Whether you are an aspiring internet influencer who needs a base for his brand, a professional who needs a portfolio to showcase your work, or a small business trying to spread the word about your products and services outside of the city, in where you open a store, building a great website is critical to your success.
Benefits range from increasing your likelihood of being discovered in today’s digital society, to increasing your credibility as someone who cares enough not only to build an online presence, but also takes the time to create an aesthetically pleasing portal for what you offer others.
The beauty of a cloud-based web development platform like Wix is ??that it gives you the ability to do all of this and more with incredible ease at an affordable price. While other platforms are similar, they are not necessarily that intuitive.
Others may offer more potential, but they also require more skills, such as coding knowledge. Often times, platforms on both ends of the spectrum can end up costing more, while offering relatively fewer benefits to those who are not programmers but want the site to look like a programmer created it.
Having tried several web platforms to build your own portfolio site, this is why I love Wix and how you too can use its technologies to create a great website for yourself or your business.
Wix” />
Freedom or freedom
First of all: what are you looking for on your website? The answer may depend on how comfortable you are with designing and organizing your site.
– /
If you’re not comfortable at all or are short on time, Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) can build a free website for you. But if you have skills or want to develop them and have time, Wix also gives you full control over your design with the Wix Editor.
Wix” />
Wix ADI
Wix ADI
Wix ADI doesn’t just provide generic templates to choose from; he collects information about you and your needs and legitimately creates an individual space based on what you tell him. Once the site’s skeleton is built, with additional input from you in themed choices, Wix hands you control to start adding additional pages and making changes to themes, fonts, colors, and more.
The upside is that you get everything you need from a basic website that doesn’t require any effort on your part to actually set up – and it’s free. All you need to worry about is providing content for your site and making sure it looks the way you want it to.
The downside is that you may need functionality or features that Wix ADI does not have, such as the ability to use your own domain. This and other advanced features require a premium plan. This is where you truly experience design freedom.
Wix” />
Drag and drop editor
If you decide to pay for a site built with the Wix Editor, as I did, your options will be greatly expanded. There are several premium options available, ranging from $ 5 to $ 25 per month, each offering additional services. However, each premium plan includes:
- free hosting
- domain connection
- 500MB + storage
- Google Analytics
- Premium Support
- No setup fees
To begin with, there are several other Wix templates that you can use for your own designs. For example, the site I created was originally a mockup of someone else who posted their design for others to use. Now it doesn’t look like the original at all, as I made several changes both aesthetically and in design.
Once you have the website layout you want, whether you’re starting from scratch or creating someone else’s accessible design, you can really start transforming your site into something unique with the drag and drop editor that Wix has to offer.
Add elements
Add items
Move text and design elements around the page. Create new pages and menus in a couple of clicks. Add tons of creative elements to make any page more than just text, from vector graphics to call to action buttons and music for your online store.
There are many more options to choose from, and Wix helps you determine if something might be useful to your site by providing detailed information about each item when you hover over or select it.
For pretty much anything you can imagine, a legitimate site that needs to be aesthetically pleasing and highly professional, Wix makes it easy to select, check in and navigate.
The process is so intuitive and iterative that it’s easy to experiment with different design or logistics elements on your site, preview them, and then decide whether to keep or remove with little to no action other than deciding where to put something.
Wix” />
Add Apps
Add apps
Another great feature of the Wix Editor is the ability to add apps, some of which are free. There are over 300 to choose from – Wix offers over 100 in-house apps, from social tools to chat apps and business tools.
Adding these apps to your site is as easy as adding any other design element that you drag and drop. There is an easy way to make your site less static, more dynamic, more interactive to really grab the attention of your visitors and make you look like a complete web development pro.
Make it mobile-friendly
Once you’re done with your site, make sure it displays correctly in the mobile interface using the Wix Mobile Editor. This is gaining in importance as most people today access websites and services on their mobile phones more than any other device.
It is very important to provide an elegant user experience (UX) that seamlessly transitions from a 13 “screen to a 5” screen. Poor UX can ruin your chances of gaining the trust of your site visitors.
You will lose their attention or their business and ultimately increase your bounce rate – a metric that measures how quickly someone comes to and leaves your site. The higher the bounce rate, the less likely you are to appear in Google search results.
While in the Wix mobile editor, you can rearrange images and text and hide elements you don’t want to display, so your site’s user interface is as elegant as in the palm of your hand, like on a tablet or monitor. It will take just a few minutes before publishing to clean up the mess.
Wix” />
Email Marketing
One of the coolest Wix additions is email marketing. Once you’ve built your site, you might want to promote it, especially if you’re a budding influencer trying to get followers; creative professional trying to find a new job or freelance work with a new portfolio; or a business trying to attract new customers.
Like everything else, Wix makes it very easy by providing you with a vibrant email template that only requires you to enter information and customize it to suit your brand. Also, your biggest job is to provide a list of contacts to whom you are sending an email.
Perhaps you already have hundreds of contacts to whom you could promote your new site. If not, there are data collection companies from which you can purchase email lists (sounds sketchy, but that’s how the world works today).
This is it. Click “Submit” and see how your site statistics grow over the next few days. By the way, make sure you have a submit form somewhere on your site so visitors can contact you. You will definitely want to provide visitors with a way to communicate with you if you present yourself that way.
Wix also offers an app that can help you grow your subscriber list, if that makes sense for your site. This is a great way to keep yourself or your business in the spotlight with a growing contact list, increasing your visibility and possibly your bottom line or status.
Wix” />
View stats and build SEO
We talked a bit about the importance of making your brand – personal or business – more visible to the online world with a stellar website. But building a great website can only get you promoted.
Most of the hard work comes from playing search engine optimization (SEO). Google and other search engines use algorithms to decide which results appear first in a search. If you want Google and other search engines to rank your site higher in their search index, there are certain best practices.
Learning these best practices and understanding how to apply them effectively takes time, trial and error. Luckily for Wix users, Wix SEO Wiz makes this much easier. It gives you a step-by-step process to follow to make sure your site is optimized correctly before even letting you hook it up to Google for indexing and search rankings – talk about your due diligence!
Once you connect to Google, Wix will navigate to your SEO plan, where you can continue to optimize the rest of your site. You are never alone in this; Wix SEO Wiz continues to offer you a checklist of items you need to complete in order for your site to perform better.
When you’re ready to see how well your website is performing, you can plug it into Google Analytics, the most powerful analytics platform available for measuring organic and paid SEO, and start tracking things like time on page, click-through rate, and website traffic. many other indicators.
Wix” />
Finish searching for your site
If you’re looking for a comprehensive cloud-based web development platform, Wix offers quite possibly everything you need without having to acquire technical skills to get the most out of it. Whether you need a lot or a little for a personal or business website, Wix is ??definitely what you need.
–