Wix.com Makes Flash Site Development Seem Easy

Wix, a company whose tools allow its users to create impressive Flash-based sites without programming or Flash skills, announced this week that it's adding a number of premium options to its services.Up to this point, Wix has been free, although users have been limited to using a subdomain of Wix.com. The free option is still there, but now you also can upgrade to use your own domain for the site, as well as upgrade the amount of storage space and bandwidth.

Wix supports the creation of multiple-page sites, but also has found a niche with its ability to add eye-catching design to MySpace pages. Getting started is easy -- you either pick one of their dozens of basic templates or start from scratch, add content modules for text, pictures, audio, and video (they have a selection of royalty-free files available for use), and publish the site.

Admittedly, I'm more of a content than a design person, but I've been a first-hand witness to the pains of developing Flash-driven sites. In playing around with the Wix tools, however, I quickly realized that even a person without a design background could put together a really slick Flash site in a few hours, instead of days or weeks.

One other nice feature is that sites created with Wix tools are search-engine friendly -- meaning they can easily be indexed, which is often a challenge with Flash-based sites. Wix handles this in an interesting way -- it creates a hidden, easily indexed HTML mirror of each site on its servers, which automatically directs hits from search engines to the Flash site.

TechCrunch earlier this week posted some background on the company, and it looks like the influx of capital should keep things moving forward.

I'm not sure if Wix will ultimately be viewed as a fun toy, or a serious development tool. But one thing is for sure -- anything than can make me feel like a real designer, even just for a few minutes, certainly has my attention.