11/20/2015

Kirameku's website - The Wix experience

Hi everyone! :)

As many of you already know, Kirameku has now it's very own website! dances in joy
It was a very dear project of mine and I'm so proud it is finally online! Between the craft shows and getting my Black Friday promo and the Gift Guide ready this week, it suddenly hit me : although I'm super excited about this project, I shared the good news very briefly here and on my social medias.

So, I thought I could let you know about my first experience with Wix, for those of you who are interested by this platform. Many of you might have seen their Facebook ads in their newsfeed and wondered what it was all about. Briefly, if you haven't heard of Wix just yet, it is a website building platform made for everyone, using a basic drag-and-drop design method.


So, very quickly, you might ask me why I  went with Wix since I know about both Dreamweaver and Wordpress, especially with the big success and many beautiful and responsive deigns in the Wordpress platform. Well, it is very simple actually. Dreamweaver is great, but starting a website from scratch is time consuming; plus you pretty much spend most of your time fixing your design instead of taking your design further. As for Wordpress, it is gorgeous, easy to work with and it is my first choice, however, the hosting fees can get pretty high pretty quick...

With all of this in mind, I decided try out Wix, mainly because they offered free hosting. My goal for this year was to create more brand awareness for my jewelry shop but still with a very limited budget as I left more space for giveaways and goodies for you instead of spending it on administration fees.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the service. Wix makes it easy for you to design a website even if you have no web design knowledge. It's easy to pick up from the many free templates design to get you started and go from there, upload your pics and texts. They have a very accessible SEO tool that helps you make sure your website is relevant to Google and other search engine. And, did I already mentioned free hosting? Their free account options are impressive, diverse and and you can pull off something very professional despite not paying a cent.

But....! If you are a graphic designer like me, you like having control over everything. That means that you might loose a few hairs while trying to edit the background to make the different sections into full-screen colors (wich is not possible with my template), in trying to figure out at what size you are supposed to insert the images for the full-screen slider (which took sooooo many trials), or insert a few basic HTML codes here and there. Also, you are having a hard time of selecting many items at once, so dragging complex group of text, images and lines is pretty difficult.

For me, it was worth the extra time spent figuring out how it all worked and where I could take my template's designs. But it might not be the case for you. If you want to have control over everything, go with Wordpress. If you want a simple page to start off, go for it. If you wish to know more if Wix is the right platform for you, I recommend this great article by Jeremy Wong that points out all you need to know before jumping in.

So, with all of this, would you like to try out Wix? And what do you think about Kirameku's website?
Have a lovely weekend everyone! :D
* Maxime *

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