Beginner’s website design using Wix and Canva
This is the story of how I went from a WYSIWYG novice to someone who could bash out an acceptable website, using cheap online platforms.
When we stated our company, Informazine, we knew we needed two things — a product, and a website.
The product was, of course, already there in incubation. But we needed a shopfront, and an identity.
Our last venture, a science and technology story condenser in the 00's, was built using Movable Type. Our needs were different this time around, and the visual world online had certainly changed too.
There are only two of us, and we needed to spend time coding our actual product rather than building a website from scratch, so we were looking for a quick and easy template maker. A brief search around brought up Wix.com — an incredibly easy to use sitebuilder.
Wix offers templates and apps for all kinds of websites, and it’s fairly easy to teach yourself to use the interface. It has its own blogging software, and offers a beautifully laid out ecommerce store integration.
It also offers domain registration, hosting, and mailboxes, but we didn’t need these as we already had our own set up.
The app from the Wix store that we have found most useful is the Twitter feed by POWr.io. It enables us to add our twitter stream to the site. The only drawback with this app is that it doesn’t just display your public feed, but also your replies and non-public tweets in the same stream. So you have to be quite cautious about what you might tweet to individuals as essentially everything will be megaphoned to every visitor on your homepage.
We’ve raised the need to separate the streams with Powr.io but unfortunately we haven’t heard if it’s on an upcoming feature list yet.
We’re not using all the features available through Wix such as demo videos, newsletters, and fancy timelines, but as the business grows we expect to create more engaging audience content.
Simple and useful as Wix is in site creation, its graphics are a little uninspiring, so we use Canva for graphic creation.
Canva is free to join, and provides good quality free templates and graphics.
Nicer graphics start at just $1.00, which for a cost-conscious startup is an almost painless purchase.
It’s really a very good pricing model, and with a claimed 9.2 million users all those easy-spend dollars must be adding up nicely.
In addition, to help create a whole corporate identity, Canva offer a “Canva for Work” paid account which supplies a brand kit enabling you to set up your brand’s colour palettes, upload your own brand fonts, and save your company logo. This is something we’re just starting on now. It’s quite interesting to think about your brand not just as a name, but as a logo that may require different implementations across different online and real-world formats.
A significant limitation with Wix is that you can’t import your own fonts. Our brand font is Xolonium by Severin Meyer. So we’ve given that part of the business to Canva — clearly an edge they have over the competition.
One of the best things about Canva is that they offer a free design school with genuinely useful content. Hopefully as time goes on we’ll use these lessons to create a brand that reflects a better design aesthetic.
Once the site was set up, we wanted to see what kind of traffic we could generate through the blog and through our twitter account. Wix offers SEO meta tag insertion and an SEO Wizard app, and allows your site to be connected to Google Analytics. Google Analytics continues to provide a fascinating daily insight into the origin and behaviour of our site visitors.
To generate a secondary revenue stream, we host Amazon Associate ads on our Blog page. We’re particular about the products we promote — we pick each one individually to try to ensure their relevance to our intended audience. We also keep these ads solely on the Blog page, so not to clutter up the site with annoying side content, and in addition I believe such clutter dilutes the experience of a brand.
We have a long way to go with developing our site into a clear and engaging visual representation of our brand, but it’s certainly an enjoyable process and, thanks to Wix and Canva, not an overly costly one.
sinead.odwyer@informazine.com
