[WIX – Wix.com] Scaling Profitably

Sometime in late 2015, I built my first website.  Or rather, I purchased a subscription on weebly.com, a website builder, and proceeded to upload photos and drag and drop pre-configured modules into a blank screen.  The process was easy, which helped as I was clueless; the layout was unoriginal and austere, which sufficed as the site’s only purpose was to showcase a few research notes I had written.  But my ambitions grew.  I wanted to embed write-ups and exhibits as pdf’s that splayed, unconstrained, across the page.  I had big ideas about how to size and arrange blocks of content that didn’t conform to weebly’s grid.  The limited font and color palette annoyed me.  I contacted weebly’s customer service staff, who were as helpful as they could be…but, it was clear that weebly’s capabilities were ill-suited to meet my increasingly obsessive demands.  So, I cancelled my account and moved my site to WordPress.

[As you can gather from looking at the scuttleblurb site today, most of these big plans quickly died].

[When talking about these website builders, it’s almost impossible not to pedantically recite feature sets, infomercial-like.  I apologize in advance]

Little did I know, around the same time that I was futzing around with weebly, an Israeli competitor called Wix was about six months away from introducing Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) to the US market.  ADI is neat.  After you answer a series of questions – what kind of site are you designing (watch store, flower store, streaming music, etc)? do you need booking or e-commerce functionality? – and enter some basic information (company’s name, address, email, social media links, etc.), Wix’s AI engine then scours the web and its own proprietary collection of text and tens of thousands of images, selects content that is most relevant to your business, and…well…builds a website for you.  In minutes.  Complete with booking and e-commerce functionality (if that’s what you asked for).  The company’s supervised learning algorithm has been trained with over a decade’s worth of data from over 100mn registered users to home in on color schemes and layouts that work best for your [hotel, restaurant, clothing store, flower store, cupcake store].

You can then use the Wix Editor to make whatever changes you want to the AI engine’s best guess at what you need.  And even here, the robot holds your hand.  For instance, if you want to change the font in a given module, you can click “do it for me” and a ghostly cursor dot will appear on the screen, clicking on all the things you’d be clicking if you were moving the mouse and making the changes on your own.  There is even a little banner next to the ghost cursor that explains what’s being done at each step.

And even while Wix’s functionality seemingly disintermediates web developers, the company offers a development environment for them as well.  After years in development, several months ago Wix rolled out a set of tools in open beta (the same set, in fact, that Wix uses in-house), Wix Code, for professional web designers and coders to develop interactive web apps.  Developing a web app is more akin to writing a software application than designing a website.  Whereas a website is mostly just an online storefront with the same stale set of media on display for all visitors, a web app – tethered to an underlying database embedded with logic that pushes and pulls content to and from a visitor based on the time of day, the visitor’s location, and the visitor’s own specified criteria – provides an interactive, customized experience.  So, think Open Table.  Based on your previous searches and your current location, what you see on opentable.com when you visit the site today will differ from what you saw last week, and will also differ from what I see when I visit the site.  Roughly 20%+ of Wix’s current subscribers are professional web designers, so Code mostly caters to a new customer base.  Before Code, these developers had to stitch together disparate backend solutions, including server configuration and security protocols, and write and monitor applications in a separate IDE.  Wix Code bundles the back-end and provides the JavaScript development platform, leaving the coder free to focus on front-end code.

While DIY website creation is an incredibly crowded space, Wix has several key points of differentiation.  Code and ADI go well beyond what Wix’s peers offer.  Squarespace lets you create custom themes and templates, but you can’t get into the guts and define and model your own database, which is required for complex web apps.  And along with ADI, Wix also offers a stable of software applications and themes catered to various industry verticals – embedded with, say, bookings capability on Wix Hotels, streaming on Wix Music, and e-commerce on Wix Stores – providing far more relevant frameworks than the standard [event, blog, business, portfolio] theme categories you’ll find on weebly and Squarespace.  These industry vertical-specific themes now account for 30% of subscriptions, up from just 15% a few years ago.

Over the last 3-4 years, Adobe has included a website builder, Muse, in its Creative Cloud suite, but Muse does not have a database engine that supports blogging and e-commerce functionality out the box.  My sense is that Muse is not really for business owners but rather artists and designers who want to showcase on the web content they’ve created using other Adobe CC products.  Several years ago, Google became a domain registrar, and while they offer a very basic business landing page, along with the G Suite apps for small businesses, they have not really invested in this service at all and actually refer those who purchase domain names to Wix and other website builders.  This makes sense as Google’s ad-driven business model is about reaching horizontally across as many sites as possible and using site proliferation as a means to reflexively strengthen search – it doesn’t really matter who provides the site publishing tools as long as the sites get published.  Besides the companies I listed, there are many, many other site builders for amateurs that are essentially indistinguishable from one another.

[Muse was actually developed by the same engineers who developed Adobe’s page layout software, InSight.  It even has the same shortcut keys]

[If you’re an amateur website builder with very little coding experience like me, rather than build your site from scratch, you will select from any number of “themes”, which are the essential color scheme and layout of your site, to be then tweaked and populated with whatever content you choose.]

WordPress, an open source web management system, the largest one out there, is used by over a quarter of the top 10mn websites.  It is superior to Wix if your primary purpose is blogging.  With tens of thousands of themes to choose from and every conceivable plug-in you can imagine (some free, some not) from third party developers, WordPress offers far more choice than any out-of-the-box website builder.  But if, like me, you don’t really know what you’re doing, choice can be daunting and counterproductive.