[Update: July 24, 2017 - The web host for eposic.com, trollmystic.com, and mkeidson.com has been upgraded, and now loads faster than is described below. So I'll be putting them to use, in addition to using this Wix-based site.]
Greetings. Have we met before? I've been posting occasionally on my other site: eposic.com / trollmystic.com (they both point to the same site). The site at those domains is hosted on a shared host that just isn't performing well, and I'm not in a position to pay more hosting fees to upgrade that site on its web host. I wanted to set up a new site that would focus specifically on my art and fiction, and I tried to do that on the shared host. I bought the domain mkeidson.com, and set up a separate site for it on the shared host. I set up a text-only, straight HTML home page, and it took half a minute to load in the browser. I wasn't happy. I set up WordPress on mkeidson.com, and that only made page loading slower.
The eposic.com / trollmystic.com site uses WordPress for content management. WordPress is a powerful tool, and I still can recommend it to anyone who has the money to pay for a better solution than a shared host provides. Just being on a shared host is going to slow page loads way down, when compared to a dedicated host.
Much of the power of WordPress is in its flexibility. If there's something you want to do with your WordPress site, there's probably a plugin for it. You can also customize your pages with embedded JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. Of course, such customization requires that either you know how to code, or you hire someone to write the code for you. I happen to know how to code, so I view that as a big advantage to using WordPress.
But these days, responsiveness is more important for a web site wanting visitors than flexibility and customization. Visiting the home page just now on my current mkeidson.com site on the shared host required forty seconds for it to load. The page contains primarily text. The only images are those used in the WordPress theme. On today's web, forty seconds is an eternity.
So I started researching other hosting options, and quickly came across Wix. The Wix platform is extensive, allowing a person to do a lot for free, while not costing a lot to upgrade to using one's own domain name. For anyone who isn't a coder, Wix should work just as well as WordPress. Some people might even find Wix more intuitive than WordPress.
I'll still keep the eposic.com / trollmystic.com site up on the shared host. There are some online tools there that need custom JavaScript to run. I may have other uses for the shared host as well. But for my art and fiction, I'll be using this Wix-powered site. We'll see how it goes.
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