Last week in class we had the opportunity to use online website builders to create a group website pertaining to Western Washington University. My group chose to use Wix which is what I will be writing about in this blog. I've had previous experience with Wix for my photography page, but I have never finished a page with the builder until this group assignment. While I found their format and look to be more ideal than Weebly, the customization interface was a bit confusing and inconsistent. I will explain the pros and cons about using Wix in this blog post.
Wix had really intricate and interesting templates that had the 'wow' factor for what a lot of pages want. Between interesting flash-style slideshows and a large variety of fonts, the customization ability with Wix was impressive. You could choose a template and change enough of it to create something completely new and unique. The interchangeability of the templates were definitely something I desired when creating a page, having it look exactly like the template it offered every other free Wix user wasn't a way to catch someone's eye, even as visually stimulating as they may have been.
From the Wix page, you can find many great tutorial videos which clearly explain the functions and tools of Wix sites and how to start, edit, add, and change elements of your Wix page. This webiste: http://www.wix.com/support/main/flash/getting-started/video-tutorials-step-step-help has video tutorials from Getting Started to Wix Editor to Saving and Publishing to Support Tools. I found the Wix Editor video to be most helpful because of how difficult I found the editing interface to be, which I explain in the following paragraph.
The cons about Wix is that it is ideal for only one person to use at a time. When using it for the group project, we had trouble with saving multiple changes from different computers. We had to prioritize our time in segments to allow for each person to access our conjoined Wix account to be able to edit, change, add, and save pages. Because companies can have more than one person running a site, using Wix wouldn't be the most ideal due to the fact that it's very 'solo user' based. I also found some of the interface options to be a bit confusing and hard to get used to. When changing pages, instead of clicking on the links on the page, you had to go over to the edit bar to switch to the page you desired to edit. This caused misclicking which moved items you didn't want moved, added other elements, or added features to other pages you didn't want anything edited on.
Overall, using a webpage builder like Wix gave me the great opportunity to see what a 'real' website could look like with the right knowledge and tools, but I would recommend Wix as a solo project based site, rather than using it for group projects one may encounter. To check out the page my group and I made, visit this link: http://trybeforeyoudie5.wix.com/kickthebhambucket
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