Oh, how I HATE sites like Wix and Squarespace

I know they serve an important market, but damn, the way they dumb down creating and editing a website makes those of us with even mediocre HTML skills cringe with their interfaces

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

A couple of years ago, I helped a colleague get her Squarespace site set up. She is a photographer who specializes in shooting local school sporting events and doing formal photoshoots for students (as part of their graduation celebration), and she is damn good at it.

Creating websites? Not so much. She got started, and then I spent a couple of weekends getting the site in shape, all the while I was pulling my hair out.

Why?

Well, it is a walled garden. It is a Fisher Price version of website creation, drag and drop, and guided path modification. If one has worked on complex documents in Microsoft Word, or a basic desktop publishing package then you can build a cool looking website.

Alas, to make this work, these services limit what you can and can’t do, making the placement of elements scripted, and coercing the users to build functional, but constrained sites.

And I get why. Having dabbled in front end web site creation for almost 15 years, you can really foul a whole site’s look and feel by a misplaced comma in a CSS file.

Recently, my wife has become part of a local non-profit, and they have some issues on their website. I have been asked to poke into it, and alas, it is a Wix site.

Not only was it a design by committee, but the people who built it originally left a lot of trial and error components in the back end, making it difficult to figure out what is active, and what it isn’t.

Groan.

Alas, I am making progress, but it ain’t easy. That makes it time for a music break:

And I am OUT.