If you remember Wix from its major venture capitalist days, you’ll know its “freemium” platform has turned a lot of heads, 12 million or so. With the recent launch of WixMobile, Wix.com is hoping to do it again.
The new platform is taking advantage of fairly unmet need in the smartphone marketplace, free mobile sites. Aimed at small business owners with little time to finagle with social media, web upkeep and general Internet-savvyness, WixMobile makes customizing mobile web content a three step process.
After choosing one of several templates, a little click and drag page design, and the use of some publishing tools, Wix.com intends to get your site up in less than ten minutes, at least, if you need to.
Templates for WixMobile are pretty general, most looking relatively identical, save for the wallpaper (You may use your own images as well). Still, as a mobile platform, the user-friendly button menus make navigation of your mobile site incredibly intuitive for the fat-fingered and bat-eyed.
And actually implementing your own information to WixMobile sites is just as easy on the noggin. Wix pages are built with effortless form filling templates. Want to add your contact page? There’s a form for that. Want to list your services? There’s a form for that. Even if the custom headers don’t match your content, adding your own unique pages is also possible with Wix’s setup. Another nice feature is the ability to display artwork on your mobile site.
In addition, contact information and GPS location services work with your smartphone. For instance, you can click a phone number to call it and click an address to open your Google Maps application and navigate to the business’s location. PDFs can also be uploaded to WixMobile sites. This could be great if, say, your restaurant or popular Foodtruck menu has been scanned from the original.
Even still, likely the best part of this new Wix platform is that it appears to actually work on almost all smart phones. Press photos and their site’s information show WixMobile being displayed on an iPhone 4 and able to use on iPads. Considering everyday Wix.com sites are all Flash-based, this could be a major selling point for the millions who are unable to visit the company’s current pages with their Flash-less Apple products (Thanks, Steve Jobs), namely ALL iPods, iPads, and iPhones. WixMobile says Blackberry, iPod, and Windows phones will be supported soon, so cross your fingers.
To learn more, check it out for yourself at http://mobile.wix.com/. For more on free website customization, see our piece on Wix.com (original).
