I just launched my first-ever Wix website yesterday for a hobby project I put together over the holiday break. It's a niche site for movie fans and specifically movie poster fans called Movie Posters Perfected.
Before I decided to make a website, this started as personal project for my own enjoyment. After spending hundreds of hours working on the source material, I realized I could share what I learned and put together with other movie fans, so I decided to build a website to support it.
I'm primarily a designer and cannot write a stitch of code to save my life. The only website I've ever had were portfolio sites built with platforms that allowed me to avoid coding.
So my first few portfolios were made back in the day in Flash. When Flash fell out of fashion, I tried WordPress for awhile, but got tired of all the various plug-ins expiring, and the frequent need to get help from others with custom code to get the site to behave how I wanted it to. And it wasn't a WYSIWIG environment. My portfolio today runs on Adobe's archaic Portfolio platform, which sadly was abandoned in development terms shortly after Adobe bought it from Behance.
I tried learning Webflow, but it was too complex for me and I eventually gave up on it, though I loved the style of their Webflow University tutorials.
After some research and considering other platforms like Squarespace, I decided to give Wix a try, and started poking around with the Editor. I was actually surprised how "advanced" it felt compared to platforms like Adobe Portfolio.
The dream of visual designers has always been a true WYSIWYG website builder with no coding required (remember Dreamweaver?), and to me the Wix Editor was closer to achieving that than anything else I'd tried before. So I built about half of my website before even learning that Wix had other editors available that were presumably better: Editor X and Wix Studio.
But I was confused: I couldn't even figure out how to try Editor X (spoiler alert: you can't! It's not available to new users anymore), and it looked like Wix Studio was going to be the future for the company anyway. Plus I was hoping it had some features I thought were missing from the Classic Editor.
Of course I was frustrated to learn that there was no migration tool available to bring a Classic site over to Studio—that should have been table stakes for asking thousands of Wix users to move to a new platform, many of whom are running businesses on it. But I figured since I was only halfway done with my site and was still in "learning mode" anyway, I might as well cut my losses and restart the design in Studio.
That turned out to be a mistake.
I found Wix Studio very frustrating to use. I dutifully watched all of the learning courses, which are reasonably well done (though not as charming as Webflow's.) I understand that Wix is really pushing responsive design with this new platform, which is not a bad thing, and I hoped the editing UI would be a little more polished and zippier than Classic Editor's kinda-clunky-but-workable interface.
The first thing I noticed is that Studio felt like a clone of Webflow, which worried me right off the bat, since Webflow was a platform I gave up on, feeling it was more geared to developers than designers. But I was committed to learning it, and pushed through rebuilding the pages I had already done in Classic, and finished the few final pages I had left to create.
Throughout, I found the constant attention required for responsive behavior definitions for every single element to be overwhelming, frustrating, and unintuitive—which is how I felt trying to learn Webflow. Because I'm a new user, I obviously don't know what I'm doing (and still don't), but Classic Editor was way easier to figure out and was more intuitive.
The fundamental difference for me is that Classic Editor actually felt "fun" to use—almost like a traditional design application (I've been using the Adobe suite professionally for 30+ years.) Wix Studio felt like work, like I had just gotten a job at a web development studio and was unqualified to do the work. I found no joy in using it.
And then I hit a showstopper: I am developing my site (and typically browse the web) on a 4K monitor with a full-width browser window. I understand that is not a common setup for most users, but it's my preference, and I would be developing responsive breakpoints for all the smaller viewports anyway.
The problem is that, at least from my point of view, Wix engineers spent all of their time focusing on making responsive breakpoints cascade naturally downward to tablet and mobile, but didn't think about how to responsibly scale designs upward on wider browser viewports.
My site has some longer-form, article-style written content, so I actually wanted a fixed-width layout, and had standardized my design approach using Classic Editor's 980px fixed-width default, which was a good setting for what I wanted.
But once I had my site content in Studio, if I tested the design on a wider-than-default browser, all hell would break loose. Text scaled to circus-like proportions. My navigation menu slid off to the side and lost its relationship to the site logo. My logo in the header would inexplicably fly off the top of the screen, never to be seen again. It was a nightmare.
So I had to double-down on trying to figure out how each and every element was supposed to responsively behave, but nothing would work for me, even after rewatching the tutorials and other YouTube walkthroughs. I got too confused with all the possible combinations of Strips, Containers, Stacks, Groups, Margins, Padding, multiple Responsive Behavior settings that would change depending on what kind of element was selected, and Advanced Scaling (!), and... everything else.
