My Experience Using Velo by Wix: Building a Simple Website

Velo is a great platform, used to create both front-end and back-end website bases, it is full-stack which is a huge step up from other Wix services, which only worked on front-end development. For beginners, it is a great platform, offering easy drop and drag development (Similar to apps like Webflow).

How I Built a Simple Web Page Using Velo by Wix

My experience with it was pleasant, I started by taking the original template and morphing the site to represent what Velo is, every button used for purpose, even anchors are helpful at times (A tool I thought I wouldn’t have used had I not known.) I started with a dull pale blue scheme, yet switched to a more vibrant green once the site was deemed to be rather boring-ly coloured.

I utilised the drag and drop features for 40-60% of the site, only changing the code when things weren’t working - Button’s not creating separate .btn classes for the CSS so they didn’t share the same theming, footers being stuck, the list goes on for smaller issues (Largely, it was fine).

Sample contact us form on my website

A large part of the process of using Velo was getting positioning JUST right, easier in say, flex or grid CSS, though I’d say more convenient if you cannot use the two.

Issues with Colors

Colour was a challenge; I would think it would be better if the colour picker had a colour wheel/hexagon grid for picking colours (Rather than the current hex code picker and basic colour picker).

Again, a small issue can cause an hour or so of figuring out how to fix it. However, with Velo it took more in the 20-30 minute range for small issues with an hour maximum for the dreaded Button issue I faced.

Stock Images on Velo

A great feature was the stock image section, included with strips and backgrounds. Very well shot images of deep colour and matching schemes for almost all scenarios. You could find glasses of milk, cupcakes, bridges towering over a glooming lake and some very nice customisation to vignette, brightness and contrast in post, to compliment your lovely text. You can even find great landscape photos for your backgrounds:

Sample Header in my Velo site

 I found myself not using overlays as much as I would normally, instead opting to colour the image itself rather than add the almost tinted glass above it to make text readable. Sites like spotify use a similar process, though use the overlay method.

In contrast to basic editors it’s about an intermediate level editor, but compared to actual code?

Extremely easy to use.

If you know what you want something to look like, you can make it look exactly how you want without playing around with code (Of course, that is if you don’t run into the issues aforementioned) to lay everything out.

For professional use, hire an actual programming team for your site, though for home use or personal sites Wix Velo is an excellent service with more than enough features to fit your fancy, I would say a small business could use it for their website though it may still require some technological knowledge to operate effectively enough to create a website from it.

Sample footer from my site built with Velo

As for the back-end, I didn’t touch it (Considering it’s not being run on a server any time soon) so I cannot rate it there, though I have reason to believe it will give just as good an experience as the front-end tool kit did. Special effects such as glass effects or skeuomorphism (A design language meant to look realistic yet still digital.) will have to be done in only CSS as I couldn’t find any points of reference for the GUI to do it. Transitions and animations however it nails with a second hammer.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, if you have no experience in programming or web development, Wix’s Velo application is the perfect site for you.

It even gives previews of your beautiful site on desktop and mobile. It also has amazing features that you can’t find anywhere else (And a lack of some ones that I’d think were standard, namely; integrated flex support on the GUI and other issues that can be solved with programming, though if you’re using Velo, chances are you are either little in experience with programming, or it’s an alien concept.)

My Rating for Velo

For an absolute rating of it, 8/10 seems fair to me, minus 2 for the aforementioned issues and a bug causing the first split second of the site to appear half unloaded until the text transitions are done. Whether this is an issue on my half or the sites half I don’t know, though I doubt I could have caused transitions to delay loading of an image. 

Hunting the bugs is easy, yet time consuming.

I had fun using and exploring Velo, and suspect I may come back to it in future for playing around with it. To pile on top of this great value, you can get started for free, something I wouldn’t expect from a site like Wix.

This article is part of a writing contest hosted by Hacker Noon in partnership with Wix. Learn how to enter here and take a shot at winning $1000 every month, from March 1st, 2021 to May 31st, 2021.