Tag: Wix

Playing Hide-and-SEO

October 18, 2023 /

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) helps your tiny droplet of a site get found in the ocean of the World Wide Web. It involves associating your site address with keywords that enable your site to be located whenever anyone types those keywords into a search engine.

And that’s about the extent of my knowledge about SEO.

SEO Settings on Wix

Let me go back into my Learning To Blog website and show you what “SEO” looks like in Wix.

Once you navigate over to the Blog posts lists, hover the cursor near the three dots to the right of the post to make the Edit button magically appear.

Selecting the Edit button opens up the post. There is a vertical menu on the left. Here’s where you’ll find the SEO menu button.

There are four tabs on the SEO menu:

  • Assistant
  • Basics
  • Advanced
  • Social Share

Assistant Tab

Let’s just have a quick look at the Assistant tab.

It’s a lot like a to-do list. I suspect that AI (Artificial Intelligence) is behind this. It analyzes what you have done on your site so far and comes up with a list of tasks for you to tackle next. You can learn more about the Assistant tab and what the items on the to-do list mean on Wix’s support page on this topic.

I believe the Assistant tab is a recent feature. I don’t remember seeing it when I first created my Wix blog. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are still some bugs to work out. As such, I’m not going to worry about it too much right now. Instead, let’s have a look at the Basics tab.

Basics Tab

So there it is. A bunch of information that doesn’t mean much to us yet.

Fortunately, when you write your post, Wix automatically pre-populates some of the SEO information for you. So for the time being, there’s nothing you need to do here. But if you’re really keen and want to learn more about the Basics settings, have a look at Wix’s support page about this tab.

SEO Noobs

So is that it? We don’t need to do anything? Well, I know that there are entire courses dedicated to the topic of SEO so there must be more to it than this. As far as what concerns us noobs, though, this is probably all the SEO we need to know or do for now. We won’t even look at the Advanced and Social share tabs at this point. I’m sure we’ll come across this topic again as we continue our blogging journey.

Feature image credit: Photo by Ivan Babydov from Pexels.

A space portal.

Spaced Out With Squarespace

August 9, 2023 /

Hello again! Thanks for joining me on our next field trip. This time we’re heading over to another website builder called Squarespace. Similarly to Wix, you don’t need to have any knowledge of HTML or anything like that in order to build a website with Squarespace. Is it as easy to use as Wix, though? Let’s find out.

Learn Squarespace on LinkedIn Learning

As with Wix, I tinkered around with Squarespace a couple of years ago and looked for a video tutorial to guide me. I found one on LinkedIn Learning by the same instructor as the Wix tutorial. (Remember that if you live in Toronto, you can access LinkedIn Learning for free with your public library card. Also, some organizations offer their employees free access to LinkedIn Learning, so check with your employer to see if they do!)

The LinkedIn Learning course is called Squarespace Essential Training: The Basics and, as of this writing, the most recent update to the course was in March 2023.

Keeping Up With The Versions

Remember back when they invented papyrus and it took another 4000 years or so to come up with the printing press? Yeah, it’s not like that anymore. Things change a lot more quickly in the digital age. When I was working my way through the course back in March 2021, I began to notice that things looked different. What I mean is, what I was seeing on my Squarespace interface did not always match what the instructor was showing me in the video tutorial. The further I got in the course, the less things seemed to match, until I was just barely muddling my way along.

Squarespace Versions 7.0 vs 7.1

I eventually made use of the Help section to try and figure out why I was so lost in space. Turned out that I was using version 7.1 of Squarespace, whereas the instructor seemed to be using version 7.0. (For a detailed explanation of the different versions, head over to this Squarespace blog post.)

In spite of this enlightening bit of information, I for some reason continued to struggle through to the end of the course before it finally occurred to me to check if there was a newer version of the tutorial and… yep, there was. It was released just a few months prior, in October 2020. The older course was created in May 2018; the newer one in October 2020. That’s almost two-and-a-half years older! The course that is there now was just updated a few months ago, but by the time you read this, it too may already be a relic of an earlier, simpler time.

