Wix.com is the first totally free Web site creator for building Flash based websites. It comes complete with a drag and drop interface and hundreds of ready-to-use vector graphics and customizable templates. It seems like the perfect solution for anyone who wants a website that is a little more high-tech than the traditional HTML websites you can get for free from a number of other sites.
It seems like it’s the perfect solution and even though you don’t have to know all about Flash to design with this service there are still some problems with it. Like many free services it comes with its share of advertisements attached to your finished site. On the plus side these ads are not the clumsy pop-ups of Geocities and Angelfire but are discreetly embedded ads for Wix.com which only reveal themselves when a user rolls a mouse over them. The problem arises when you publish your site and realize that these are not the only ads on the site. On any free Wix site a large, blue border appears around the outside edge. Some have cleverly tied this color in with the design of their site graphics to get around looking like it is an advertisement. Which does work pretty well but if you don’t want the primary color scheme of your site to be blue it sticks out rather more than the site design which is definitely a problem.
Graphic designing is an interesting practice that needs to be followed because it makes the websites look attractive and colorful which in a way is a nod to the creativity of the designer and Wix.com has one of the best graphics in modern times where the costo sito web is quite adequate.
But never fear, Wix has the solution. Premium services can take the ads away, give you tools like Google Analytics and a shopping cart. The problems that arise from this are hard to detect but if you look at the chart long enough you find out that not all premium options take the ads off your site. The cheapest option, $4.05/month, will not take ads off your site but you can use your own domain name. The next option up will take ads off your site but even though you’re paying more will not allow you to use your own domain. That doesn’t make sense when all premium options on sites like Tripod take ads off the users sites and domain names are typically given in the packages for the second level and up.
But the editing process for building with Wix remains easy to use. If you’ve ever tried Flash coding you know what it’s like to work for hours on the perfectly designed website only to have all the buttons play on a continuous loop and none of the links work right once it is launched. Wix comes fully loaded with buttons, space for graphics, royalty free graphics and backgrounds and widgets like music players and photo galleries. The only problem I had with it was one of my buttons on a page wouldn’t hold a link. It was there when I saved the page but not when the page was published. Wix also has add ons like scroll buttons you can attribute to paragraphs of text and contact forms which only require an e-mail address assigned to it. When you first visit the Wix website visit the gallery under the explore tab to see all the other sites that have been built with Wix. Some are very impressive the only thing that would bother some is that the gallery includes a view button with a “get” button which allows the viewer to get the code to the site. Although most pages use a lot of the preloaded Wix graphics so it’s probably alright.