Wix Designer – Sunshine Coast

Sunshine Design now specialises in content managed websites using WordPress and Wix. Due to overwhelming demand, Sunshine Design is now offering Wix website builds. I get a kick out of designing beautiful, streamlined websites which convert visits into money for my clients. I believe web design should be eye-catching, elegant, easy to navigate, and easily found by potential customers. Landing and home pages start from $500. Average pricing for full sites, SEO and social sharing range from $1,500.

Pros and cons of Wix verses WordPress

Wix

Can be started by the client on a free account. Can be upgraded with a personalised domain. SEO is reasonably easy to set up but I have not seen great results to date compared to my WordPress sites. For a case study on how poorly WIX sites rank compared to WordPress please visit my post on a site I’ve been asked to do minor edits on – Noosa Island Wedding Venue.

Quite powerful with lots of features. Monopolised by Wix. Hard to leave the platform. Hard to back up externally. Reliant on the cloud. Crashes frequently as the site grows. Intuitive to use and fast to learn. Good starting templates but hard to customise elements across the site in one go. Smooth transitions between pages and scrolls. Conclusion. Fun to use for small builds on a budget. Good starting point.

WordPress using divi

Requires a domain and hosting provider. An open sourced platform, which means the themes and plugins are from contributors worldwide with constant updates. I choose to use Divi as my builder and theme. It’s used by nearly a million people worldwide. I’ve personally used it to build 95% if my sites in the last few years. It’s intuitive to use as a designer. It integrates with 3rd party software and can be hosted and maintained through a cpanel. Backups can be transferred between hosting. The platform is stable with minimal crashes. Sites and pages are easy to duplicate and mix and match elements. Templates are available for most types of businesses. Conclusion. More stable for bigger builds. More control over backups. Easier to edit the overall style of the website once it’s been started. Better SEO.

Jack and Knife is a new restaurant in Darlinghurst Sydney. The owner already had an existing web site with wix and wanted to transfer the hosting to the new site. The benefit of using wix over WordPress for this particular job was the integration of reservations, analytics of visitors, menu databases and booking forms. The owner of the domain already had experience in editing this format so it worked out well for them to continue on the wix platform. Full site here.

AURA design and drafting is a start up company on the Sunshine Coast. The owner is transitioning from being a builder to a draftsman. The business had no folio of work to show on the site, so the direction of the brand and website creative was all about potential and possibilities. Full site here.

At Sunshine Design we only use the best quality themes, builders and plug ins from Elegant Themes. This is one the many free layout design packs from Divi. The Divi theme and builder are my primary tools for building WordPress websites. This website preview is one of the free templates available to download with my lifetime subscription. I generally start my sites with a clean slate, but this is a good example of the Divi theme. If you love this template it could be the starting point of your next site. Every element, colour, font and arrangement is completely editable. The unique thing about Divi is that you can edit from the back end and the front end. Each way of working has its benefits.

A funky branding design and website for music producer – Stufly. This music collaborator is in his late 40s so is not overly keen to promote his own image. He wants to market his music to a younger audience so I’ve used clever imagery to achieve this and keep his age ambiguous and away from the marketing. It keeps the brand looking young and current. His music is modern electronic, chill and pop.