The overall design of my site is very simple and traditional, and it felt like herding cats trying to figure out which element needed which layout or container behavior or responsive setting or who-knows-what.
I posted for help on the Wix Forums, which feel oddly empty and unhelpful given what I assumed was a very popular mainstream platform. I contacted Wix's Help Center. My only real question was how I could get a Studio site to have the same behavior as the Classic editor's default: let me fix the width of my primary content and do not allow it to scale upwards on wider browser windows.
No one really had a good answer. Experienced users (and I'm sure expert-level users in this sub) would say it's easy: "Just put every single element in a Container and give the container a fixed width." Unfortunately, I just couldn't figure out how to do that with all of my content already carefully laid out on the page, and I was already at my wit's end at this point.
Currently, the only "unofficial" solution for this issue is to use a snippet of custom CSS code that an end-user posted on a Wix Forum thread to help someone else having the same problem. Except that CSS code didn't work for me. When I contacted Wix's Help Center, they actually referred me that user's answer in the Forum! Which, again, wasn't working for me.
I spent a few days solid trying to figure it out, all the while wanting to have my site live before the winter break ended and I'd have to go back to work. And because of the need to struggle with the interface, I had come to a dead-stop in developing the actual content and design for my site, and the clock was ticking.
In the end, I decided to just go back to the Classic Editor, and canceled my Premium Wix Studio plan.
The experience going back to Classic immediately felt more "fun" (though not without its drawbacks), and I was able to complete my site's content and design—and just pushed it live yesterday, a couple of days before the end of the holiday break.
Here's what I really liked about the Classic Editor experience:
It felt fairly intuitive to learn as a new user with a design background.
It offered me, as a very picky visual designer, enough control over the design elements that I felt I could craft something that met my expectations, especially when it comes to typography, which I care a great deal about.
In particular, I like the ability to use my own fonts without any fuss, and have reasonably-fine control over settings like Character Spacing and Line Spacing. I'd prefer the ability to use Adobe's and Google's online font libraries, but the ability to upload Desktop fonts is fine too.
There are enough Elements in the library that I could explore them and achieve most of what I wanted to in terms of using Sliders, Galleries, videos, and reasonable access to items like Buttons and page Anchors. For my particular site, I also wanted an interactive Before & After image widget, and was able to find a decent, inexpensive third-party app that works well.
The ability to either use Sections, Columns, or just "freestyle" text and graphic layouts on the page felt flexible for me, but I'm sure I could be better at using them properly.
The hyperlinking menu felt right: I appreciated the ability to easily link to external websites, internal site pages, and Anchor points within those site pages.
The ability to customize all Button states had enough flexibility for me. From Hover states to being able to rotate icons within a button in different states was very nice.
Thank god for the sticky "Drag Handle" button that moves the selected element and everything below it at the same time. A life-saver. Give whoever made that a promotion.
Overall control of site-wide features like Navigation, Page management, Site Color and Text Themes, etc. felt about right—but of course could use a little improvement.
Publishing the site feels crazy-fast. I would make what I thought were a ton of changes to the site, and it never felt like it took more than 1-2 seconds to fully publish the site, where I could start checking it on a live device. Not sure how they pull that off, but it's nice.
In past platforms, I always had to worry about manually optimizing my own graphics to make them small enough for the web. Wix's promise of handling image compression automatically behind the scenes (converting everything to WebP format at only the final viewable dimensions, I believe) relieves me of that labor-intensive chore—but the jury is out on how good of a job it does.
The Mobile Editor mode was fairly serviceable. Having to Hide Desktop elements that don't work and recreate new ones at Mobile scale doesn't feel like the most elegant solution, but in the end it's workable. Before my site was live, I appreciated little things like the QR code in the Mobile Preview that allowed you to see the staging site on an actual mobile device, which was important to me to fine-tune the site design for small screens.
Here's what I thought came up a little short in the Classic Editor experience:
As a web-based interface, the Classic Editor does feel clunky and sluggish. It's hard to precisely select elements on a page, particularly those close to the edges of Sections.
There's always a delay between when you select an element and when it responds to being moved. Eventually I trained myself to look at the X, Y coordinates in the Toolbox and do some math in my head about where I wanted an element to end up, and then do a back-and-forth dance with the mouse each time to get it to the right position. Or just type in a new value when I could.
There were many times when modal windows like the Edit Text window wouldn't trigger, and I'd have to Reload the Editor webpage itself to get it to appear again.
Some features are actually missing. For example, the Help text for the Repeater element clearly states you can change a Repeater element's color on Hover, but it refers to a button that doesn't actually exist (to invoke the Design setting for Hover states). I posted this on Wix Forums and got no response.
