Is Designing a Website on Wix Cheating?

I had a client call me because they were happy that I specialized in designing websites on the Wix platform. The client found Wix to be very easy to setup their initial simple website, and now they wanted an expert Wix Designer to help with a redesign to make it more user-friendly while making it look more professional and polished. They said that one of the other website designers they approached said that “Wix was cheating!” and suggested alternative platforms. Ha! That's pretty funny.

I believe that when you find a tool that makes things easier, go for it! I am a long-time Website Designer, and I started on Wix many years back after they had changed from a Flash-based platform to HTML5. I was planning on building my client's website in Wordpress as I typically was using for many websites in addition to Shopify. I had a design created in Photoshop, and so I was going to work on customizing a Wordpress template to work with my design. My husband told me about Wix, mentioning that his friend built his band website on the platform and really liked it. So, I thought, what the heck, why not try it out? I was dreading having to battle Wordpress templates and coding and css to recreate my design, so I was excited to try something new. I then proceeded to build the homepage in an afternoon –Wix's drag-and-drop WYSIWYG* editor was amazing! Wordpress would have taken much, much longer (and lots of coding) to recreate the homepage design. Designing in Wix was like designing in a design program like Illustrator or Photoshop. I was blown away. I was immediately hooked. It did cross my mind: "This is too easy." But the fact that Wix is fairly easy to use is an amazing thing! In Wix, I was able to really play more with the design, having full control over elements placed on the page – I could design any graphics I needed and drop them in as PNGs or JPGS, and add any images desired, too. It really was like designing in Adobe Illustrator. Very different than any website editing platform I'd seen before. I was even more impressed by the Mobile Editor, which allowed me to shuffle, resize, and hide or place the desktop items wherever I wanted in a mobile vertical layout. No more fussing with the rigid “responsive” Wordpress templates, which flowed into a mobile format without much control of size, placement, or order unless you were a wiz at css coding. In Wix, I now had full control over the mobile website elements so I could design for the best user experience. I loved it.

When I built my first Wix websites for clientsabout 7 years ago, Wix was still missing a few key features such as customizable page URLs, and other SEO functionality, however, Wix has never stopped improving the platform. They added all the essential SEO features soon after I designed my first Wix website, and they continue to regularly add lots of other great functionality to their platform. Wix is quickly becoming a new standard website platform in 2021 going into 2022. Both small and Large companies are finding that Wix is a great platform for easy maintenance and updates for their company websites. Many stores are starting to offer ecommerce through Wix as well. More and more website designers and graphic designers are discovering Wix everyday. While there is still a residual snobbish attitude in the website developer world regarding Wix, it is slowly winning people over – once you try it, you'll understand why it's amazing. No more battling with css and code to get those little design elements “just right.” No more designing a website in Photoshop only to compromise your design when trying to recreate it in a Wordpress template. No more frustrated clients who are afraid to even touch their website as it's so hard to edit. Wix really has changed the website design and editing platform game.

Want to see the wide range of website design styles Wix websites can have? View some of the Best Wix Websites » These are some of the best Wix websites that show that every Wix website can be unique and stunning - you're not confined to templates! In fact, whatever template you start out with can be completely changed from header to footer.

Now, I will say that there is a learning curve on Wix, the more you work in it, the more you figure out the best ways to do things in the design and functionality. Website Designers and Graphic Designers like myself pickup the platform easily as we're used to design programs and understand website design, and can adapt to Wix's easy to use tools and editor. If you're not a designer, it's often difficult to build a Wix website from start to finish and be happy with it, but any non-designer can be easily trained on editing their own website once it's built by a Wix expert. I train all my clients on how to edit their websites so they can keep them updated easily and just come back to me if they have new design or functionality needs. Wix also offers Velo Code, which allows you to code pages with elements such as dynamic repeater items that pull data from a store or blog. The sky is the limit with Velo Code on Wix, and it opens the doors to a lot more customization of a Wix website when needed.

So, is using Wix to build a website cheating?

No way. If you find a tool that saves time and creates a better end product, go with it!

I hope that other platforms will be inspired by Wix's easy to use editor and start improving their own platforms to have drag-and-drop WYSIWG editors so that everyone can easily edit their website. No one should have to go through the pain and time-suck of a hacked Wordpress site or conflicting plugins. Wix is a secure, easy-to-use platform that works great across all devices. It is perfect for 90% of my client needs! I do still work in other platforms such as Wordpress and Shopify when needed (Shopify is quite robust with custom ecommerce features, whereas Wix is just starting to come into it's own with ecommerce and still has some limitations), but most of my clients are now on Wix and they don't look back.

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Happy Wixing!

*WYSIWG: What you see is what you get.