This week class was cancelled due to sickness, and I was asked to continue working from home. At this point I felt like I was dragging behind on my development work, trying to work around Framer, I was getting used to everything on it but I felt like it was going to be too time consuming and too slow, compared to where everyone else in my class was at this point.
I decided to move into my backup plan and begin making my website using WIX, I still planned on using the same content/ website layout for the whole website, the only difference is that I was using WIX and not Framer.
Diving into development, the biggest issue I had with using WIX was just how overwhelming and overcrowded everything seemed at first glance. There was just so much content, so many different buttons and pages. The biggest struggle I had the most and still sort of do, is managing to get to the web editor/ creator, as it’s just so hidden away and buried behind useless and what I feel are unnecessary amount of content.
Another issue I had was how cramped my work space felt on the actual editor. What I mean by this is, when I design or develop anything on my computer, I tend to have the screen smaller, so i can look at the design all in one go. The issue with WIX is when designing, it automatically zooms in and theres nothing I can do, meaning I can’t tell right away if a button or image is miss aligned, and it’s also hard to tell if my content is too big or too small to see also.
The final issue I have with WIX is the domain names. When putting in my domain, I was under the impression that if I created one and purchased it all on WIX, I would be able to then use it on my own created WIX website. However, Upon paying £32 annually (even though it later said it was monthly) when I went to update the domain on my website, it was prompting that I must also upgrade to a WIX plan to include the domain.
Moving into positives, aside from my traumatic switch over, getting used to the designs and prompts of developing my app was easy as pie. I had a quick look around at some of their templates and they were really interesting to see how they were created.
What I really liked the most about it was how it automatically put any design page for my desktop layout website, into a phone layout. This saved so much time in development especially if I were to do it from scratch using Framer.
I also really liked the sections feature to WIX, being able to choose a block layout and plot it straight in, as well as being able to customise every part of it is extremely fun and fast.
Begging my website layout, I put the most effort into my home page, I thought that this would be the most important area to cover as it’s the first thing users see when they would go to my website.
I also did a little bit of scouting at past student websites and noticed that a lot of them have their names in big bold, with introductions being very minimal, which I liked a lot and thought it would be best to implement that into mines.
I also had a look at another students website, Noah, as it was always talked about by lectures and noticed he had his big logo on the right hand side of his name. I thought I would also include this to mine at the time being, but I’m not sure how I feel about it. I plan on keeping it here for the time being until I can get some feedback from my lecture on what the best direction I should go with.