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Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

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Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#171

Post by someonenice »

Angostura wrote: post #135
abledon wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever someone asks me advice on building a website, I just say "Wix", unless they are willing to spend 10,000$ or more paying a quality developer to do a custom and probably unnecessary build.

I always used to say Weebly - and I've helped quite a few friends and family build little brochure sites. The big change with a new version a couple of years ago made less enthusiastic, though I haven't looked at Wix yet.

I wanted create / migrate my sites on Weebly but they lack the power to organize the url structure. For example - I want urls like - mysite.tld/europe/germany/somepage So I can also create pages like mysite.tld/europe/germany/index mysite.tld/europe/index

etc. Currently they only support one level in url making it difficult to migrate my sites.

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#173

Post by rrhyne »

sotojuan wrote: post #138
kepano wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there from 2000-2006 and feel the exact same. I grew up on deviantART. All my friends were there. It opened my eyes to many forms of creativity and I may have never become a designer or entrepreneur without it. At the risk of embarrassing myself, here's what I was up to from ages 15-20: http://a-t-o-m-i-c.deviantart.com/

The 00s decade in general seems to have been the high point for small/idependent/hobby-based online communities in general.

You too can create an off world colony.

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#174

Post by true_religion »

yestoallthat wrote: post #76
mcbits wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first I heard of Wix was a few months ago when a local news site deployed their new design. The page would be completely blank for 10-15 seconds while it made hundreds of requests for useless little React turdlets. As far as I can tell, they "fixed" it by moving away from Wix. If that's normal for a Wix site, then I would say no, nobody involved on either side of the transaction is a web developer except in the m…

I thought you were exaggerating, but holy cow... maybe those who disagree can find me a site from http://www.wix.com/explore/websites for which that doesn't hold true, because I gave up after a few which were all incredibly abysmal. Yeah, those sites are "stunning" alright. Aesthetically very bland and samey, but technically utterly stunning. I wouldn't even know how to make something that slow without using a combin…

Worse, it happened with that page itself. It took 10 seconds before it loaded any content beyond the header and base template.

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#175

Post by mbesto »

Angostura wrote: post #135
abledon wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever someone asks me advice on building a website, I just say "Wix", unless they are willing to spend 10,000$ or more paying a quality developer to do a custom and probably unnecessary build.

I always used to say Weebly - and I've helped quite a few friends and family build little brochure sites. The big change with a new version a couple of years ago made less enthusiastic, though I haven't looked at Wix yet.

I usually turn them to Weebly and SquareSpace and adamantly turn them away from Wix. I think some of this has changed recently, but most Wix sites unnecessarily hijack browser functions, have time wasting page transitions, the SEO is terrible, and social sharing links always are buggy. Financially speaking, as a company they simply just out-spend everyone on marketing/sales to compete in the market, with very little product innovation.

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#176

Post by mbesto »

wmeredith wrote: post #9
omn1 wrote: post #3

DeviantArt has always been a nice community. I find it surprising that the price is so low given that they add a lot of value.

Having moved in Deviant Art circles (some time ago, admittedly) I'd say one reason for the low price might be that, somewhat like Reddit, the core values of the community make it challenging to monetize.

Unlike Reddit, it doesn't have financial backers who have produced a ridiculous narrative. (which is important btw, I work in M&A)

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#177

Post by mbesto »

elsewhen wrote: post #95
brightball wrote: post #44

I think the most interesting detail here is that Wix is doing well enough that it has $36M to spend.

i dont think it is too surprising considering that wix is a public company with a market cap of $2.7B https://www.google.com/finance?cid=353014528816355

More importantly they have high gross margins and debt is still really cheap right now.

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#178

Post by Illniyar »

erelde wrote: post #103
pmlnr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not enough information, what story exactly?

My bad, this story[1] about Wix "stealing" code from Wordpress. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/wordp...

As far as I know that saga ended when wix open sourced their mobile client.

Re: Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt for $36M

#179

Post by cpeterso »

yestoallthat wrote: post #76
mcbits wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first I heard of Wix was a few months ago when a local news site deployed their new design. The page would be completely blank for 10-15 seconds while it made hundreds of requests for useless little React turdlets. As far as I can tell, they "fixed" it by moving away from Wix. If that's normal for a Wix site, then I would say no, nobody involved on either side of the transaction is a web developer except in the m…

I thought you were exaggerating, but holy cow... maybe those who disagree can find me a site from http://www.wix.com/explore/websites for which that doesn't hold true, because I gave up after a few which were all incredibly abysmal. Yeah, those sites are "stunning" alright. Aesthetically very bland and samey, but technically utterly stunning. I wouldn't even know how to make something that slow without using a combin…

It looks like Wix only tested that Explore page in Chrome and Edge. Clicking any of the "View Site" links opens two new tabs in Firefox and Safari, opens nothing in IE11, but works as expected in Chrome and Edge.
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