Wix is an online app for creating websites and other widgets. The company has its roots in Israel and was founded by the trio of Gio Kaplan, Avishai Abrahami and Nadav Abrahami. Gio Kaplan, the CTO for Wix is an entrepreneur with several years’ managerial skills of web companies. He was also a member of a technology unit while in the Israeli army. Avishai Abrahami, a co-CEO of Wix, is also a long time entrepreneur in web companies; He had previously founded other web companies such as Sphera, a web hosting service and Arel which was a medium which allowed executives to participate in online learning. Like Kaplan, Avishai also served as part of a technology unit while in the Israeli army. Nadav Abrahami who is the VP R&D for Wix, is a sibling to Avishai and had previous experience as a senior engineer with Oberon, a company into the development of casual games.
Also on the Wix team are Allon Bloch, another co-CEO and Ni Zohar the company’s head of operation.
According to Allon Bloch, the goal behind the creation of Wix, is to make it a possible for people to directly create websites online with their application. In addition to being able to create business, family or blogs websites, the application will also make it possible for users to be able to create their own customized widgets or flyers online. The platform is developed on a framework that will allow a host of web applications to be built directly on it.
The creators believe that there should be mediums available that will allow people create very nice looking and functional websites without needing to have prior knowledge of much coding or web technology. Usually, most solutions either required some basic knowledge for people to be able to create websites or just provided them out of the box templates that did not allow for an expression of individual creativity. With Wix, users need not feel constrained and have a number of tools with which they can customize their websites.
Typically, websites developed using the Wix platform are also hosted directly on it, however users who desire to use their own specific URLs can also do so by following certain guidelines available on the site.
The Wix platform consists of a drag and drop WYSIWYG editor that allows users to arrange the features of their websites the way they want. The Wix framework allows for unified publishing of items such as text, animation, audio and video files. The final rendering of any website created using Wix is in Flash but an XML stream is also created which makes the finished site search engine friendly.
According to the founders, Wix is to be a fun way of creating great looking websites. The company has headquarters in New York while research and development for the project is based in Israel.