In Part 1 of this blog, I wrote about why I chose to use Wix to develop my website. This blog will describe my experiences using Wix to create my site.
At this time, I should point out that for many years, I worked in IT in various highly technical positions, but that was a long time ago. I figured, I must still have some left-brain abilities—so off I went on my path to creating a website.
One of the first things I realized about Wix was that there was not a Dummies book, which always seemed helpful with other software products. Therefore, I started looking at the how-to videos they provided on their site. There were lots of them. You can also find them through Google and YouTube. I was into my learning curve.
I knew I needed a domain name. Would “bobpuglisi.com” be available I wondered? After some Google searches, I decided to get my domain name at Namecheap, and, yes, my domain name was still available. I purchased it, and it seemed inexpensive if you paid for an entire year, and planned to renew yearly. Once you have it, you could easily transfer it to Wix web hosting, which I chose to do. There was a one-year cost for hosting that I paid for and will renew each year if I decide to stay with Wix’s hosting services. Once you have a site, you can easily move it to another hosting platform, and there are many. A couple of the more popular ones are GoDaddy, and WordPress. You can also use GoDaddy or WordPress to develop your site for free.
In Wix, you use the Wix Editor to build your site, also free. I set up an account on Wix and went to work on finding templates for an Author’s website. I found a template that I liked and started to make changes that reflected what I wanted. However, the first one I found was for an e-commerce site in which you can sell products (in my case books) right from the site. That’s not what I wanted to do. My intention for the site was to have a landing place that tells readers about my books and me, and through links on the site, they’re sent to Amazon for the actual book sale. I thought I could still use the e-commerce template, and remove the e-commerce links, but I couldn’t, maybe out of lack of experience. So I abandoned that one and found another one without the e-commerce hooks, but I did like that first one better than what I eventually chose. I didn’t think they offered that many templates for author sites.
After that, I made quick progress, but there were times I’d be stuck on something for days, and eventually got in-touch with Wix support. Before contacting the support people, I looked at the various help options, sometimes-video tutorials to solve my problem. These helped occasionally and sometimes they didn’t. You can also get help via email, and you should receive an answer within 24 hours. If you need an immediate response, you enter some preliminary information about the problem and put in your phone number. This seemed the best solution. Sometimes the first person you spoke to solved your problem. Other times, that person had to escalate it, and I was on hold for extended periods. I often got disgusted from waiting and hung up. One particular problem, I was determined to stay on the line to get it fixed. After a 45 minute wait, I got the help I needed. It was a stupid problem, where I spelled my own last name wrong, and it caused the email portion to the site to fail. It seemed to me the first person should have been able to solve that one. I should have seen my own mistake, but things like that happen when you are dealing with technical issues.
Following their help, they always send a survey in order to get your feedback. I complained about the long wait time. It must have had some effect because they changed the procedure and would tell you in advance that they would call you back in so many minutes. That works a lot better than holding on the line.
Sometimes, just trying to move some element of your site around, can take much longer than it should, especially when you are starting out.
Since I haven’t tried using WordPress, I can’t say positively that Wix is better. They do keep changing things to improve it and I’m sure to keep up with the competition. This can be a problem if you look at some of the Wix tutorials on Google and YouTube. The help tutorials often refer to things that have been changed or are found on different menus. You have to be careful about that. I found it best to follow the help information provided by Wix. I think it is more up-to-date. I hope it is.
I went on to add to my site a Subscriber form, email, and a blog. I had some problems implementing these, but received good support from their help staff. Search engine optimization is another thing that I’m still struggling with. You must choose keywords that help people find your site on Google. The catch with this is that no one but Google knows what their search algorithms are. I’ll write more about this a later time when I understand it better.
So that’s my experience using Wix to build my website. I hope you find it helpful. See my sites landing page below.