What’s really hilarious is that the outdated course I had just finished slogging through was almost 5 hours long, whereas the newer course was a mere 2 hours. I spent about 9 hours on the project altogether!

Expect Change

The take-away here is: don’t be surprised when things look different. In fact, be a little suspicious when things still look the same. If you find that things on your screen don’t match up with the tutorial, don’t panic! Chances are, things will look a lot more different than they actually are. Just do your best to muddle your way around. The more you muddle, the better you get at this learning tech stuff!

Just to be clear, the May 2018 course, which is the course I originally worked through, was for Squarespace version 7.0. The October 2020 course was for Squarespace version 7.1. This is why they looked so completely different from each other! (Note that the October 2020 course was last updated in April 2022.) The current course, released in March 2023, is also for Squarespace 7.1. You will only find this latest course listed in LinkedIn Learning, the first two have since been archived. But they still exist in cyberspace, just follow these hyperlinks if you want to check them out:

I am currently working through the March 2023 course. I’ll report on the new course in a future post. For now, let me share what I learned about Squarespace the first time around.

Shocker #1: Squarespace doesn’t have a free option

Gah! How are us broke people supposed to check this thing out if it’s not free??

Thankfully, they do offer a 14-day free trial. I would suggest that you don’t start your 14-day free trial until you are ready and able to dedicate some solid blocks of time on this.

If I can use Wix for free, why would I pay to use Squarespace?

Well, first off, the free option for Wix is very limited in its capabilities. It’s pretty much like an unlimited free trial. In order to have a fully functional website, you’d need to upgrade to a paid plan. Beyond that, Squarespace apparently has a lot of features that make it “better” than Wix. The LinkedIn Learning tutorial goes over some of these. For instance, Squarespace automatically makes the necessary changes to your website so that it can be viewed on any device, whether that be a desktop computer monitor, a tablet, or an iPhone. Wix does too, but doesn’t do it as well, says our instructor, and requires extra tweaking, which means you have to spend more time building your site. Time is money, people!

Another feature that Squarespace has that Wix allegedly doesn’t is the ability to export your site to WordPress. Naturally, you have questions. What is WordPress? And why would I want to export my site to it? WordPress is yet another website builder, and it is on our travel itinerary, so hang tight, we will get to it soon! If your business or organization or project outgrows your initial small website, you will likely need to move to another platform that can handle a larger, more complex site. So that’s where the exporting from Squarespace to WordPress would come in. There isn’t an easy way to move your site from Wix to WordPress; you’d pretty much have to rebuild the site all over again (ouch!)

I know what you’re thinking. Why not just start with WordPress and avoid the potential hassle? Well, according to our instructor, “What makes WordPress so popular (all the functionality) is also what makes it confusing (all the functionality).” In other words, it might be more website builder than you need. Both Wix and Squarespace could be just fine for a small business or organization, or as a hobby site.

Shocker #2: Planning your website

Uh-oh, we need a plan??

Yes. According to our instructor, we need a plan. In the March 2018 course, she spent a significant amount of time explaining how to plan out your website and why it’s important to do so before you begin building it. This planning out stage is not specific to Squarespace, this is something we are encouraged to do regardless of which website-building tool we choose. She also went over some basic information about working with photos and how to decide whether our website should be single-page or multi-page, among other things. This is why that 2018 course was 5 hours long vs. 2. I think she has now created a separate course to go over this information; I’ll have to look into it to confirm and get back to you on that.

Adding Photos In Squarespace

Here’s an important thing I learned while working through the Squarespace course: photos don’t just appear out of nowhere. You may recall back in Wix Land, back when we were mere Noobs, we discovered that it was easy to find professional-looking free stock photos right within the Wix interface. (If you missed it, here’s the post in question.) Well, it doesn’t look like Squarespace has this handy feature. So, I did a little research and found this website called Pexels. It looks like photographers upload photos for you to use for free, although there is an option to donate to them if you wish. You can also copy a link back to their profile page to include on your site in order to give them credit and exposure. Please be sure to give credit where credit is due!

