Wix – Create Your Own Flash Website

A website company called Wix has developed a simple and (mostly) intuitive way for users to build flash websites and widgets for FREE. This company is a few years old and not yet as well known as it should be, but the potential for this website becoming an important resource for bloggers and internet marketers alike is tremendous.

Some marketers and bloggers have no need or desire to use Flash and that’s perfectly fine. Yet there are many other who wish they could utilize the effects Flash can provide but either don’t know how to go about writing the codes OR don’t want to pay the money to someone else who does know how to write flash codes. Wix allows its users to be their own flash designer for free (although you can always upgrade to more premium accounts, which obviously offers more benefits). You can use Wix to create not only websites, but also MySpace Layouts (admittedly, not many people use MySpace anymore – but for musicians with music on their MySpace page this could be a fantastic way to add pizzazz), widgets, blogs, newsletters, banners, flyers…the list goes on and on.

Wix is initially slightly overwhelming – although it is to a large degree intuitive it does take a bit of playing around with it to fully appreciate all the effects and options at your disposal. There are thousands of free customizable templates for you to use, and once you pick the theme or template you desire you are automatically taken to a wix editor.

This wix editor is impressive and offers a myriad of features you can add to customize your page. For instance, you can add pictures, videos, and music in addition to adding various widgets including RSS, paypal, Google Maps, comments, and contact forms. You can add shapes, give your webpage animations, and introduce visual effects for user behavior. Naturally you can change colors and texts (and there is a wide variety of unique fonts – I happen to like the “pez” font). You can modify or eliminate menus and headliners, and for particular objects on a page you can rotate, resize, and rearrange to your hearts content.

There is so much more you can do using wix – I’ve barely scratched the tip of the iceberg. The best way to learn more about wix and all of its incredible features is to explore it yourself.

Wix is also very important for another reason -Wix websites are fully compatible with search engines! Traditional Flash is not SEO compatible, but because Wix has developed a new way to create content (a hybrid of HTML and Flash – even though the Wix editor relies on Flash, there’s no need to create codes) you’ll be able to use Wix-created websites or widgets for effective promotions and optimizations. For websites this is a HUMONGOUS development, but for widget purposes (such as Facebook widgets) the SEO benefit is not relevant.

I was playing around with the Wix features and decided to post my results into a quickie website (this took maybe ten minutes to make). I’m not great at creating flash codes so if I had to do this the traditional way this would have taken me FOREVER.

Okay, forever is perhaps a slight exaggeration, but the fact that this little website only took ten minutes to make (and that’s including ‘mess around’ time to figure out the features) really shows how easy it is to make a professional-looking website or widget quickly. My “mess-around” website with its minimal effects is only the bare bones of a potential website…and with more time and focus it is absolutely possible to make a stunning and SEO compatible website!

I will explore Wix further (and perhaps you will too) and as I discover more about Wix I will share the findings in future posts.