How to Create a Website with Wix

Wix has introduced an easy method for building websites quickly and easily without any coding knowledge required. Most users who have no desire to hire an expert and wish to create professional-looking websites from the ground up should have no trouble using Wix.

Wix also serves as a one-stop shop that includes hosting and domain registration, so there is little effort or complexity for you. The package includes all the tools needed to get online and manage a website. See how you can use Wix to launch your website in five steps.

What Is The Wix Website Builder?

The Wix website builder is a popular web development platform that allows users to create professional-looking websites without coding or technical skills. It provides a user-friendly interface, a drag-and-drop editor, and an AI-driven tool that automatically builds your website based on a series of prompts, such as the type of site. It offers you several designs based on your logo color.

All paid plans include a custom domain, free for the first year, ad removal, and a free secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate. The VIP and Pro levels include an events calendar, a professional logo, and social media logo files. There is a free option, but you must accept ads advertising the Wix platform on your site. These will appear on the bottom of the page and the upper right.

Pros and cons of the Wix website editor

The biggest advantage of using the Wix website editor is its ease of use, especially compared to other products like WordPress. WordPress is far more flexible but requires at least some basic technical ability. Wix works well if you lack technical experience and need to get a website up and running fast.

The Wix interface uses a drag-and-drop interface, and you can either build your site from a blank page or start with some preexisting templates. However, there are some serious limitations. If you start with a Wix website, you’re stuck with the provider and must use its services.

Sign Up for Wix

Before anything else, you need to sign up for an account with Wix. You’ll get a free trial to try it out before committing, so you can follow this whole tutorial without spending a dime.

After sign up, you’ll be able to register a free domain name. However, you can skip this part for now if you’re not sure what domain name you want to use. You’ll get a free temporary domain to use until you’re ready.

Determine Your Website Goals

You need a clear goal before creating a site. Don’t try to do too much. If you don’t keep your site focused and on-topic, you risk confusing your visitors and looking unprofessional.

Website types can be divided into several categories. These include business websites for promoting various businesses and services, personal websites that promote a hobby or serve as a personal portfolio, and announcement websites designed for promoting various events.

Business websites

This type of site is designed to promote and sell products or services. At the most basic level, it can be a business card-type of site so that people can find your contact information, such as through a phone number and address. This is the minimum kind of site that a brick-and-mortar business should have.

Another example is a site designed for lead generation purposes. This type of site typically has some basic information about a company, such as a sales pitch and a contact form. Business sites can be more elaborate and offer e-commerce where you sell products online or various other types of utilities and tools that might be purchased or used for business purposes.

Personal websites

This is another common type of site that can vary quite a bit. They can be simple vanity websites and serve as personal portfolios for people looking to showcase their professional work. In this category, we can also include blogs if one wishes to showcase a passion or interest. Another common use of personal sites is for crowdfunding purposes to raise money for a need or a cause of some sort.

Announcement websites

If one needs to make some sort of announcement online, one of the best ways of doing that is to create a website. These can announce specific entertainment events, personal events, and more. This category includes various informational and educational sites. For example, someone can create a site promoting an artistic event or a band. Sometimes, people like to have a website announcing a wedding, party, or other special event.

There are many reasons for having a website. What you do with it is only limited by your imagination.

Develop Your Website Content

Before building your website, have your content in order first. Think of your website essentially as a structure for presenting the actual content. While this is important, your content is more critical than the structure itself. There are a few basic pages to have planned. The following pages are essential:

• Main page: Most likely, this is the page you have thought about most and what people find if they enter your domain name into a web browser. It’s your storefront ― your facade. You need some basic content here to define what your site provides and helpful hints for navigating the site. What is your main selling point? Do you have a catchy slogan or offering? Include this information on your main page.
• About: You need a page describing you, your business, or your website. This is where people will find out what your site’s overall message and vision are.
• Contact: People need to find a way of contacting you. Even if you’re selling a product, people may often have questions or seek other information. If you’re offering a service, a contact page is essential. Provide at least one of the following: a contact form, email, address, physical address (although some sites don’t need this), and telephone number.

For certain sites, you need different types of pages. If you’re selling something, you need product pages, a shopping cart, checkout area, and more. If you’re offering services, provide a page that explains your service offerings clearly. Think what sort of things you would be looking for if you were a customer or client.