Squarespace or Wix?

So which is better? Squarespace or Wix? In my very limited experience, here’s my opinion.

Ease of Use

In terms of actually building a site, as someone who was just learning how to do this, I think I preferred Squarespace to Wix. I think. But I’m not really sure. Fourteen days just wasn’t enough time to get a good feel for it. I think I preferred it for its seemingly more customizable design capabilities though, not for ease of use. Remember that Wix had two interfaces: Wix ADI and Wix Editor. The Wix Editor had more customizable design capabilities as well, but it also had a steeper learning curve than Wix ADI. I guess if we’re talking strictly about ease of use, Wix ADI wins hands-down.

Pricing

Let’s talk money. Currently, the cheapest plan Squarespace offers is $192/year. This is for the “Personal” plan. The next tier is called “Business” and costs $276/year. I’m assuming this is in US dollars, so for Canadians we’re looking at around $250/year for the Personal plan and $365/year for Business. For Wix, the cheapest plan is free, followed by a very basic plan for $90/year, then a personal plan for $180/year. The next tier is for entrepreneurs and freelancers at $240/year. These prices are all in Canadian dollars. I guess if you’re reading this, it means you’re just at the learning stages of website building, in which case Wix is probably a more budget-friendly option to start with.

My First Squarespace Site

Now, since Squarespace doesn’t have a free version, and I wasn’t about to pay to make a fake site I will never use, I had to get creative with how to share my project with you. Because I can’t actually publish it, I instead took a series of screenshots, hacked them into photos, and put them into a free Wix site to make it kinda-sorta look like what it would look like if you were actually looking at it as a real website. (Note that it’s a bit fuzzy-looking because detail was lost in going from screenshots to jpegs. If it were an actual Squarespace site, it would look much crisper.)

I added hyperlinks so you could “pretend” to click on links and move through it like you would a real web site. (Tip: hover over the menu bar at the top right and just click anywhere, it will move you to the next page. Just keep doing that until you come back to the Home page.) You’ll have to use your imagination a bit.

I’m not sure exactly how it will turn out on your end. It should look “okay” in either desktop or mobile (not sure about tablet), but if things look really wonky or broken, it means my hack didn’t work out. C’est la vie.

Ta-dah!

Ok then, off you go! Have fun! Don’t forget to write!

A space portal.

Enter imaginary Squarespace website

through this portal.

Image credit: Christopher Burns on Unsplash

A yellow brick road.

The Wonderful Wizard of Wix

June 16, 2023 /

“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 Wix ADI user interface.
The Wix Editor user interface.
Wix ADI vs. Wix Editor user interface.

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 Submit button when using Wix ADI
The Submit button when using Wix Editor
Positioning of the Submit button when using Wix ADI vs. Wix Editor.

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

A double-decker sightseeing bus full of tourists.

Tourist in the Land of Wix

June 12, 2023 /

Did you try making a free website with Wix yet? How did it go?

After I created my first Wix website, I wandered aimlessly around my Wix ADI interface for a while, pushing random buttons to see what would happen. Eventually I decided to look for a knowledgeable tour guide to show me around. If you’re feeling as lost and directionless as I was, and not really sure of what to do next, read on!

Learn Wix ADI on LinkedIn Learning

If you are familiar with LinkedIn, the social media platform for business relationships, you may know that they offer a library of high-quality online video courses for workplace skills development. One of the courses available is a beginner-level course called Learning Wix. It walks you through the process of using Wix ADI to build a website for an imaginary custom cake business.

You need a premium membership with LinkedIn to access the course, but if you live in Toronto, you can access all of the LinkedIn courses via the Toronto Public Library website for free! All you need is a library card and an Internet connection. Just do a search for “LinkedIn Learning” at the TPL website and it will bring up the portal.

