AI capabilities: AI is all the rage these days—and for good reason. When you’ve got a full-time job or business to run, AI tools can simplify the process of creating and maintaining your website. For example, Wix’s AI site builder can help you produce a fully functional website in minutes. It makes sophisticated decisions on your behalf regarding your web design, site copy and user experience, while setting you up with the right business apps; you can always edit your site as desired, but can save yourself hours of setup time.”
Add page: Click the blue "+ Add Page" button to create a new page and click on whatever template suits your needs.
Name your page: Once the page is added to your site, the page name will be highlighted in the left side panel for you to edit.
Customize: Customize and build the newly created page by adding your content, adjusting the layout and refining the design.
Manage pages: Drag and drop pages in the side panel to rearrange them or click on the ellipsis icon to the right of each page title to duplicate, delete, rename, hide and more.
Subpages: Create dropdown menus by adding subpages to your main pages, enhancing site navigation.
A shop or gallery. This is the center of your site where visitors can browse through your products or services. Create product listings, manage inventory and process transactions all from one centralized dashboard. Dedicate time to write product descriptions that will grab potential customers’ attention. The same goes for your product photography to ensure that your items are displayed in their very best light.
A personable About page. Use this page as your online business card. It’s the spot where you can present who you are, what you stand for, your strengths, values and any other crucial information you think your visitors should know about your team and your business.
An easy-to-find contact section. Don’t leave your site visitors astray by making them search for your contact information. Dedicate a page to list contact numbers, email, social links and any other way users can get in touch with you. In addition, it’s a good practice to add your essential contact details on your website footer.
An interactive membership area. Creating a membership area on your website serves the dual purpose of monetization and user engagement. Various membership models, like drip-feed, all-in and fixed-term, can be employed to monetize your content. You can also offer premium content, online services or downloadable materials as incentives for users to subscribe.
Easy-to-access online courses. The growing popularity of virtual classes presents an opportunity to generate income by launching a paid online course. This approach allows you to monetize your existing website traffic. Design courses that align with your expertise and cater to your audience's needs. Ensure the content is relevant and unique.
An informative FAQ page. Save yourself and your clients some time (and frustration) by including an FAQ page to provide answers to questions that may naturally come up as visitors browse your site.
Keyword research: Wix provides keyword research tools to help you discover relevant keywords for your content.
On-page SEO: Easily optimize your meta titles, descriptions and headers to improve your on-page SEO.
Image SEO: Optimize your images with alt tags and compress them to improve page loading times.
AI meta tag creation: Use AI to generate optimized title tags and meta descriptions for each of your pages.
Sitemap generation: Wix generates XML sitemaps to help search engines crawl and index your site effectively.
Mobile optimization: Ensure your website is mobile-friendly for better search rankings.
Local SEO: If you have a local business, use Wix's local SEO tools to improve your visibility in local searches.
SEO analytics: Monitor your website's SEO performance with built-in analytics and reports.
Rich results: Implement rich snippets and schema markup to make your search results stand out.
Take advantage of features like Wix’s “Site Preview” mode, which allows you to view and navigate your site as a user. This enables you to experience the user journey of navigating your site and flag issues a user might encounter. Make sure to test all pages, links and embedded media in addition to spell-checking content. Do this on desktop and mobile view.
Get a fresh pair of eyes to review your work. Ask a friend or colleague to take a look at your website and give you notes on initial impressions, user experience, clarity of content and effectiveness of the design. This step is imperative as someone less familiar with your content will be a much better barometer for how a new visitor would navigate your website. Test your website as much as you can to make sure it works as it should. Here are some ways Wix can help you get your site out there:
SEO: In case we haven’t said it enough, SEO is imperative. For those less familiar with SEO, SEO is basically the practice of optimizing your site to help it rank better on Google and other search engines, which, in turn, bring you more web traffic. This is a crucial step in ensuring your site's success once it’s published.
Although SEO is very technical and nuanced, using the right website builder can streamline the entire process. You can get an automatically optimized site with a solid infrastructure that exceeds search engine standards, alongside a suite of SEO tools.
For example, Wix’s SEO Assistant gives you a personalized SEO setup plan for your site. It can make suggestions on how to tweak your content and provide explanations as to how these changes may help your rankings. For the more advanced user, Wix offers other SEO tools including a robots.txt editor, dynamic XML sitemaps and customizable canonical tags (among others). Keep in mind, however, that it takes time (and regular investment) to see the results of SEO, and your site may not rank well immediately.
Email marketing: Whether you're an eCommerce business, a blogger or an entrepreneur, it’s essential to build and maintain strong customer relationships. Email marketing tools enable you to create and send professional email campaigns to your subscribers and drive traffic to your site. Send newsletters, promote new products, create trigger emails and share exciting updates with your audience. w
Blogs: Blogging is a powerful content marketing strategy. With SEO-rich blogging capabilities, you can create and publish engaging blog posts that not only captivate your audience but also rank well in search engine results. When selecting your website builder, look for built-in SEO features to ensure your blogs are optimized for maximum visibility.
Functionality: sometimes features like eCommerce capabilities, custom forms, databases and interactive elements increase costs. This is not true for all features, or website builders, so it's worth doing your research.
Content creation: Both on-page copy, images and video can cost you if you outsource them to professionals rather than creating your selves.
Hosting and domain: Robust hosting services and domain registration can vary in price based on performance and security needs. With a Wix site, hosting is included; domain names are available with a paid plan.
Marketing: Investing in marketing services to drive traffic and improve visibility can significantly affect your website building budget.
With Wix, you can create a website for free or opt for a paid plan that can cost from $17 a month, depending on the type and exact features. This plan will include a custom domain, 24/7 customer support and hosting services.
While creating a website by yourself can be very manageable, even if you don't have design or coding experience and especially if you use a website builder - it's worth taking into account some common pitfalls associated with building a website.
These include:
Neglecting your user experience (UX) design
Focusing on design and how it looks, over functionality
Ignoring accessibility guidelines and design
Not optimizing for SEO from the start
Failing to preview and test every part of your site before going live
When it comes to learning web development and creating a website from scratch, you have a few main options to explore.
Bootcamps: Bootcamps offer intensive, short-term programs focused on teaching practical skills relevant to web development. They typically cover HTML, CSS, JavaScript and frameworks like React or Angular.
Computer science or software engineering degrees: Pursuing a degree in CS or software engineering from a university provides a comprehensive understanding of computer science principles, including web development. These programs cover a wide range of topics beyond web development, such as algorithms, data structures and software engineering principles.
Independent learning options: There are also ways for you to learn on your own. Some of these include online courses and tutorials, books, coding bootcamp prep programs and opportunities to contribute to open-source projects.