Building a website is slowly turning to a necessity instead of just an edge to have over your competitors. Many businesses have realized this, and they often find themselves searching for maximum and efficient aid possible. There are many services for secure website making solutions for such clients. Generally, building a website is an expensive affair. This makes it more important to understand thoroughly the services such solution providers have to offer, asses them, and then make an informative decision. For building a website, you also require to invest in a hosting server. The website is designed to adhere to the needs of customers, as well as web crawlers for getting the maximum benefit from it. There are several hidden or indirect costs involved with running a website, such as maintenance charges.
Here is where Wix comes up as a solution to address these problems. Wix is easy to use by anyone to create the most efficient website for their requirements.
As an informed customer, you should first understand what exactly they have to offer and when you will need external help creating your Wix website. Using one of Wix’s premium plans, coupled with some initial help in setting up or designing your Wix website, can be a smart and extremely cost-effective solution for many small businesses.
Wix is a website hosting platform where you can make your website without much help, generally speaking. It was started for students and designers to help them with making their online portfolios and websites. It made it possible for people without technical knowledge to create their website. It has its servers where the users can purchase a domain or host it for free. It has a drag and drops tool builder, which includes various functions like Title of the pages, Feature and blog images, Link section, Page breadcrumbs, Call-to-action, Payment gateway, Graphics, Navigation options and much more. It also has an option to add functionalities like Social media plugins, E-commerce plugins, Contact form plugins, Email marketing, Online marketing plugins, and other third-party plugins for SEO benefits. The SEO plugins would only be available in the paid version of the website, whereas other primary drag and drop options and plugins are available on the free website too. In the free website, ‘.WIX.COM.,’ appears with the name of the website so that people know it was created with the Wix platform, but it can be removed in case of fraudulent activities and malpractices.
Now that we have a basic understanding of how Wix functions, we should study the various aspects of this service, get a better understanding of its scope and when exactly you need help with Wix website design.
Following are a few pointers that you need to keep in mind to make this determination:
1. Not able to use the Drag and Drop functionality:
Wix believes it is one of the easiest ways to make a website for anyone coming from any field, which it is. In its initial stages, Wix was considered to be the first website builder to introduce drag and drop option for the users to make it easy, time-saving, and easy for the users. However, over time, more people started using it, and the reviews turned out to indicate mixed opinions regarding drag and drop options. All the designs and layouts cannot be dragged from a particular place and can be dropped on the interface of the website. If you are not able to fully use this functionality, you may need help in figuring out how to do it.
Many times, themes don’t include simple drag and drop tools. Hence you could be under the wrong impression. There a lot of technical aspects that a non-technical might face difficulty comprehending. Wix provides tutorials for reference, which helps ease the process, but still it could be a bit challenging to figure out if you are a completely non-technical person.
2. Not able to choose the right plan:
There are different plans available on the Wix website, from a free website to premium plans.
FREE PLAN:
The free plan unlocks only necessary features for making a blog or a website and is open for advertisement. This plan is free, so it just offers basic options that do not work well for business websites; it is just suitable for portfolio websites and no other types. Keep this in mind if you’re not planning on spending bucks to create your website. Ideally, Wix might not be your best solution for creating free websites apart from portfolios.
COMBO PLAN:
The combo plan offers basic features plus your domain name without advertisements on your user’s screen. This comes with an extra cost, but there aren’t many added features. Removing adds can be a great advantage to have as adds can annoy your potential traffic, however, if you want to create a proper website, the combo plan also doesn’t have much to offer in that space. You could, however, go for the unlimited plan.
UNLIMITED PLAN:
The unlimited plan offers all the features of a combo plan, plus it offers unlimited space for storage. It is ideally suggested for blogging websites. The cost is subjective to your budget, but it could seem a bit expensive to some people.
BUSINESS BASIC PLAN:
The primary business plan includes all essential features of the Wix website builder along with online selling options. This plan is undoubtedly made for the business websites but involves no extra features competent for a business website like payment options, SEO packs, and more. One needs to purchase an extra SEO pack for this website.
