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Comment by rollcat | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes have to interact with Wix for one customer. It's a complete nightmare to work with. Their WYSIWYG editor takes minutes to load on an M1 Mac with a decent Internet connection, and every operation is incredibly sluggish.

What they've done with this AI is rather... unimpressive. ChatGPT already generates pretty decent websites, we've generated more than one demo or PoC with it. They really should focus on their core product UX, because it's... just trash.

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I also found their WYSIWYG editor unintuitive and fixing anything larger than minor (or adding basic features) required you to switch into their code mode or whatever, and that got overwritten with their updates..

Interesting! Any thoughts on their competitors; Squarespace, etc.? I've been using a WYSIWYG service I'm not super happy with the cost and have been considering moving to a different one. Wix was pretty high on my list. I'd be interested to hear if there's a preference for X, Y, or Z for this or that reason.

Having worked with WYSIWYG web editors dating back to Frontpage and also Wix the critiques here are similar to all editors — they’re finicky and quirky, slow to load, and hard to do truly custom things that go outside their templates or rigid systems. Wix is neither better nor worse. If you can work with it great. I advise a couple of nonprofits and i set them up with wix not because it’s super customizable or fast, but because it’s useable by laypeople and hosting is included.

Any mention of Frontpage should come with a trigger warning! After all these years, I still haven't forgiven Microsoft.

Was horrible but also started my web dev career, so…

Squarespace (and Weebly which Squarespace ate) are simpler to use than Wix, in my experience. I found Wix particular unintuitive. Which may explain their push to go for a prompt-based approach.

As a professional web dev who hates these kinds of tools for the most part, I actually liked Squarespace's tool for doing simple static sites for a couple of friends.

How do you use ChatGPT to generate websites? Any particular process or tools?

Let it stay crap, leaves more of a market for human web devs.

Framer, what you want is framer.

Re: sluggish - my experience as well developing a plugin for Wix

Bubble’s devX and speed on the other hand was surprisingly good

Not sure why this has been downvoted? Bubble is an impressive piece of kit. As an engineer I’d still much prefer to write code, but I get the value - I’ve witnessed non-engineers craft legit web applications. DB, workflows, client state - it’s powerful but also accessible.

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