How to Create a Wix Blog That Matches WordPress

How to Create a Wix Blog That Matches WordPress.

Wix is â€‹â€‹a platform for building all kinds of websites. This service is designed to enable you to build your website without advanced technical knowledge or thoughtful design. Anyone can create a professional and modern website on the platform. The free version of the service offers more than most individuals need.

While most people probably think of Wix as a place to build websites with personal brands or small online stores, it also has a solid blogging tool. If you want to create a beautiful Wix blog that rivals the best WordPress has to offer, you are in the right place.

The Trouble With WordPress

While WordPress is a great mature blogging platform, it’s not the most user-friendly. WordPress itself is a free and open source software package. However, you need to provide your own hosting solution.

This means renting or buying a server, and installing and setting up your own WordPress instance. You can pay to host and manage WordPress by someone else, which is comparable to using Wix.

Already Have a Wix Site?

If you would like to add your Wix Blog to an existing site, select the Blog App from the Wix App Market. From there, it’s pretty much the same process as editing your blog template as described below. The rest of this tutorial is based on the assumption that you are building a Wix blog site yourself.

Getting Started With Your Wix Blog

If you haven’t already, go to Wix.com and create an account. After logging in, select “Create New Site”.

When prompted for what type of website you want to create, select Blog.

You now have two options for how you want to build your site.

The first uses a system known as Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence). Here you will be asked a series of questions, and Wix AI will automatically create a website for you.

ADI is a managed process, so we don’t need to walk you through it. We will focus on the second option. We’ll be using the Wix Editor to modify the template to reflect exactly what we want.

Choosing a Template for Your Wix Blog

Wix offers a wide variety of blog templates. Choosing what works for you can seem daunting. By default, you will be shown templates from each category. It may be easier to pick one by first selecting one of these subcategories.

Just remember that nothing prevents you from choosing any template, regardless of its type. They’ve just been designed for certain types of blogs, but there’s nothing stopping you from using them for a blog outside of the intended category.

If you see a template that looks interesting, select View and you can see a demo of it. This should help you make the final decision about which template you need.

Once you’ve chosen a template, select Edit to get started designing your Wix blog.

The process of creating templates is much easier in Wix than in WordPress. Using WordPress templates is a multi-step process that can be quite technical if you are administering your own website. Wix is â€‹â€‹a simple solution.

Editing Your Blog Template

At first glance, the editor may seem quite cumbersome, but if you look around for a moment, you will soon realize that it is quite intuitive. There are too many features in the editor for us to cover here, so we’re just going to learn the basics.

The most important control you should be aware of first is the page switcher menu.

Select this dropdown to navigate to one of the different types of pages that make up your blog. This means that you can customize the look of every page your site is built on.

There is another very important control element nearby. This is a switch for viewing the desktop and mobile versions of the site. Since a significant percentage of your readers will be using smartphones, be sure to check that the site still looks and works well on mobile devices.

Since we are working with an existing template here, the best approach is to simply edit the elements that were already provided to you in the template. In this article, we are not going to describe the basic elements of template design. However, when it becomes more comfortable for you to edit in Wix, you can move on to building from scratch or radically redesigning the templates to your liking.

Wix includes hints in placeholder text so you know what content should be placed in each place and how to do it in accordance with best practices.

What you see is what you get. You can select any element in the template with the mouse pointer and modify it. Move, stretch, or change the text. Most of the things you expect to do intuitively will work as expected. Some items, such as the titles of other pages in the menu bar, cannot be changed.

In WordPress, developing a theme requires a lot of programming knowledge. While Wix doesn’t give you the same level of control, you can radically change your template using just drag and drop tools, which is a huge advantage.

Key Left Side Toolbars

On the left side of the Wix Editor, you will see a vertical stack of buttons. For the purposes of editing your blog before publishing it, some are more important than others.

At the top you will find the “Pages” button.

This mimics most of the functionality of the page switcher at the top of the tool and allows you to navigate between pages in different ways. You can also find page transitions here.

Below you will find the background of the page.

Choose an image or video from the catalog to be the background for your blog. Or upload your own art. Just be careful to keep your text readable!

Next, we have a button with a big plus sign.

This allows you to add almost any element to your Wix Blog, such as buttons or menus.

The Media button allows you to add media from your computer or from social networks.

We especially found it useful to integrate Google Drive and DropBox.

The last button we’ll mention is perhaps the most important in this particular context.

The Blog Manager button allows you to add new posts and edit existing ones. It also provides quick access to help resources specifically designed for blogging.

Key Floating Toolbar Highlights

To the right of the editor window, you will see a floating toolbar. This gives you important information about each element. As you select them, you will see the size and position information change. Rotation angles and other precise values â€‹â€‹can also be specified here.

Write Posts and Give Your Wix Blog a Name

Once you’ve edited the look and feel of your Wix blog to your liking, you’ll need to create actual content for it before you can publish it.

You can use the My Blog button we mentioned above to create your first posts, but there are already a number of posts that have been created as placeholders for the template. Either delete them or edit them in unique posts of your own. Their headlines are a good place for inspiration for article types.

Finally, don’t forget to give your blog a name. This is one of the most important things to do. So don’t take it lightly. This name will be the first thing people see when they search, and it will summarize the nature and essence of your post.

Hit the Publish Button

You should now be ready to publish your blog. Now it all depends on your ability to create content that people will love and share. You can buy and link your Wix Blog to a custom domain, or have Wix do it for you for a fee. In any case, unlike WordPress, you don’t have to worry about also running the server and being a sysadmin besides managing your blog.

–