By James Bernstein
Copyright 2021 by James Bernstein. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Printed in the United States of America
Bernstein, James
Wix Made Easy
Book 24 in the Computers Made Easy series
For more information on reproducing sections of this book or sales of this book, go to www.madeeasybookseries.com
Contents
Introduction
Since the internet has been around since 1983 (depending on who you ask), you would think that there are many websites available for you to visit and you would most definitely be right. Websites come and go with new sites popping up daily and if you are a business owner and dont have your own website then you are not running your business up to its full potential.
Nowadays, the internet is the first place people go when they are looking to buy a new product or get some type of service. In fact, the internet is where most people go when looking for just about anything. So if you have something you want to share with the world, creating a website for it is the best way to get your products, services or ideas out there.
Wix is one of the most popular and easy to use website creation tools, and you dont need any HTML (HyperText Markup Language) coding experience to use it and is fairly easy to get a basic website up and running in a short amount of time. And if you want to put a little extra effort into your work, you can create a very professional site for your business or personal use. And best of all, its free to use and publish your site on the internet for all to see!
If you have used software such as Google Slides, Google Sites, Microsoft PowerPoint or Microsoft Publisher then you should have no problem getting up and running with Wix since it uses some of the same processes as these other programs where you simply drag and drop text and images where you would like them to go. Of course, there is a little more to it than that but after you spend some time with Wix you should get the hang of it fairly quickly even though can look a little intimidating the first time you use it.
The goal of this book is to get you up and running with Wix and show you how to make great looking websites for your business or personal use. I will also go over many of the other advanced features such as how to publish your website online and even how to use your own custom domain name. Even though Wix is a fairly easy application to use, there are many, many things you can do with it so covering each and every feature would make this a 2000 page book! Once you get a hang of the basics and know where to find the tools you are looking for it should be easy to figure out anything that I might not have covered. So on that note, let's get our ideas online!
Chapter 1 Overview and Signing Up
You might have noticed the trend these days with many applications being used online rather than installed on to your desktop computer. By having these apps run online or in the cloud, it allows you to access your work from almost any device that has an internet connection from any location.
This also allows the app developers more control over how and when their applications are used and updated and also saves them from needing to develop software that needs to be installed on your computer. For example, if you have been using Microsoft Office for a period of time you might have noticed that they are moving from the desktop versions of their programs such as Word and Excel to online versions used in their Office 365 subscription version and Office for the Web free version.
TIP
If you are interested in learning how to use Microsofts Office for the Web online productivity apps then check out my book titled Office for the Web Made Easy.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092H828GK
With that being said, you will be doing all of your design work within your web browser rather than using a program or application installed on your computer. This doesnt mean that you cant do things such as edit your photos or other design elements on your PC because you can do this type of thing and then upload them to your Wix account to be used on your site.
Wix Subscription Plans
When you first start using Wix I would recommend that you just stick with the basic\free plan to make sure that it is the platform that you want to use to create your website. Then if the design and site functionality end up working for your business or personal site then you can go with one of the pay for (premium) plans.
There are many paid subscriptions to choose from and there are also three categories, each with different plans. There are the Website Plans, Business & eCommerce Plans, and Enterprise Plans. For the sake of this section I will be discussing the Website Plans category since that is most likely where you will be going when it's time to choose a subscription.
Figure 1.1 shows the four plans that are in the Website Plans category and as you can see, each one offers more features as the price goes up. When you go to the Wix website for yourself, you might see different numbers for the pricing based on when Wix either raises their prices or offers discounted temporary deals.
Figure 1.1
One of the main reasons to get a subscription plan is to remove the Wix ads that will be placed on your website once you publish it using the free account. If your site is just for something like your baseball team or school project this might be fine but if you are using it for your business then it might not look that professional.
You might also want to have your own custom domain, so your website address (URL) doesnt contain their name in it. The format of the free account address is username.wixsite.com and you might not want wixsite.com for your domain name and might want your own personalized one instead. Just keep in mind that whatever you choose for your domain name will need to be available and not in use by someone else.
Another thing to consider when deciding if you want to go with the free vs. paid plan is storage space for things such as images and videos. The free account only gets you 500MB of space where the paid accounts get you 3GB up to 35GB depending on which one you choose.
Signing Up For an Account
The first thing you will need to do before starting on your website is sign up for a Wix account using your email address. Then you will need to log in with this account whenever you wish to work on your website. All of your site data will be stored with Wix on their end so make sure you remember your login information!
To sign up for an account, simply go to the Wix website at wix.com and click on the Get Started button to create your account. Then you will enter your email address and create a secure password to be used for logging in.
The first time you login you might be presented with a screen that will ask you a few questions to try and get an idea of what type of website you are trying to create.
Figure 1.2
