Wix: Why it sucks.

WhoNeedsJimbo

"You need a website. Why not do it yourself"

There's one problem. You didn't do it yourself.

Wix is an online website maker that allows people to create their own website using its variety of drag-and-drop tools. The formula is simple, drag that there, drag that over here, change the background to that, and download a bunch of addons to customize your site. Sound pretty neat, right? WRONG.

The problem with wix is that without a "premium plan" is that your site looks like a 4 year old made it and put in a bunch of ads advertising, you guessed it- Wix. This is actually common on some other sites, like weebly. But unlike weebly, Wix restricts the parts of your site that actaully make it look professional. Without a premium plan, you cant have a famicom (its stuck at the wix logo,) there are 2 wix ads that stand out, saying "Create a Wix site!" and "This site was made using Wix. Create a site today!" I get it, if your trying to make a buisness everybodys gonna use, you have to make money off of it, right? Welp, you dont have to make it so you can have only 500MB on the site, bombard the site with ads, not have a custom domain name, and make the site look unprofessional as crap. At least restrict only a few of these things.

I have tried wix before, look at this.
http://familyeverill.wixsite.com/pixelpizza
As you can see, there is the words "wixsite" in the domain name, Not only that, if you go to the site, there are two wix ads. AS well as the famicom is the wix logo.

I have also used weebly, a relative to wix, as it uses the same "drag and drop" website making mechanic. Oh, and BOTH have an ability to upgrade to get more features, (but weebly doesnt restrict as much as wix) and they both have ads.

That was my rant on drag and drop "do it yourself" website makers. If you really want your own site, take the time to learn HTML and CSS. The payoff is much better than making a site with those site makers.

WhoNeedsJimbo

o. :)Wix.com. The website is good. Except for, "WIX.COM CREATE ACCOUNT TODAY" "WIX.COM" "WIX.COM" "WIX" "JOIN WIX"

Toostenheimer

OneBreadSlice

If you want a quick solution for a website, weebly looks better than wix. However, HTML and CSS would be preferable and most professional if you want to save money and have the customization that you need. I don't remember what I used in the past, but there was a nice HTML/CSS editor + a drag and drop feature to save time on most of the coding, while still having the functionality and customization of a professional webdev.

Shellcode

The thing is that these companies rely on people fearing any kind of programming and seeking out easier ways to create websites no matter the cost. That being said, while i dislike tools like Wix they do have to make money.

500MB is A LOT of space for a website, a simple single page website is normally less than a 10th of a Megabyte (MB) if its too large it will take forever to load and cost a ton of resources for Wix and the person looking at it. Storage is not cheap especially when your talking about enterprise level server storage that's wired into machines that cost tens of thousands of dollars each. If you want to store a ton of large files its really cheaper to rent a high storage Virtual Private Server (VPS) than it is to pay for their "Premium" plans.

Wix is aimed at simple websites that don't care about ads and stuff as long as there is little to no work involved in creating the website.

WhoNeedsJimbo

That being said, while i dislike tools like Wix they do have to make money.
~ @Shellcode

Its true, although like their cousin, Weebly, they could unrestrict more features. I do prefer using HTML/CSS, but if they want to attract more people that don't know a lot of coding, they could unrestrict a few features mentioned above.

7acespade

You literally have a website calling you a professional gamer and you're complaining about a website making you look unprofessional. You cant just neglect to learn any of the features and then call wix bad, its a great website for inexperienced people to make a decent looking website.

WhoNeedsJimbo

You literally have a website calling you a professional gamer and you're complaining about a website making you look unprofessional. You cant just neglect to learn any of the features and then call wix bad, its a great website for inexperienced people to make a decent looking website.
~ @7acespade

lmao what I wrote on that site tho

Enron

Try Neocities.
No ads, custom everything, pure HTML coding, completely free.
It's basically a redo of the old Geocities, from the internet's golden days.

Marshy_88

TL;DR

Use weebly

iGwampa

I like how you just got this off the internet and copied and pasted it. Great job!

WhoNeedsJimbo

I like how you just got this off the internet and copied and pasted it. Great job!
~ @iGwampa

accusations

TL;DR
Use weebly
~ @Marshy_88

benster82

Just learn some basic Dreamweaver skills and you're set. Adobe Dreamweaver does most if the coding for you.

