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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

Yesterday, coincidentally, there was a surprisingly silly and heated discussion in a large Facebook group about whether a person who specializes in Wix can be considered a "web developer." (https://www.facebook.com/groups/hackathonhackers/permalink/1...)

Hacker News is biased toward DIYing websites from scratch, but WYSIWYG builders like WIx are very important for those who aren't tech-savvy. DeviantArt, in a world where designers must build their own overly-elaborate portfolios with JavaScript and CSS shenanigans to stand out, serves as a good compliment.

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You are a definitely "person who develops for web" but not necessarily a Web Developer within the context of any community which assigned a specific meaning to that title.

The definition may, of course, change over time and it already differs across communities. On the top of my head, I know many freelancers who wouldn't consider you a web developer without good Photoshop skills and many JavaScript-oriented developers wouldn't consider you one if you can't write a line of JS without using a library.

I, however, don't know any significant group which would call a person who can only author on Wix, a Web Developer. Ignoring that would surely create miscommunication and would be considered a wrong or misguided use of the title.

The first I heard of Wix was a few months ago when a local news site deployed their new design. The page would be completely blank for 10-15 seconds while it made hundreds of requests for useless little React turdlets. As far as I can tell, they "fixed" it by moving away from Wix.

If that's normal for a Wix site, then I would say no, nobody involved on either side of the transaction is a web developer except in the most pejorative sense of the term.

I thought you were exaggerating, but holy cow... maybe those who disagree can find me a site from http://www.wix.com/explore/websites for which that doesn't hold true, because I gave up after a few which were all incredibly abysmal. Yeah, those sites are "stunning" alright. Aesthetically very bland and samey, but technically utterly stunning. I wouldn't even know how to make something that slow without using a combination of bmp images and sleeping here and there for a few seconds.

To be fair, I just tried a few of those sites and they're not as slow as the one I had in mind. But I wasn't exaggerating about that particular site. Each page view was taking at least 10 seconds to show the first pixel of content for what is effectively a static blog.

Sounds like all 3 I clicked on.. they all loaded 150+ tiny files, and started out with several seconds of a white screen.

It doesn't help that they apparently couldn't bother to proofread the subtitle on that page.

> With 1000s of stunning options, no two website are the same.

"two website" => "two websites"

Worse, it happened with that page itself. It took 10 seconds before it loaded any content beyond the header and base template.

It looks like Wix only tested that Explore page in Chrome and Edge. Clicking any of the "View Site" links opens two new tabs in Firefox and Safari, opens nothing in IE11, but works as expected in Chrome and Edge.

A few years ago every Wix site was Flash. So...progress, and apparently profit.

It's madness. I keep saying it, but this is basic UX stuff. Even using JIRA lately has become painful as components bounce all over the place while they sling in code asynchronously with no UX indication. Save a sub task and watch as the whole page jiggles about like it's trying to avoid being clicked.

I will get you, edit button. You cannot escape my patient pointer.

Someone who can use Wix could possibly be called a “Web Designer”, but “Web Developer” seems a stretch within a conventional understanding.

This reminds me of the "webmaster" days when the debate was over whether doing HTML could be considered "programming". My position then as now is that being a programmer (developer in this context) requires programming a programming language, and neither HTML or Wix is that.

On the other hand, in practice, in the presence of a technology that non-programmers can use to build perfectly viable products, the onus is probably more on the "programming-language-programmers" to differentiate themselves and seek out the challenges that can't be solved by "HTML-programmers". If you as a programmer find yourself in a venue head to head with a Wix'er, you may win a small victory in the battle over definitions, but you will lose the war. If the problem can be solved with HTML/Wix, in most cases it should solved with them.

Sharepoint, Wordpress, and SAP fit that description too.

Whenever someone asks me advice on building a website, I just say "Wix", unless they are willing to spend 10,000$ or more paying a quality developer to do a custom and probably unnecessary build.

There are more alternatives out there and some of them are cool too.

I always used to say Weebly - and I've helped quite a few friends and family build little brochure sites. The big change with a new version a couple of years ago made less enthusiastic, though I haven't looked at Wix yet.

Hey there, I'd love to hear a bit more about your negative experience a couple years ago and how we could make things better. Didn't see an email in your profile -- could you email me at david@weebly.com? Would really appreciate your feedback!

I wanted create / migrate my sites on Weebly but they lack the power to organize the url structure. For example - I want urls like - mysite.tld/europe/germany/somepage So I can also create pages like mysite.tld/europe/germany/index mysite.tld/europe/index

etc. Currently they only support one level in url making it difficult to migrate my sites.

I usually turn them to Weebly and SquareSpace and adamantly turn them away from Wix. I think some of this has changed recently, but most Wix sites unnecessarily hijack browser functions, have time wasting page transitions, the SEO is terrible, and social sharing links always are buggy. Financially speaking, as a company they simply just out-spend everyone on marketing/sales to compete in the market, with very little product innovation.

I work for a small ISP & MSP. We have a "web developer" who occasionally will create a basic website for one of our customers. On Wix, of course. She wouldn't recognize an HTML tag if it smacked her in the face.

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