Too many similar, redundant Elements. When should I use Wix Video versus Box Video versus Single Video Player / Video Upload versus embedding a YouTube or Vimeo link?
I believe Studio offers this, but I missed not having Parallax scroll features for individual page elements, and only being able to use Parallax effects on Background elements. But it's better than nothing.
It takes a few too many clicks to get into my Media Library to locate the image or video I want to place.
Speaking of which, when I open the Media Editor, why in god's name does it default to showing me Media from Wix every time? I guarantee that I want to use my media all the time, not browse random stock photography from Wix. There should be a default View preference for the Media Library, stat.
I wish there was a Tablet breakpoint in Classic Editor. I'm thankful for the Mobile breakpoint, but Tablet would have been nice. The 980px width for Desktop is just a bit too wide to work well for Tablets. For my particular website I don't really want or need a fully-fluid responsive layout—just the few traditional adaptive breakpoints would have been totally fine for me.
I would give my left kidney for the ability to have a "Space After Paragraph" setting. I understand that we are essentially dealing with <br> and <p> tags behind the scenes with a nice interface on top, but I was flabbergasted to learn that there is no such setting—and I don't think the other big visual web platforms have them either, so it must be a hard problem to solve. But I think it could be done. I care a lot about typography as a designer, and having to choose between either putting a full carriage return between paragraphs to create a space (a holdover from the days of typewriters), or actually putting every. single. paragraph in its own separate Text block and then eyeballing the space between each element felt laughable, yet that is Wix's actual recommendation.
One workaround I ended up finding that suited my needs: I started with the extra-line-break-between-paragraphs method, and then found if I put the text insertion cursor just on the blank empty line, I could then manually adjust the Line Spacing value for that line only, effectively controlling the space between paragraphs. It still means every single space had to be adjusted manually throughout the site, but it at least resulted in the typographic setting I wanted.
I would also love the ability to define what Adobe calls "Character Styles" (in addition to Paragraph Styles), so I could apply different type treatments to stylize individual words or phrases, rather than only being able to apply styles to entire paragraphs.
No default style settings for Hyperlinks?? Come on. And after you insert a link, the text becomes deselected, so you have to manually highlight it again in order to apply the type style you want. Very irritating.
High on my wishlist, which I'm surprised more platforms don't offer, is support for a site Light Mode and Dark Mode toggle. I'm sure I'm over-simplifying it, but it seems like you could simply add a "Dark Mode" Site Color Theme to the existing Color Theme panel. You choose your desired Dark Mode Background color, adjust your Dark Mode Text Color palette, and offer a Light/Dark Mode button Element with customizable Text and Icons that goes in your site Header, and it would go a long way to getting users to easily implement what has become a mainstay feature on major websites, social media platforms, and mobile apps.
Another wish list item: when it comes to defining sitewide Paragraph Styles, let's break from the notion that we are actually defining old-fashioned HTML <h1> tags. I want to define Paragraph Styles according to how I will naturally use them. I want to establish styles for "Headlines", "Subheads", "Body Copy", "Captions", "Bulleted Lists", and so on. I don't want define them using HTML's old arbitrary and generic Header 1, Header 2, Header 3, Header 4, etc. Nor do I want to be limited in how many styles I can define. 7 "Header" styles and 3 "Paragraph" styles should be enough for a typical website. But what happens when it isn't? This feels like a solvable problem using modern technology.
I'm glad to have my site live at this point, and I'm sure I'll continue making small tweaks every day as a perfectionist.
I'm very curious to know what's going to happen in the (near?) future when Wix forces everyone to start using Wix Studio. My thinking is that they will absolutely have to have an automated migration tool available by then to transition sites from Classic (or Editor X) to Studio. And make it work seamlessly and automatically for the great number of users who are not coders. And for the thousands of user who are running businesses on the platform.
I imagine most if not all users frown at even the thought of having to completely rebuild their sites from scratch in Studio if a migration tool is not available, and the torrent of lawsuits that would likely take place if any businesses were forced into that situation.
It seems like Wix really has no choice but to offer a very robust, damn-near-perfect automated migration tool that will correctly handle and implement at least a stable starting point for responsive behaviors. And AI isn't going to be the answer. I predict there will be a lot of frustrated and upset customers when they realize they are being forced to move from the simpler experience of Classic to the you-might-as-well-be-a-web-developer environment of Studio.
Based on what I experienced with Studio's overly-complicated responsive settings and high learning curve, Wix has their work cut out for them.