The LinkedIn Learning video course is just over an hour and a half long. You will be guided through the steps of building a simple business website using Wix ADI, starting from signing up with Wix to publishing a free site under the Wix domain. It’s a good first course for finding your way around the Wix ADI interface. Here is a link to my finished project, a website for an imaginary floral design business: https://csistok.wixsite.com/wixadisamplesite

As you can see, there is a banner across the top advertising Wix, which is the trade-off for having a free site. If this were a real business, I would want to upgrade to a paid plan to get rid of that banner. This would set you back around $15-20/month. But let’s just stick with free website-building for now!

Other Resources for Learning Wix ADI

If you don’t live in Toronto and your local library doesn’t offer access to LinkedIn Learning, this YouTube tutorial by ProfileTree is a good alternative. It’s about an hour long and walks you through the process of building a business website for a coffee shop using Wix ADI.

Of course, you could also just walk yourself through the learning process by making use of the Wix Help Center. From your main page on the Wix dashboard, find Help on the menu bar at the top left. When you select it, you should see a hyperlinked text: Visit Help Center. From there, you will find all the articles they have about using Wix ADI.

Overall, I found the Wix ADI interface very easy to use. But after getting some hands-on experience using it, I began to see how it has its limitations and why one might prefer to use the Wix Editor instead. So, now that we are pros at using Wix ADI, are we ready to move onward and upward?

Next stop: Wix Editor!

Image credit: Waldemar on Unsplash

Two women over the age of 50 are sharing a laptop to learn how to build a website.

Make a Website In 20 Minutes Or Less

June 7, 2023 /

I have a confession to make: this ain’t my first rodeo.

I created my very first website about 2 years ago. (Well, that’s not entirely true; I created my very, very first website about 20 years ago using a website builder called FrontPage. It was part of Microsoft Office Suite. But FrontPage is long gone, and so is that website, so they are both irrelevant to today’s post.)

So back to my second very first website, I created that one using Wix, and both Wix and that website still exist. I’ll link to both of them below, but first I want to tell you what Wix is and why I think you should try it out if you’re at all interested in creating your own website.

What is Wix?

Wix is a company that offers a platform for building and hosting websites. (Woo, wait a minute, what is “hosting” you may ask.) Ok, never mind the lingo-jargon, you don’t need to know about hosting just yet. Let’s just keep things real simple for now. Wix is a website you can use to create your very own website, very easily, for free!

Why Should I Create a Website With Wix?

Because it’s free! And it’s easy!

Ok, so I don’t recommend you create a free Wix site for your business or for anything you want to put a lot of time and effort into and that you want around for a long time. But I do think that if you know nothing or very little about creating a website and have no idea where to even begin, then Wix is the perfect place to begin! Just keep in mind that this will likely be just a learning exercise for you and not your permanent home on the web.

So now that you know the What and the Why, let’s talk about the How. It’s super easy. Just three steps.

How to Make a Wix Website In 3 Easy Steps

Here are the steps for creating your own website using Wix:

  1. Go to wix.com.
  2. Select the first Get Started button you see.
  3. Follow the instructions.

You’ll have to sign up with email first to create an account, then you’ll be walked through the steps of creating a website. At one point, you’ll be asked to choose between Wix ADI and the Wix Editor; I recommend going with Wix ADI as it’s the easiest route for beginners, and you can switch from ADI to the Editor later if you want. Don’t worry about what ADI means vs Editor, just go with it. (But if you’re curious, it’s an AI-based tool that makes some selections based on your answers to questions, whereas with the Editor you have to make some of those selections yourself.)

It took me about 20 minutes to create this website:

https://csistok.wixsite.com/learningtoblog

Pretty cool, right?

Now off you go! Get out there and make your own website!

Help! I Don’t Understand

Ok, no worries! If you need more detailed step-by-step instructions, there is no shortage of tutorials on the web. A quick Google search will give you several to choose from, like this video tutorial on YouTube. It’s 18 minutes and 44 seconds long, proving my point that you can create a website in under 20 minutes!

If you would rather follow written instructions instead of watching a video, then have a look at this blog page for a step-by-step lesson.

Go Forth and Conquer

And when you come back, drop a link to your very first website in the comments below.

Good luck and have fun!

Image credit : Centre for Ageing Better on Unsplash