professional/parent) in other words, not a programmer or web developer, working on – and creating websites from scratch – for the past 15 years has not been an enjoyable part of what I do.

Then WiX came along. I'll tell you all about it in a just a moment.

But first: let's talk about the elephant in the room when it comes to websites.

Here's Why People Settle For Websites They Don't Actually Like:

Historically, websites have been a pain -- they can take a long time to make, can be rather complicated to maintain, and quite often you can end up with a website you’re only lukewarm about, that is just okay. (And yes, in case you’re wondering, the biggest ones I worked on and am calling out right now were Wordpress sites. There. I said it!)

'Lukewarm websites' are where the story ends for most people.

This may be because the websites are inefficient overall, not-quite (or not at all)-what-they-want-design-wise, or, they give up on them because they don't have the technical knowledge needed to maintain them. More coding and confusing tech jargon than I ever signed up for, thank you very much!

Many people do not love their web presence, and worse, their web presence does not love them back. And here's why that's a problem.

Website content gets outdated quickly -- and for some people, updating their site is such a pain that they would rather just leave it out of date! Alternatively, you need to pay someone to make every little change for you.

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These problems happen for a very simple reason:

Folks typically do not do the necessary personal soul-searching and branding development for their business, in order to build a hard-working website that will serve all their marketing needs and support their long-range and evolving business goals.

They picked a cute template somewhere, slapped a logo on it, and called it a day. Some highly-motivated ladies might have done a little customizing of the looks of it, but, just as many do not.

It's simply not enough to get you where you want to go.

I know this because I did the same thing, more than once. And I have seen it in my clients’ cases many times over the years.

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A Quick Backstory:

During my marketing career, I’ve built and maintained many websites over the past 2 decades, both for the companies I’ve worked for and for my own projects.

I’ve worked on various platforms ranging from rudimentary drag-and-drop to the more powerful and complex. I’ve had my creativity suffocated because the things I was envisioning just weren’t possible... yet.

Despite being very comfortable in an online environment and having put in my 10 thousand hours, I can sum up all those years of websites in two sentiments:

1. Managing websites = frustration. Once they were built, they were needlessly complicated on the tech side (and often infuriating);

2. Creativity = capped. My vision always seemed to fall outside of what the technology could do, or at least, what I could do with it knowing very basic HTML code.

...Then I Found WiX

WiX is an all-in-one website builder tool that I’ve taught myself to use quickly and efficiently over hundreds of hours. By 'all-in-one', I mean that it combines the platform to build the site itself, the design interface, and the added business functions one might need their website to do for them.

The fact that they also sell domain names and offer web hosting just makes my life easier, so all the “website stuff” is centralized and way easier to manage. (Nothing like what it was 10 years ago!)

You can take a template as a skeleton and completely overhaul it to suit your needs by changing colors, fonts, adding or taking away creative elements.

It’s not a complicated system to use, once you get the hang of it (but it does have a learning curve).

This alone is a game-changer.

I’m not being paid to say this -- just the simple truth based on my experience.

So WiX is now my preferred tool of choice. I deem WiX to be in a league of its own not only for building new sites, but also for the ease of updating them, and in adding advanced functionality from the app store.

Why I’m Done With Wordpress

With Wordpress, adding 3rd party plugins was, for me, usually hit-or-miss (these are the tools you typically add to have more interactive functions on an otherwise static website).

They are made by independent programmers and may or may not work well for your particular site, or your particular business needs.

For me, they often looked all wrong, and only partially did what I needed them to do. The sites needed constant app updates and security updates. Managing the sites and their numerous plugins was a very fussy, time-consuming process overall.

I also experienced site crashes because the plugins stopped working, or one day suddenly became incompatible with each other.

I have had my Wordpress sites hacked by bots and scammers, despite paying extra for all kinds of security features.

A treasured personal project site of mine was a victim of what’s called a “PHP injection” (this is where all the links on my pages were 'hijacked' to steal traffic and send my visitors to random foreign-language websites that sold shoes, guns or porn).

That was the final straw for me.

So far with WiX, these kinds of headaches are 100% a thing of the past. I say this with a huge sigh of relief. This is not the kind of crap I need in my life!!

Here Are The Top 5 Reasons I’m Switching To WiX:

1. They’ve got a huge range of really good-looking 100% customizable templates that cater to different businesses (not just creatives). For me specifically, I can do blogging on WiX, which is a baseline need.

2. We can make a gorgeous site without needing any code or advanced technical skills, with user-friendly drag-and-drop editing. Customizing all the visual elements took some finagling at first, but is totally learnable, and is what I teach all my clients to do themselves.

3. There are tons of free apps available (called WiX Business Solutions) to bring added functionality to your site, and 80+ of them are made by WiX themselves so you’re not running into the same issues noted above with Wordpress.

4. You can make an online store and sell physical and/or digital merchandise, accept payments, add a booking feature that marries with your calendar, etc. It doesn't matter what template you choose, you can add a store, or appointment bookings, or whatever to any template. These are all things I have needed and could not do before -- the possibilities are vast and exciting.

5. When I’m not able to do my own professional photography, there are a ton of beautiful royalty-free photos to choose from in the WiX Media Library, as well as access to specially-discounted Shutterstock images, and yet another Unsplash library of images. This solves 100% of my visual needs.

So there you have it.

When people started hearing about my being able to "do websites" (independent from my day job), word started to spread. After repeating the process several times with the aspiring women entrepreneurs in my circle, I created systems and ways to streamline the entire journey of doing the necessary work BEFORE creating a website: fleshing out the actual ideas; the brand development and business vision (who/why/what is this thing and where is it going?) and the marketing plan (how are we going to get there?).

The website, then, is the final piece -- the vehicle we build that enables you to carry out these plans.

If this sounds like something you need some help with, then check out the ways we can work together above!

P.S. Here's my very first Instagram carousel I made way back when!

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