A project made for friends from another career (Bachelor of Business Administration).
One day, I received a message from a friend asking me if I had used Wix before. I said no and asked the reason for her question. She explained that her team had to present a webpage for a company for which they had previously created a brand image, defined the objectives, products, and some legal terms. They had to publish all that information on this webpage, which was essentially an e-commerce site. The only requirement was that it needed to be built with Wix.
As a rookie in web development, I had misconceptions about these kinds of technologies. I mean, the bad reputation a developer gets for using these no-coding tools for making projects. I thought it was terrible even considering the idea of implementing a webpage using Wix. But one of my professors told me that it was somewhat prejudiced to think that way, so I decided to accept the task.
I had no experience at all using Wix, so it was somewhat complex for me to use it. That was ironic, because these tools target people who don’t know anything about coding a webpage and want visual management to create the page they desire. But in my case, I was searching for any option that would allow me to write code, which was not possible. Within days, I started to understand how this tool worked and now that I’m writing this, I look back and notice the simplicity of these tools for some features. The styling is easy with coding or non-coding tools, but aspects like the payment feature, the stock of products, were easier using this tool. For the stock, the page comes with a dashboard where you can personalize the products shown, the content and styles of the page, purchase and connect a domain, the delivery system of the products, SEO recommendations, and even help messages from a chat integrated into the page. Making this possible with coding would of course be possible, but it would cost a lot of time. It would involve an admin dashboard and all those features. That was another point my professor made. Most of the time, these tools help in real situations to save time and help the client understand how the page can be managed with no coding tools.
So, the products of the new company were added from the dashboard and everything was set up easily thanks to Wix. The payments, if I’m not wrong, are with Stripe and PayPal, and it also offers the possibility to sign up with different providers. But in this case, that feature wasn’t fully applied because a real Stripe account involves real information about the company, which was fictitious.
It took me some days to achieve the result and the requirements they wanted for their project page, but my friends were satisfied with the final product. The professor congratulated them for the page and, if we think seriously, it has some potential.
If somebody asks me if I would use Wix again, I would say that it depends on the kind of project and the time I have to make it. After using it, I still feel some limitations creating the pages and some features. I would like to do it myself to have full control of everything, but I have to agree it’s a good tool and as a Software Engineer, I should be open to testing new and different technologies that could be useful one day.
