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I’m close to finishing migrating a site off of Wix to a static site generator. The actual Wix product is horrifically bad. Unending JS, basic functionality imp

I’m close to finishing migrating a site off of Wix to a static site generator. The actual Wix product is horrifically bad. 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.

hypermachine 6y ago
I have tried many, many website editors. Wix is one of the better ones. Among the big three managed website builders of Wix/Squarespace/Weebly, Wix has the most powerful editor. Sure it's very unintuitive if your are a frontend web developer. But it maps very well to pre-2008 desktop application builders. Take a look at the Retool editor if you want a better explanation. The ideas behind them are similar; rapid development based on pixel grids. 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.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  I was building WYSIWYG CMSes when IE6 was still the dominant browser. The way wix works is fundamentally flawed. Sure the others have flaws. But treating a webpage as InDesign was bad way before any consideration of mobile. Even before there was a concept of the various things that coalesced as responsive, web content has always flowed vertically. Wix treats it as a pdf and just makes you reflow any content any time you edit anything above. That’s awful.

hypermachine 6y ago

I have tried many, many website editors. Wix is one of the better ones. Among the big three managed website builders of Wix/Squarespace/Weebly, Wix has the most powerful editor. Sure it's very unintuitive if your are a frontend web developer. But it maps very well to pre-2008 desktop application builders. Take a look at the Retool editor if you want a better explanation. The ideas behind them are similar; rapid development based on pixel grids. 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.

eyelidlessness 6y ago
I was building WYSIWYG CMSes when IE6 was still the dominant browser. The way wix works is fundamentally flawed. Sure the others have flaws. But treating a webpage as InDesign was bad way before any consideration of mobile. Even before there was a concept of the various things that coalesced as responsive, web content has always flowed vertically. Wix treats it as a pdf and just makes you reflow any content any time you edit anything above. That’s awful.