Wix Professionals Meetup

Wix Professional Design Community Meetup on YouTube

Reach out to me with Wix questions or to share your own tips!

Wix Professional Design Community
YouTube Online Meetup

As a Wix Designer, I was super excited to join the first ever Wix Professional Design Community Online Meetup on YouTube on December 15, 2016, hosted by Brett Haralson! Brett and Wix decided to host this meetup to address the Wix design community to tell us that they're listening to us and our requests! And they then shared some great new features, as well as the new Expert Accounts that will allow us to build Wix websites for our clients and show them concepts with no ads, plus a Global Ambassador program.

You can also view the YouTube recorded stream which will is available here on YouTube:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yIO0AOECFo

Begins, Brett: "Wix is listening!"

First thing Brett talked about is unveiling an amazing brand new designer tool:

"Telling us about it, is Naama, a designer at Wix, here to share a brand new tool to allow you to create even more stunning websites - with an animated twist!"

Naama Hoffman, a Designer at Wix, introduced us to Hoverbox, a great new tool for buttons. Read about this amazingly cool feature below (now I can do everything that I used to do with Flash back in the day before Apple killed it...) YES!

1. Hoverbox – Rollover Buttons with Animation!

Ths is the "new box in town," previously boxes had limited functions and only had hovers that didn't offer much control of the font/colors/animation. Well this new "Hoverbox" has great abilities – we will now have full control over the hover instances and can use a solid color, an image such as a PNG, JPG or animated gif, or even a video background as the "standard" or "hover" image! NICE!

So now you can have some very cool animated rollover button effects. With video or gif abilities, the sky is the limit! :) It can be used for ecommerce, or special navigation, to promote certain content, and... you can a rollover to view content in a different way – for example, you can have an image for a video or audio, then when the user hovers over it, they will see a auto-playing video or audio upon rollover! You simply choose your custom Regular image and a Hover image, add text, add animation like "expand in" for the image, then voila, you have a beautiful animated rollover image button. Before this, they had a "rollover image" plugin, but this is built right into the editor and looks much easier to use with more control.

Mobile:

The hover ability won't work on Mobile (you can't "hover" on a phone with your finger) – but it will display either the hover or regular version on mobile. Though, without testing it, I'm not sure how the video would work this way?

THE WIX HOVERBOX ROLLOVER IMAGE FEATURE IS STILL IN BETA, as a Beta Tester, I am lucky to be able to check it out (see my Wix rollover hoverbox example page), but I will let you know here where to find it once they release it to the main Wix editor. This is VERY exciting!
Thanks, Wix Wizards!

Good Quotes:

"Get out of here."
– Brett

"It has great abilities."
"You can do really crazy things with it"
– Naama Hoffman :)

2. Expert Accounts for Wix Designers

From Brett:
"Not a design feature, it's a new venture. Wix has been working on this behind the scenes for a long time, this one is clearly a foundational, monumental, first path and first layer of something that is being built by Wix.... oh wait, I have to take a bathroom break... Just kidding!... announcing ...Expert Accounts!"

Yael introduced us to the new Expert Account for Wix Designers.
Here is how Expert Accounts will be a great benefit to us Wix Designers:

Priority Support:
Priority ticket that gets answered quicker than usual ticket
Client Preview (with no ads):
So now you can share concepts with your clients without any Wix branding so they are not distracted by Wix sales ads while reviewing concepts (especially since we, as Wix designers usually setup the Wix plan for them anyway!).
Feedback is also incorporated into the Expert Account system.
New Sitelist:
Where you can view all your sites in a grid and easily select them quickly, also with Quick Actions you can easily view, transfer, rename, duplicate, get feedback.

Wix is giving Expert Accounts to people who have 5+ Premium plan websites on account (or transfers). You can become a Wix Expert and get a Wix Expert Account by joining the Wix Design Experts Facebook group and messaging Brett to sign you up to get an Expert Account.

3. Global Ambassadors

Cheryl - Manager of Global Ambassadors, discusses inviting all Wix webmaster pros to apply to become your city's Wix Ambassador. Ambassadors will be part of Monthly workshops, teach Wix in trainings, and produce and teach at quarterly meetups. Wix Ambassadors will collaborate with the teams in New York, Tel Aviv, Miami, etc.

Become a Wix Ambassador in your City, email: ambassador@wix.com
(I just emailed them!)

Good Quote:

"I bleed Wix."
– Brett

4. Wix Certified Trainer (WCT) – New Program!

Sarah and Nancy from Wix announced a brand new Channel certification Course: Wix Certfiied Trainer – With 7 modules, with quizzes, homework assignments, and steps to get to the final interview to approve you for certification.

Watch all the modules to get a better idea of how to teach Wix!
You'll get Wix worksheets and a curriculum will be developed to use in classrooms.

Why would a designer do this?

Answer: Wix wants designers to be successful, this helps you build your community and become a leader and foster a community of Wix designers, plus we can add teaching Wix to our services!

Where do you signup?
Answer: Brett is going to put up all this information on the link on the YouTube account.

5. Rebuilding Arena Entirely from Scratch – Adding Reviews & Rankings

Dan and Iran are product managers at Wix, and they've been busy! Today they've announced that they are working to rebuild the Arena entirely from scratch. It sounds like they are going to work on a lot of new features to promote Wix Experts. They said they would be incorporating more design services that we can share on our Arena profiles. Reviews & Ratings will be added to the Arena, that are systematic and your actual clients will be able to write reviews on your profile rather than the designers putting their reviews in. Sorting search options will be added, so people can sort through the Arena based on their needs. They are going to be transparent on how the ranking algorithm works, with the customer and designer both in mind to make sure the listings are fair and recognize long-time arena designers. I am looking forward to the release of the new Arena!

6. Other New Features Coming: