As I am spending more and more time with the people of The Rio Texas Conference and I am hearing a lot of need for assistance in building and renovating websites. Many (if not most) of these churches are working with very small budgets and little to no staff. I am grateful that we live in a moment where great websites are possible with little money and little time. If I had to pick one communications priority for a church with no website, it would be simple: build a website.
So, in my free time, I have been exploring the many options for building inexpensive websites. I am focusing on options that will work for people with little or no experience in websites or tech in general. My latest exploration led me to WIX. WIX is another template-based website platform that attempts to make having a website cheap and easy. Their prices are certainly good from free to around $40 a month. To check it out, I built another fake website.
I wasn’t happy with any of the WIX templates so I started with a blank slate. In trying to build an attractive site as quickly as possible, that was a mistake. If I had a clear design in mind, this would offer great flexibility. However, if you just want to jump in and get something nice published, templates are the way to go. Apparently WIX has some more and better templates if you upgrade from a free plan to a paid plan.
Overall, the user interface is very intuitive. From my limited experience with both, I think Weebly may have them beat on ease of use. WIX also offers a bunch of free stuff when you sign up for their plans, including some help with getting your site a little love from search engines.
The more I dug into WIX, the more I liked it. It has some unique features, like full color palletes so your sites colors work together. They also make it really easy to connect with other platforms like social media sites, calendars, and online giving. They have an “app market” that makes integration fairly seamless.
I am going to play with WIX a bit more. In the meantime, have you built a site on WIX? Let me know about your experience in the comments. And check out Bob’s UMC at http://wrice7.wix.com/bobsumc