PREMIUM PLAN:
The premium plan consists of all the basic features of the Wix website plus all available plugins. The plugins available with Wix are necessary but could lack some tools and add ons available with personal websites that could enhance your website. At the same cost, if allotted to the developer, the developer could make a high-resolution professional website for the business. The choice comes down to ease of outsourcing v.s getting value for money with constant involvement.
3. Need Help Choosing the Right Theme:
The theme is an essential part of designing a website. The selection of the theme needs to be done, keeping few essential points in mind like website niche, purpose, vision and mission, message to your audience, presentation of your identity in front of your audience, and much more. While so many factors need consideration when deciding the theme of your website, Wix has certain limitations of only categorizing the themes as per the industry/niche in which your business functions. This limits the scope of finding the right theme that not only adheres to your niche but also checks all other boxes. Hence, if you are looking for a particular niche, you might want to consider a personal developer for the flexibility of choices.
4. Not able to use the Wix A.I. builder
Wix artificial A.I. website builder seems easy to use at first glance. The tutorials give an idea for it to be simplistic and minimalistic in terms of efforts while creating your website. However, it can still be challenging to operate, especially if you lack technical knowledge. It does allow you to customize the fonts, colors, menu, theme, and navigation aspects of the site, but the technicality involved to make these changes is not very easy to comprehend.
5. Need more images than what is included in the Wix library:
Visuals are the first element that captivates the visitor’s attention. It creates the first impression of the website in a visitor’s mind, based on which he/she decides if they want to continue exploring the website. It is something that everyone notices technical and non-technical people alike. Wix comes with its media library, which has a remarkable variety of images, which are again structured category wise. This limits the chances of Wix having images for a new emerging category that isn’t in its repository already. Lesser options for each niche also could mean overuse of the image you chose by many other brands. If you can’t find the right images, you may need to hire someone to take care of this for you.
6. Ambiguity around categories and page bread crumbs at top:
Page breadcrumbs are the like navigation points for the users as well as web crawlers. It guides them like which section would include which information, thus saving their browsing time. Here, as per the tutorials, you can drag and drop and create categories for breadcrumbs, but when executing, it adds pages and categories on the top and not the page bread crumbs. There are many complications around this feature, which might be overwhelming for a non-technical person.
7. Need help with the e-commerce in plugin setup:
E-commerce is a pure medium of sales. If you are a product-driven start-up or well-established business, it is necessary to include an e-commerce feature on your website to smoothly sell and receive your payments. There is a plugin for e-commerce on the Wix website builder only if you opt for premium plans. However, the plugin comes with an extra cost, but it still requires a separate payment gateway for the receipt amount. Also, the setup procedure can be complicated and time-consuming for the creator, and there are chances it might not t give proper results at the end.
While Wix eases the work by taking care of many factors itself when you try to build a thorough website where you want to have a lot of creative freedom and customization offers, there are chances it might not serve you exactly how you want it to unless you get help from a professional company to set everything up for you. Depending on the uniqueness of your website, content, and design you could make your decision on whether to hire an individual web developer which would require your active participation and involvement. In such case, Using Wix will give you a great layout and overall website.
If you are looking for an extraordinarily tailor-made and unique website that caters to a very premium industry and you just don’t have the know-how to set things up fully via the Wix platform, turning to expert web designers and developers to do it for you there can serve you better. Web designers know which color to use for your website that is suitable according to your brand color schematics. They have an understanding of what fonts to use to complement your website design and create a visual guide for the visitors. They also know which information to fit in which section of the website through proper content management and mapping. They can design a custom logo for you to use on your Wix website. They have been taught for years to use their analytical, logical, and designing skills for making the layout of the website.
Hiring a professional for Wix website design can be expensive, as compared to choosing one of the build-in Wix packages and doing everything yourself, however depending on the situation, it may be very well worth it. Identify the need and the reach you want for your website, and if all the requirements are met for using a pre-built template and you have no problems figuring things out on your own, then you will be all set. If, however, you feel like you still need help designing a Wix website and taking advantage of all of Wix’s functionality to the fullest, then hiring an external agency or company to create your Wix website will be the most logical step.
