Does anyone use the web builder WIX? 
No.
Not wanting to discredit Wix, itās perfectly fine for a starter website, but itās nothing more then that.
NO.
And I bloody hate their ads. And sponsorship deals.
The same with Squarespace.
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What do people suggest instead?
A decent web host. Couple of options, purchase a Template for your site, or if you design one yourself? Perhaps get the talents of a young web designer wanting to get their work noticed 
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Iād take Keanu Reeves over Karlie Kloss any day of the week.
Waitā¦
Squarespace is nice with their templates and the ease of use for non-technical users.
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Wordpress self hosted simples, I can sort for you if need be Monzo discount community rates 
Iāve used it recently to create a website for a small bed and breakfast. For what they wanted if ticked all the boxes and at a reasonable price/timeframe.
If you want anything complex Iād go elsewhere but the tools they offer have definitely improved over the years.
Itās no harm in trying the free version to see if it does what you want and then look to pay to have adverts removed.
I like other peopleās suggestions of getting a young developer the chance to build up their portfolio too
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https://www.tsohost.com/ - low traffic, speeds are ok, support has been good so far.
Use āRANK10ā for 10% discount.
https://kinsta.com/ - has really good load times, the support I havenāt used on the site Iāve got with them, but the hosting is on the more expensive side of things.
I use WordPress. Its fully open source so its good if you can code, and build your own custom theme. Its also great for starters, using preset themes. Theres also a new drag and drop editor (Gutenberg editor) thats been introduced with WordPress V5. Iāve not had a look at it though.
The problem i find with WIX is that it isnt accessible. So those using screen readers, keyboard navigation, speech navigation, etc due to disabilities arent catered for in the way that WIX builds the site in the background. So a lot of the time, ARIA framework isnt enabled or used well. WordPress does most of this as a standard (apart from their drag and drop - its very difficult to make any drag and drop accessible, unfortunately).
I would 100% recommend WordPress. And I dont mind answering any questions that anyone on here has about it.
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I can vouch for this. Learning something like Divi for WordPress and WooCommerce if you use a shop is a really good starting point.
Not hard either, like learning how to use Microsoft Word minimal coding required and you be able to watch a couple of YouTube videos and get all the pointers youād need and end up with a pretty professional looking website.
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Wordpress? Ewww.
Seriously just look at the codebase. Itās garbage.
If you need a blog why not look into Ghost? At least the code is decent.
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If you donāt like the base code of WordPress, develop a custom theme and edit the code? Iām speaking about WordPress.org in particular, which is completely open source, which you run of either a hostās server or your own. Not Wordpress.com, which I would agree, the codebase isnāt THAT greatā¦
For me, I would say that Ghost is designed purely for blogging. Great for news/review sites, but poor for when you want it to do other things. I think for a beginner, Ghostās Markdown editor will be a challenge, I much prefer the WYSIWYG editor in WP. Ghostās USP is minimalism and thatās where it lets itself down, it doesnāt do anything special - itās minimalism is visible in the functionality and the design.
We pretty much only use WordPress for small to medium sites, the only barrier is the skill and knowledge of the developer, when you can create Advanced Custom Fields, the possibilities are essentially endless. It does everything. For much larger sites we do use WordPress but also use TERMINAL4, who are fantastic and can host huge, huge multi-sites (Iām talking 50,000+ pages)
I think the world of web is open to interpretation in all honesty, the above is my interpretation 
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If you donāt like the base code of WordPress, develop a custom theme and edit the code?
So Iāll have to develop an entire CMS from scratch then? Because the theme is the least of your worriesā¦ in fact the theme is probably the only ādecentā code in there.
Iām speaking about WordPress.org in particular, which is completely open source, which you run of either a hostās server or your own. Not Wordpress.com, which I would agree, the codebase isnāt THAT greatā¦
Iād argue for the opposite. With the hosted service, I donāt have to care how bad or vulnerable the code is. I just pay a monthly fee and get service in exchange. I donāt have to worry about maintaining it, reinstalling the server when it inevitably gets compromised, etc.
I would say that Ghost is designed purely for blogging. Great for news/review sites, but poor for when you want it to do other things
Wordpress is designed for blogging too. Just like WP, you can hack Ghost to do other things but itāll always be a hack. Iād suggest a custom website if you need to do anything more than a blog with a few static pages. Neither Ghost nor Wordpress are particularly well-suited for non-blogging usage, although Iād say itās much easier to extend Ghost with custom code (itās just an Express.js app) than it is to extend Wordpress.
My biggest issue with WP is its horrible codebase that leads to things like this. And no, Iām not saying itās bad because itās PHP - there is a way to do proper PHP, but Wordpress is definitely not it.
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Whilst I agree. Got to remember weāre comparing it to Wix here.
In all fairness, I probably wasnāt the one to start an in-depth discussion. I work purely on the content side of things (and the accessibility compliance of front-end elements) so Iām not really familiar with different coding standards etc.
Iām just going off of what developers have told me, and how I, personally, see the site. Again, like I said, everyone has their preferences. And itās important to respect that, I completely understand your issue against WordPress, and itās something Iāll be feeding back to my colleaguesā¦you raise some valid points.
I think most CMS are better than WIX in all fairness, and hereās my issue with WIX, purely from a business/marketing perspective, not development:
- Their websites are slow - a lot of them source their servers from elsewhere or have servers that arenāt capable of handling peak volume.
- Search engine rankings will reduce - A big one for me, as a marketer is that often, they donāt optimize for SEO, they donāt optimize for speed, they donāt have the best mobile compatibility, they arenāt keen to updates, they donāt use schema, etc - these are all taken into account when it comes to Googleās SEO algorithms.
- Wow, so original - The problem with these templates is your brand identity, or lack of it. These ātemplatesā that are only sort of customisable are used by millions of others - ruining your brand identity. (Stats below)
- Issue/Customer Service - If you want customer service that is half decent youāll need to pay premium prices.
- Custom features are few and far between - They make money on people signing up for premium accounts so most custom features are reserved for them. Primarily, these ādrag and drop editorsā are designed for standard elements, not custom ones!
I saw this figure online, 90 million use WIX. They boast about 500 templates. 90,000,000 / 500 = 180,000ā¦
So this means, you are statistically using the same theme as 180,000 other websites. Doesnāt seem like a very good decision to make from a branding point of view.
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We use it at work and itās really not good enough for a professional organisation.
Essentially, WIX want to hold on to your data meaning that any input areas (such as forms) canāt be edited in terms of the HTML. So if we want to push lead information into Salesforce or even just put some basic CSS around the forms to style the form, we canāt.
Instead any lead information just gets stored within a WIX database which canāt be exported. On top of that, the code it generates just seems to be horrible and bloated.
I want us to switch - just not sure where to yet ā¦
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I think there could be an angle hereā¦ 
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Would never use Wix, SquareSpace or even Wordpress.com, for me trying edit the code in the web builders is a headache (recently had a friend using VistaPrint web builder) I have not even looked into Wordpress.com as use .org, I know it is a blogging site at its heart but also so much more 
Will have a look at the Ghost CMS but not really a coder but can get by