Reflect on the path you’d like the user to take through your site, such as browsing for a product, putting it in a shopping cart, and checking out. Or, alternately, maybe they are reading about your services and contacting you. Take into account Search Engine Optimization (SEO) when writing text to make sure people can find you on the internet when searching for similar products or services.

Design Your Wix Website

When you start building your site with Wix, familiarize yourself with the website builder, and set out a plan of action for creating your site. Below, we’ll tackle the actual process of creating a site and ensuring you’re comfortable using the tools available to you.

Research competitors

Before you begin, spend a considerable amount of time looking at similar sites to yours and in your area of focus to get an idea for how you would like your site to look. Other people have laid the groundwork for much of the work involved, so there’s often no need to reinvent the wheel. While it’s not wise to copy your competitors exactly, you can get many ideas from what they’ve tried before. Maybe you can even spot some weaknesses in their approaches you can use to make your site stand out.

Build your Wix website

Now that you have an idea of what you want to include on your website and how you’d like it to look, let’s dig into the Wix Website Editor. It is relatively easy to navigate. You’re presented with a menu that looks like this:

Choose your website type

We’ll choose “A company” for the example we’re using. You’ll walk through a few questions to gauge your comfort level with designing a site.

Select from the list that appears or start typing, and you’ll be given several choices. Choose one that makes the most amount of sense for you. Then, the Wix AI engine will start asking what other sorts of things are important for you.

After answering these questions, you can either let the AI engine build a site or use the Wix Website Editor. We’ll be using the editor. You’re given the option of choosing a template or working with a blank template.

Choose a template

Select one (or start from scratch), and Wix will generate a template automatically based on the one you have chosen and provide sections based on the selections you made during your setup process. Here is an example template main page:

You can edit almost anything on this page. You don’t need to know any code, as Wix will create it.

Create your site pages

On the left side, you have multiple options for managing the site. For instance, the first button, “Site Menu” will show you all of the existing pages that Wix created for you. You can navigate between these pages, or you can create a new page.

Other options on this page include:

• Background: You can change the background image, color, or add a background video.
• Add features: You can add numerous features to your site, change the layout of the page ― including how you want it to look ― and add several multimedia options.
• Theme manager: Using this, you can change or manage the color theme of your site.
• Apps: This is where you can choose a wide number of plug-ins to add all kinds of useful functionality to your site. Wix will recommend a few relevant options to the site model you choose, or you can search for various new features. These apps can do everything from building a form to creating a blog and adding an online store.
• Media: Add photos, videos, and a gallery of these however you like, with this easy-to-use function. You can also sync up your site with any existing social media accounts.
• Start blogging: A blog is one of the best ways to keep your website current. Wix will walk you through installing a blog app, and you can update your site with new insights and posts regularly.

Many other options will also appear, depending on the selections you made when you were first creating the site.

Publish Your Site

Now that you have spent a considerable amount of time constructing your site, and have reviewed it fully, you’re ready to preview your site and publish it.

Click on the “Preview” button on the top right of the site to see how it will look. You can go through your entire site to see how it will look to the public. Once you’re happy with it and ready to make it public, click on the “Publish” button to the right of that one.

Next steps

After you’ve published your site, you’ll do some promotion work. You can post regularly to your blog to increase your SEO rating potentially. More content is better, and newer content is best.

You can promote your site on social media regularly in concert with blog posts. Each time you create something new, it doesn’t hurt to direct people to your articles via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media networks.

Track your site

You can use Wix analytics to track how well your site is doing. This is where you’ll find statistics about visits and page views. If you’re running a store on your site, you can track the conversion rate of your customers and do minor tweaks to your formatting to try to increase this rate.

Wix analytics also offers the option of creating various polls where you can get direct feedback from your customers about what they like and don’t like about your site. If you’re using any of the paid options of Wix, you can use Google Analytics to get more in-depth information about how users are behaving on your site.

Note: You cannot use Google Analytics on the free version as you need to have a separate URL and domain for it to work.

One thing to remember is that once your website is built: never consider it “complete.” Updating your content regularly and redesigning the site every year or two will help your site remain fresh to your customers.