Website Design in Wix

Website Design

Have you ever been in a situation where you felt that it would be better or it would have been more organized if there was a website? For me, this issue came up when I became more involved with my Residence Hall. I felt like it would be a lot better and easier to find out when events were happening at my Residence Hall and it would be easier to promote certain events with this tool. I talked to my Hall Director and connected with the Digital Scholarship Lab and began my journey of designing my very first website.

Features you want in your website as you are trying to decide what service to use and how to design it:

• Easy to navigate
• Organized and clear
• Library of add-ins and plug-ins
• Simplicity

I remember when I first had the idea of making a website I was very overwhelmed and intimidated. Designing a website is a huge deal and can be daunting at first. However, hopefully by the time you are done reading this blog post, designing your own website won’t be hard at all.

There are so many different helper cites you can use to help get you started.

A few examples are

• Wix https://www.wix.com/
• Weebly https://www.weebly.com/
• Adobe Portfolio https://portfolio.adobe.com/
• Squarespace https://www.squarespace.com/
• Wordpress https://wordpress.com/create

All of these platforms have their own pros and cons but the most straightforward and easy to navigate is Wix. Some of the other websites are less structured and allow for more freedom, however that means they are a lot more complex and require some more background information. I ended up using Wix and had a positive experience.

The first step to use Wix is create an account. There is a small negative issue with Wix. They do not let you pick the URL of your website. The website name will be your email. So to combat this issue I created a new email account with the name that I want my URL to be.

Next you want to hit the button in the top right corner called Create New Site.

This will take you to deciding what you are building a site for. Do not take this part too seriously. They have this here because it is what they believe would be the best template for that specific topic. Feel free to explore and do whatever you want with this.

If you want a little bit of freedom with the design of your template than click Create your website with Wix Editor. Otherwise pick the left option and you will have a quick website made in minutes!

I ended up designing my website myself. From there you decide and explore the templates and start plugging in what you want displayed on the website and different tabs.

Some cool features you can use are

• Inserting links
• Adding google calendars
• Creating more tabs
• Adding contact info and links based off of social media icons
• i.e. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter

At the end of my project, I ended up creating a website that can potentially be a huge asset to Residence Halls at Marquette. learned how to create a website on a pre-made template but still make it unique and personal in my own way. Some assumptions people have when using Wix is that everyone’s websites will look similar because the templates are similar. However, it is important to recognize that you are still able to make changes to themes, colors, fonts, designs, and more. There is a lot you can still do with this platform.

You can create an organizational tool like Wix to help you do the same for certain aspects in your life.