SpongeyStar

it reminds me of ear wax

LordInateur

I'm not a huge fan of the CMS-type stuff. A lot of people like the remoted-hosted CMS (Wix, etc.) and the self-hosted (Drupal, WordPress, etc.) but I've always been a fan of old-fashioned scratchwork.

Now, any programmer worth their salt (note that I didn't say "web designer") knows HTML + CSS + JavaScript, but the question that's more interesting to me is "what are we using for the backend?" Most people use PHP... a nasty, nasty scripting language (super easy, though) that is loosely typed and can't get its object oriented and functional paradigms straight. I mean, your [X]AMP servers are going to be the go-to for most websites... but what if we bring this into the context of full integration with something like, say, a Minecraft Server?

Here's an idea. Choose a different platform other than PHP. For the advanced users, use an Elixir/Erlang/OTP combo (my personal favorite) to create an always-on and fault-tolerant system... pretty much 0% downtime for websites integrating into Minecraft Servers. But for those who prefer to stick with a full Java stack, there is a plethora of microframeworks (or even just full frameworks) out there to choose from. One of my favorites is "Spark Java" (NOT Apache Spark, that's something different) integrated with the Apache Velocity Template Engine. Using this sort of web stack allows the programmer to create Bukkit/Spigot (or even other Java-based) plugins that integrate seamlessly between the Minecraft Server and the Web Server.

If someone's interested and actually wants an example of this, let me know.

SuperDyl

Your right, the page looks more like wix just quickly put it out as an example page to show the potential it has. The main page is nice, but the advertisement layout speaks a different story.

Shellcode

Most people use PHP... a nasty, nasty scripting language
~ @LordInateur

What's wrong with PHP honestly? Seems people are willing to throw hate at a language that has been around for so long because some things are broken. Any programmer worth their salt should be able to test/debug their work so those slight issues with PHP shouldn't matter. I'd advocate that PHP is more well known and well used than any other web backend and you can forget Node (and the associated crapware) if it's performance you are looking for. The latest PHP revisions have brought significant improvements in every way.

I'll agree with you in general about CMS use however if its something that applies to CMS use (like a blog when we have Wordpress) then use it. Nobody should be adapting their ideas to fit a premade backend though.

TheTastyNacho

I've used weebly and it's great. Yea I tried Wix and it sucks.

LordInateur

What's wrong with PHP honestly? Seems people are willing to throw hate at a language that has been around for so long because some things are broken.
~ @Shellcode

I mean, I agree with the sentiment that decent programmers should debug their code, etc., etc., but that doesn't take from the fact that it is so incredibly easy to turn a PHP script into spaghetti code, or lead the developer into a false sense of security. People forget that it's a scripting language... and too often people treat it as the catch-all web-enterprise system. (But I suppose that's better than using an ASP.NET stack.) Furthermore, I would argue that more than "some" things are broken.

My opinion of the language stems on the fact that as the language has progressed, it has truly built on top of outdated versions of itself instead of refactoring the code, which is what they should have done. Rather, what they've done is truly Windows-esque. Maybe they've done this in the name of "backwards-compatibility" but such notions become null and void when developers can often decide which version of PHP they want to utilize on their systems in the first place. As a result, many old implementations of various functions remain present and either broken or insecure. Frankly, I'm not so concerned about performance (though a strong argument could be made regarding C++ back-ends and their phenomenally superior benchmark results... but as PHP is interpreted, that's to be expected, and as such "speed" is not the issue at hand).

I think that my prejudice comes from reading so much bad PHP code (I think I prefer languages that are strongly-typed and require you to be explicit when describing exactly what you want to do, such as Ada). As such, the matter of whether or not PHP is a "bad" scripting language boils down to a matter of opinion in regard to the following question: should languages prod the developer to write clean code, or should languages assume a developer's arbitrary code?

That being said, PHP does have it's merits. I've coded forum software from scratch using PHP, so it's obviously capable. I personally tend to use PHP if I need a dynamic system running in a very short amount of time.

SuperDyl

Learning languages should give some leeway and guess at times, while most other languages should force cleaner, more focused code. This prevents more unforeseen bugs at the cost of more errors springing up, but only for serious code, compared to a beginner (such as I).