I harbor no delusions that anyone reading this post has followed me here from my former WordPress portfolio site to this new Wix site. I mean, a portfolio site is little more than a portable collection of samples that can be shared with a quick copy/paste. No one actually reads anything, which I guess is sad considering that, in my case, almost everything in my portfolio is intended to read. It's not a relationship-building venture. Portfolio sites are transactional on a good day and ignorable most others.
Still, I felt the need to explain why I happily pulled the plug on my WordPress site, which I've been using for well over a decade now.
Because it sucked.
Not WordPress itself, although yeah it kinda sucks too in its Android-esque insistence that users know something about HTML or live in a perpetual state of frustrated linked to not being able to make their portfolios look the way they wanted to. To achieve the latter, you need a spendier site and maybe a bit more savvy development tools than my own rudimentary knowledge of HTML. Yes, if you pay enough, Wordpress can be pretty functional.
What sucked is that I'd recommended Wix sites to people forever and had never built one myself. So when I realized that my WordPress site, the most recent iteration of which I built back in 2017, I think, was littered with broken functionality, I figured it was time to see if Wix was as good as I'd been telling everyone.
If time-spent-building is an indicator, then no. I started building my Wix content portfolio in April. I finally finished a somewhat presentable iteration of it today. That's 4.5 months. Way longer than a "good" option should take for the extra-basic writing portfolio site I developed.
The problem? Wix was almost too simple. But isn't that a good thing?
K, full disclosure: sometimes, when it's me vs. tech, I need to win. I have these visions of everything I want my website to be, how I want it to act, what it should look like, and Wix wasn't playing that game. I wanted to master Wix, domination the mutha. Wix didn't really care if I was capable of mastering it. It just wanted to be used and deployed. Lickety split.
Yeah, it was easy. I was the one being difficult.
In the end, I was happy enough to finally send this version of my portfolio live. It should last a year or two or more. And truthfully, prior to today, I'd worked maybe 15-minutes at a time on my site and would forget about it for weeks on end until something would trigger a need for samples and then I'd kick myself for not having the new site ready. I didn't love the prebuilt template options nor the user interface. Apparently, I'm still hung up on building a site in a DOS environment where I can type in DIR for a nice overview of the files I have to work with. The color schemes were unnecessarily confusing, too (mapping which position would results in teal text was almost frightening). And not being able to change the size of certain thumbnails in the template I chose was weirdly frustrating. But overall, the rest was easy.
I may one day edit this post and add some of the process, but for now I'm just hoping for feedback. Do you hate it? Like it? Understand it? Want to know how long it took? Let me know. I'd love to get your feedback and answer questions.
EDIT: I just opened my Wix site on an iPad and it may be the most hideous beast ever!
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