Wix and Their Dirty Tricks
ma.tt
ma.tt
Unending JS, basic functionality implemented with custom elements and CSS custom variables (wanna support IE users at all? you’re SOL).
The “site editor” is somehow worse than DreamWeaver ever was. At least DW always had a consistent concept of flow content. On wix everything is positioned to the pixel???? Edit: except it’s not. Want to add a border to something? Get ready for mouse precision that would make Minesweeper nerds like me weep.
Want to change font size for something that looks the same in two places? Congratulations! You’re fixing layout on every single thing on every page.
Want to find out what an element’s font weight is? Lol obfuscated for no good reason. Everything is 400.
Oh by the way someone probably did the easiest thing imaginable and copied and pasted text, then made some changes. Now all your text is an h2. Screen readers can go to hell!
Want something on every page but slightly different on one? You can either duplicate the global thing and hide it on some pages or duplicate it on every page manually. Good luck making changes!
Do you have a device or browser window between handheld and “nerdstation”? You’re not in luck, hope you’re into scrolling horizontally.
This is just random stuff off the top of my head from two days making small quality of life improvements on the wix site before the project to migrate off.
I’d mostly kept this experience relatively quiet because I don’t like shitting on other people’s work. But then I saw that ad, which is shameful and disgusting, and decided wix doesn’t deserve that consideration.
You can divide UI editors generally into two categories, those that allow arbitrary positioning and sizing, and those that don't. Those that don't are much more familiar to web developers as the underlying structure is based on relative positioning for different screensizes. In other words flexbox and breakpoints. It is also easier to use variables for fonts and other elements as there are fewer hard constraints. But if you try to use a website (or any UI) builder without arbitrary drag and drop, it gets very frustrating as your UI feels as if it is "stuck" to a particular design. Weebly and Squarespace don't even allow much changes to layout at all by the visual editor outside of pre-built components so they are significantly less powerful than Wix relatively speaking.
They're mostly artists, very new business owners, & volunteers (tasked with building a website for their organization) and all are very, very un-tech savvy. Converting power users isn't even remotely possible for a walled-garden platform built for the technically unsophisticated.
If those are the Bose NC700, mine decided after a year to stop charging, and instead smell like melting plastic with smoke coming out of them.
That in itself wouldn't be an _absolute_ terrible thing, except their customer support was _abysmal_.
First of all they suggested I hard-reset the headphones, much to my surprise. When I emphasised that I wouldn't be plugging them in again and repeated the point about smelling melting plastic and smoke coming out, they then asked for pictures before initiating a replacement order process they'd suggested.
I explained that there isn't any visual indicators on the headphones such as melting plastic as I'd noticed it immediately, but they insisted I send them photographs anyway.
On sending them photos as asked (and clarified) they've since gone radio silent for 3 weeks, and ignored any more attempts to get in touch with them.
So yeah... I won't be touching Bose products at all in future.
And the ad itself didn’t really make sense to me either.
There are plenty of ways to make an ad that makes fun of WordPress — I recently had to help a friend who hasn’t used it in a few years adjust to Gutenberg (which is a constantly moving target) and it was not fun. The way full-site editing works right now is a mess compared to the other hosted solutions (Squarespace, Webflow, etc.) and the need to try to find plugins that do what you want them to do, but aren’t constantly spamming you you for upsells in the settings is another issue. Not to mention the ways you can ding WordPress over perceived bloat (even though that is arguably a host thing more than anything else).
But this ad did none of that. Moreover, I’m not super sure who then think their audience is. Is this supposed to be for web developers who build on WordPress (which is who they targeted with the headphones), or regular users who want an easy way to build a website?
Because those are two different audiences.
The first audience wouldn’t use Wix anyway — there’s a strong Shopify customization market and you could definitely build a business customizing Squarespace for people, but I can’t think of any web developer or consultancy that would want to use Wix as the platform for clients.
I would never in a million years recommend Wix to a client (if I were still consulting) or even to a family member. The stuff isn’t that good and as Matt said in his post, you can’t get your stuff out of it. It’s trapped in Wix forever.
But if the intended audience is normies who want an easy way to build a website, well, those people aren’t following WordPress influencers, reading Hacker News, or knowledgeable about who Matt Mullenwegg is. So again, who is this even for?
Big fail for me.
