No code? No problem. How we built a landing page with Wix [Part 4/4]

This is the 3rd article in our 4-part series about building landing pages using website builders. You can check out the links below for the other articles in this series:

1. No code? No problem. How to build landing pages without being a dev. [Part 1/4]

2. No code? No problem. How we built a landing page with Squarespace [Part 2/4]

3. No code? No problem. How we built a landing page with Wordpress [Part 3/4]

These past few weeks, I’ve been building landing pages using website builders, to see if they’re solid candidates for future projects. This would mean saving lots of Figma and coding time. And so far, I got to test out Squarespace and Wordpress. Both of which had limitations, but were overall pretty good.

The “trifecta” is about to be completed: this week, my landing page experiment reached its 3rd round. I built the page using Wix, a well known and powerful website builder. My main goal was keeping the same design as the Squarespace and Wordpress pages, since those turned out quite alike. Did that actually work? Read on.

Before I began this experiment, I actually tinkered a little bit with all these three platforms. And Wix, well.. Was my least favorite. And “favorite” is quite a stretch. But I tried not to be biased against it and to try my best to make it work. So I spent a little extra time choosing the perfect template to start with, since I knew blocks of content Wix offers are all centered around specific themes. And those themes weren’t what I wanted.

Once I chose a template, I got to work. And man, did I. Wix was my least favorite for solid reasons. The editor had quite an old-looking design - which didn’t lower functionality, but it wasn't pleasant to look at. And it had lots of customization options, which with the previous platforms I would’ve loved, but it seemed to take a toll on my computer. So most of the time I worked on this landing page, I was dealing with lag. That might not be a problem for everyone, but you shouldn’t need a $3,000 computer to build a landing page, right?

One thing kept happening over the few days I worked on this: the UPDIVISION logo, which I put as an image on the left side of the header, kept going underneath the header itself. No matter how many times I set it to go on top of it, I often found it “beneath the surface”. I couldn’t understand why this kept happening, and it kept it in mind as a negative point.

Moving on, I tried my best to keep the same layout as the previous 2 pages - since those turned out quite alike. But Wix made it difficult. The advertised customization was flawed: normally I would’ve loved to have it, but maybe there was too much. Too many ways to do things, too much customization, can become overwhelming - and it did. 

After a few days and lots of effort, I sort of managed to finish the page. Why “sort of”? One major issue I had was a long, empty space on the page that I couldn’t remove. I tried to drag the footer up but it didn’t work, so I was left with that space. It all came down to Wix’s algorithm: their page elements are divided in what they call strips. You can put elements on these strips, edit them, change their background, and so on. But what I realized you can’t do is change their length. Which is probably how I ended up with that empty space.

Pros:

• Lots of templates for lots of different industries. There’s even one for plumbers.
• So much customization: you can edit text as if you were in MS Word (there’s even character and line spacing), place it anywhere you want (anywhere) or simply take a pre-made section and make it your own.
• It’s got many different features - some aren’t needed for a landing page, but it’s good to know. You can have a booking system, a blog or an online store.
• It’s free to edit your site. Which means you can keep playing and only pay when you want to go live.
• You can link buttons to page sections. So for instance, you can put a button in the page intro that leads to the Services section on the same page.

Cons:

• The abundance of features makes it lag, thus it’s difficult to use.
• The pre-made blocks of content come in a limited number of styles, and most of them aren’t appropriate for the style I was going for. Basically, most of them, to me, screamed flower shop or clothing store.
• The whole header debacle I talked about earlier.
• The empty space debacle I also talked about earlier.
• You can’t exactly place strips one after another - or at least, I couldn’t - and there’s a high chance you’ll end up with thin white lines between sections.
• Overall a pain to work with.

So, there you have it. This was my experience with Wix, one of the biggest website builders out there. Just like I expected, it wasn’t great - but that doesn’t mean I don’t recommend it. If you need all the freedom this platform gives, and no other no-code sources offer it, then all the usability issues are an ok price to pay. 

If you don’t want something quick and dirty, but high quality and custom, contact us and let’s make it happen.

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