Every time a beautiful website is launched, an angel gets its wings. Our mission at Wix is to empower people all over the world to build their own sites and fill the web with greatness. With a powerful platform, a free drag and drop website builder and the guidance of our experts, Wix makes it easier than ever to create a website that can boost your career and make your dreams come true.
How does it work? The Wix Editor is filled with brilliant features and functionalities that help users create professional, sleek sites. Once you get to know them, all you need to do is click, drag and drop. Ready to meet them? These 10 advanced Wix tips and tricks, our little web design secrets, will introduce some of the most exciting capabilities that Wix has to offer when it comes to learning how to make a website.
01. Know your site layout
Your site’s layout is the foundation of the entire design scheme. Understanding your layout will help you determine many of the crucial decisions that you’ll make as you build your site. When you’re considering how to structure your layout, think about how you want to divide your site into content sections.
One option is to use Strips, which split up your site into full-width horizontal rectangular blocks. Another is to use Wix Columns, which divides the site into vertical sections. Each of these two options provide a slightly different browsing experience and influence the way your site visitors interact with your content. Want to mix things up? You can integrate strips and columns on one page.
02. Customize your site colors to match your site’s vibe
In web design, colors mean more than just blue, green or pink. They generate an entire atmosphere and convey a message in visual rather than textual means. In short, colors determine more than just the appearance of your site, and that’s how you should approach them. Take a look at this guide for choosing the right color scheme. Once you have it figured out, follow these steps to adjust site colors to match your website’s goal and personality.
03. Beautify your page with scrolling effects
It’s time to stop thinking about website backgrounds as something static. Backgrounds can be vibrant and exciting, and they can impact your site’s overall design greatly. Parallax scrolling effects add a dynamic layer to your website’s background or to the background of specific strips. Check out the gorgeous scrolling effects available in the Wix Editor and discover how they can transform the browsing experience of your site altogether.
04. Upload your own fonts
Your website, your way. That’s the Wix motto, and we apply it to every web design element – from colors and images and even to fonts. The Wix Editor offers a large selection of fonts to choose from, but if you can’t find one that suits your branding strategy and your design vision, we encourage you to upload your own fonts and use them freely.
05. Add professional photos from Bigstock
There’s no overstating the importance of high-quality visuals in professional web design, but hiring the service of a photographer can get quite straining for a small-biz budget. That doesn’t mean you have to compromise, though. Through the Wix Editor, you get access to an immense selection of professionally shot and edited images from Bigstock, one of the leading image banks on the market. For a fair fee, you can use these photos on your own site and achieve the trustworthy and dignified look that your site deserves.
06. Resize multiple elements
There are many small details involved in the process of creating a site. Our job is to simplify these minute tasks and let you focus on the big picture as much as possible. One feature we created for this purpose lets you control the size of several site elements simultaneously and resize them to match with one another. This little feature can save you a whole lot of time if you’re working with many elements that require uniformity, like thumbnails, icons, buttons, etc.
07. Make your galleries dynamic with hover effects
Site visitors like to feel that they are browsing a site that reacts to them and to their actions. There are several methods to incorporate this notion into your web design, and one of them is using hover effects that respond to the cursor’s movements. Applying hover effects to image galleries in particular creates a conversation-like user experience – the visitor moves around, your site acknowledges the motion. In case you’re not a fan of flashy design effects, we intentionally created these hover effects to be subtle and smooth.
08. Bring your site to life with video backgrounds
We are continuously impressed by how video backgrounds contribute to websites’ look and feel. They are visually striking, but they don’t necessarily take over the entire design scheme. They can be abstract or they can depict a very specific situation, and they immediately generate an unmatched impression. Granted, video backgrounds are not suitable for every website topic or target audience, but if you think that they would work well with yours, we encourage you to give it a shot.
09. Highlight your works with slideshows
The Slideshow feature allows users to put a visual emphasis on some aspect of their website that they wish to promote, like products on sale, upcoming performances, new blog posts and so forth. We designed the slideshow to function like a stage, where you can shine the spotlight straight on these items. Slideshows are powerful in grabbing site visitors’ attention and directing their focus to where you want it. And of course, it is easily customizable so you can continuously edit and update the slides’ content.
10. Keep it straight with this alignment tool
Symmetry and alignment are extremely important in creating a professional website and should not be overlooked. These two words can give web designers a major headache, but fear not, for we have just the preventive treatment – the editor alignment tool that lets you position and adjust multiple items at the same time while keeping them neatly parallel and straight with each other. With this little genie of a feature, you no longer need to drag each item individually and strain your eyes and your wrists. Alignment solved!