“Follow the yellow brick road, follow the yellow brick road,
follow, follow, follow, follow…”
Great! Now that I have that song stuck in your head, let’s begin.
Up Your Wix Game
So far we’ve seen that it’s really quite easy to quickly build a professional-looking website using the Wix ADI feature. Wix ADI is easy to use by even the most noobiest of noobs.
But I have news for you. We are no longer noobs. Yes, you heard that right. We have officially graduated from Blog Noobdom. We are ready to explore the Wix editor.
Learn Wix Editor on Udemy
As with Wix ADI, I searched around for free resources to guide me. I personally like to follow along with video tutorials, so I checked out a few different ones and finally settled on this one offered on Udemy.
Although you do have to pay for many of the courses on Udemy, this one is free! If by the time you are reading this the Udemy course is no longer offered, or if you don’t like it, you can easily find many other resources to choose from. My search for “beginner Wix editor” returned 1.2 million results, so there is no shortage of information out there.
The Udemy course is under an hour long and walks you step-by-step through the process of using the Wix editor to create a simple business website.
What’s really nice about using a video tutorial like this as a guide is that it shows you just the basics you need to know when you’re just starting out. The Wix editor interface is a bit intimidating for anyone who hasn’t worked with any sort of graphic design program before. All the menus and buttons and rulers and gridlines (oh my!) can be overwhelming.
The Udemy tutor shows you which tools you will be using most often as a beginner, and which ones you can ignore for now (which, thankfully, is most of them), while still giving a quick explanation of why you may want or need to use them down the road.
The tutor also spends a fair bit of time explaining some of the nuts and bolts of running a website, such as choosing a payment plan and the ins-and-outs of purchasing a domain. I will re-visit these topics in more detail in future posts. For now, let’s stick to a $0 budget.
Wix ADI vs. Wix Editor
Because I wanted to compare the experience of using Wix ADI vs. the Wix editor, I decided to try and re-create my Wix ADI sample site in the editor. And let me tell you, it was kind of hard to do. Mainly because I had to try and figure out what fonts and colours were used in the ADI design, and I had to mostly guess and try to eyeball it. (I mean, probably there’s an easy way to do it? But being just a recent alumnus of Noob University, it’s still beyond my capabilities.) Here is the result: https://csistok.wixsite.com/wixeditorsamplesite
For comparison, here is the website I created using Wix ADI: https://csistok.wixsite.com/wixadisamplesite
As you can see, they more-or-less look the same. But remember when I mentioned in my Tourist in the Land of Wix blog post that Wix ADI has its limitations? Well, one of those limitations is not being able to design things exactly the way you want. Case in point: in Wix ADI, the Submit button on the Email Us section (on the How To Find Us page) is sitting on top of the message field. Super annoying!
The reason this is so is because that entire Email Us section is one set “thing” and I can’t make changes to any separate part of the whole “thing” in ADI. But in the editor, each part of that “thing” is a separate object, so I can position that Submit button exactly where I want it to be. Which is below the message field, not on top of it.
No Clear Winner
Now, before you go and throw Wix ADI in the garbage, let me say one thing: the Wix editor wasn’t less frustrating. In fact, it was kind of more frustrating, just not in the same way. Sure, I was able to put that Submit button exactly where I wanted it to be, but I had to fight with it first… and it put up a pretty good fight!
If you are someone who has experience with graphic design programs you might not have any difficulty. But if you’re the type of person who could never grab the corners of those text boxes and images in Microsoft Word or Powerpoint, could never get them to align or “snap to grid”, if it drove you batty trying to resize and crop and make all the formatting match, then you might be better off with Wix ADI. Even though I have a LOT of experience with Microsoft Word and Powerpoint, working in the Wix editor was beginning to try my patience.
Bottom Line
Maybe it just comes down to a learning curve, but if you’re someone who is more interested in writing content for your blog than wrestling with it, you might prefer the ease and simplicity of Wix ADI.
So there you have it, we’ve come to the end of the yellow Wix road. (I’m sorry… that pun practically wrote itself.) But our journey has just begun! Stay with me to explore more website builders in upcoming posts.
Feature image credit: Photo by Akshay Nanavati on Unsplash