Wix doesn't target developers or anyone tech-savvy, they target average people that see an ad, and then buy into it.
The argument of not being locked in the basement is really important for small businesses which is why Wordpress got so huge in the first place.
Having the ability to hire one dev and if that doesn't work out being able to go to another is a major selling point for a small business.
Good luck porting your wix site if they turn evil and yeah that already seems to have happened.
He should relax. The person I was replying to should relax. Those offended in the WP community should relax.
Stealing code- there are remedies for that, which Auto and the foundation are free to pursue.
But glad to see all my comments on this topic keep getting down voted.
Contrarian POV isn't adding to the thread? I'm not baiting, asking a serious question.
For as negative as tech/digital professionals are about Wix, it is a $16B company with $1b in annual revenue.
The owner of the website is the copyright holder of the user generated content. The fact that they would have to go and copy/paste their own work, download their own images, etc. in order to move to a different provider absolutely cements my position to actively warn people in my sphere of influence to avoid Wix like a plague. The gall of a company to exploit the OSS parts of the web and to only take & take without ever giving is gross.
It's one of the worst and sleazy pieces of software I have ever encountered.
Wordpress out of the box is relatively unstyled. Even with Gutenberg, you're really only changing the layout of the <article> element, and not <body>. Full Site Editing is apparently coming soon, but at this time, page builders created on top of Wordpress have a much better UX.
Wix is awful, and everybody should know that. Free and open WordPress, for all its qualities, is somewhat an outdated technology. WordPress is empowering for non-technical people and small businesses. The truth is, it can also be shaky and hard to maintain for the same people, for many reasons tied to its history and development.
I never cottoned to the fact that that is an entirely different outfit from the website people -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wix.com
I kid; point is, while all the technicalities being thrown around are lovely, the fact you -can't- literally steal code probably does mean that those using the term 'steal' do in fact mean IP infringement.
But that furthers my point - this semantic game obscures the core point, which I think everyone agrees on.
edit: I'm not saying it's good that it has become equivated to theft, we have anti-pirate legislation to thank for this. I would call pirating infringement, but license violation is much more akin to theft than anything.
The only GDPR related FAQ I could find is mostly focused of wix's customer's customers (IE the site's visitors) getting access to their data, but there's nothing about Wix's customers accessing their data...
Wix's negative attack campaign which confused people and really speak about it self should be the focus here?
why you even attack an open source software? source code is there for you to review and play with. if you don't like it or it doesn't work for you then move on.
i just don't understand the point of attacking an open source software. it feel like Microsoft attacking linux back then.
Also because so many plugins have huge security flaws and laravel is much better if building from scratch... And is my bread and butter....
Wordpress just isn't that elegant and it's old and outdated....
That said I'd never ever use wix and I'll never buy from someone who does. It's just not professional. I probably would think twice about Weebly to having had to support it at eig, but I guess they're not as bad as wix which is like the lowest of low.
I mean wordpress or shopify at least have a feel of professionalism, but knowing wix isn't exportable I'd immediately recommend everyone get off and never go anywhere near them.
I respect automatic and Matt, can't say the same for wix. Wp is a lot better community and better for business than wix ever could be.
I think a good business might be creating some sort of wix exporter that uses browser apis to login, copy out data and format it in presentable ways for other platforms.
Why did they do this? To address this specific problem with YouTube programmer influencers.
Wix = Yuck
The head of WP marketing - who has contributed a ton over the years - learned she was out of a job when she saw the announcement of a new marketing lead on social media.
WordPress is great, but it isn't perfect. And for the CEO of the largest for-profit part of WP to liken a competitor to a roach motel or an abusive relationship is irresponsible and denigrates the mission.
WP is great, this vendor not so much.
Wix is a good solution for some people. WP is a good solution for some people. Weebly and Shopigy and Web.com and AEM and Google Pages and and and an can be good for different people.
If Matt (and the WP community) don't like how Wix markets itself then don't use the service. I do know, however, that the WP community is talking about Wix a lot in the last couple days, more than they ever have before.
(Also, enjoy the headphones b/c I promise Matt isn't sending you any)
It all made sense once I discovered that Wix is a "no code" "solution" to basic web page development and not (just) a shop of poorly paid third-worlders half-assing it for crumbs. The quality of output is similar, for similar reasons (you get what you pay for).