An experiential review on creating a website using wix.com
I am a wix user, i have been for over two years now, and I have to tell you that I have been having a pretty good experience so far, my background is definitely defined by Marketing and Communication, I understand little to nothing with regards to HTML coding and other technical concepts, but I do want to share with you my experience with wix, having chosen the portal to create something that is very dear to me, my website masseriafaraone.com designed and published with the use of the Wix platform.
I opened up a wix account for over 2 years now, and I have to say I have been having a pretty amazing experience so far with it. It was either going to be WordPress or Wix. Honestly, I did use WordPress for the creation of a blog and a website, but using WordPress is just far too complicated. Complicated in the sense that its unfriendly to edit your site, right there and then on the page. I also have to mention that the choice of website templates specifically for the hotel-category was more appealing aesthetically from the Wix platform.
It all started with the choice of Wix Theme. There are a bunch of Wix Themes available actually, and categorized according to Business area and focus, which I found very useful as to where to start developing a website with an abstract concept in mind.
So I chose a Hotel themed Wix Template, but quietly frankly if you were to compare the original Wix website template with the current state of art of my website; you would clearly realize there has been a complete freedom of change, creating a unique website. When I say freedom of change within the wix template, I mean free kingdom. You can literally change anything from scratch from graphic, to text, to letter-type, to color scheme, to images and videos, and so on. There is freedom for graphic designs and animated designs, especially now with the possibility to code in HTML within the back-end editor of your Wix website.
The freedom of change allows you to design your own unique brand and identity which is vital for certain business in order to distinguish themselves in highly competitive sectors like the service industry, in my case the Hotel and Travel industry. The only downside is that once you have updated the desktop view, sometimes the mobile-view alters completely, which is absolutely fine I understand. But still wix.com should some how notify me when I publish my desktop editor to go have a look at my mobile editor and see if there are parts I need to change or modify.
This one time I added a new content part within my desktop view on my website, and completely forgot to change the mobile view, after a few weeks I entered the mobile view and realized the page (very important page) was a complete mess – like see picture here _
As I previously mentioned, my choice of business use for the Wix template was specifically for my bed & breakfast venture, Masseria Faraone a historic farmhouse in the south of Italy. The plan which I have been using and still currently am using is the unlimited + Wix Hotels Premium Plan by Wix.
The Wix Hotels app is absolutely phenomenal, I get to have my very own booking system directly from my website masseriafaraone.com and I avoid the Booking and Airbnb fees and commission. Which is freaking amazing because I get to save 15% of commission from Booking reservations.
The sole negative aspect of using the Wix Hotels app is the current state of affairs for what regards the synching of the calendars. Updating calendars is one of the most important jobs for when you manage a hotel or bed and breakfast. You obviously want it to be done correctly and precisely at all times, especially during high seasons when it can get chaotic. When you do not update your portal’s calendars and online listings you will have the chance to experience an overbooking, which is not quite the best day for a hotel manager. The Wix Hotels app does not allow you to synch your hotel calendar with Booking.com or Airbnb.com. You can only synch you Wix Hotel calendar with Google Calender or TripAdvisor but still the two most important holiday rental platforms are not compatible to sync with Wix?
One last point to mention to complete this experiential review with Wix is the topic of Customer Service. Yes, customer service, my favorite jam. So Wix is quite smart when it comes to accessing or contacting Customer Service – there is no clear contact details listed anywhere. I actually had to search online how and where to find the Wix Customer Service page. Turns out it’s a ticket system which I would have never been able to find on my own wondering around the Wix platform. The wix.com customer service is indeed a ticket system – so you submit your ticket, wait a few hours, sometimes days, get your feedback, which is usually not a 100% answering your questions – and you keep in contact with this ticket until they solve your issue and the ticket can be closed.
You can imagine the down-sides, response time and the quality of the response can be improved.
Francesca Gianfiglio, owner and founder of masseriafaraone.com | Airbnb Superhost | Booking.com Guest Award
