Create a Website Easily With Wix (Even the Free Version)

With the first Beta version of its original service released in 2008, Wix is no newcomer to the website creation arena. But Wix (free, Premium plans start at $5 per month) has just reinvented itself: Its previous offering was entirely based on Flash, and this current release leaves Flash behind for the power and ubiquity of HTML5. With the new Wix, you can create beautiful, modern-looking personal, portfolio, and business websites, without writing a single line of code and without running Flash.

To start you off, Wix offers dozens of ready-made HTML5 templates, subdivided into categories such as Kids, Music, Fashion, Food & Drink, and more. There are also single-page personal profile templates, competing directly against services like about.me and flavors.me. The templates are beautiful, and don’t look anything like WordPress or other content management systems. Like Weebly, Wix uses Web fonts, so it’s not all Arial and Times New Roman: Titles are sometimes rendered in playful script fonts, and some themes use with thin, all-caps sans serif fonts for dramatic impact. The templates avoid Lorem Ipsum, opting instead for placeholder text that’s in plain English and more closely resembles actual copy. In the rare event that no template catches your fancy, you can always start with a blank slate and create your website from scratch.

The Wix editor is a joy to use. Click an element, and you can drag it around, change its text, or edit its appearance. You can customize just about anything: A template I was editing used ribbon elements that appeared to “fold” across the left side of images. With the editor, I was able to change their direction and color scheme so that they folded onto the image from the right. Since everything is based on CSS, I only had to change one ribbon, and Wix applied the change across all of the others. For many elements, the editor offers presets you can pick from, but also lets you create your own settings from scratch for your own unique look.

Wix also makes it easy to create new pages and arrange them in the menu, as well as customize the menu itself. Pages are arranged by types, such as a gallery, text pages, a Services page, and so on. Unlike Weebly, Wix does not let you create a blog as part of your site, nor bring in other editors to help you author content and maintain the site.

The other side of the coin for Wix’s ease of use is that you can’t get at the actual CSS and HTML that drive your website. Even if you know what you’re doing and want to customize things by coding, Wix will not let you do that: Everything is locked behind the editor. This also means that when you design you website with Wix, you are effectively married to the service. Wix does not support exporting your content, and monthly plans are relatively expensive for a simple web hosting service.

Wix does have a free option, but it displays a Wix banner at the bottom of your website and will not let you use your own domain name. Even the Connect Domain premium plan that costs $5 per month leaves the banner intact-to get rid of it, you must upgrade at least to the Combo plan, which is $10 per month. If you don’t mind the rates (or the banner and Wix branding), Wix’s new HTML5 version offers some of the best visual website creation tools I have seen to date.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor’s site, where you can use the latest version of this Web-based software.

–Erez Zukerman