Why I chose to leave the Wix banner on my website, and why you might want to consider doing the same (also read as: Building my own website with a purpose in mind)
I’ve been wanting to build a personal website for quite some time now. I decided to pull the trigger, build it with a purpose in mind, and set a goal to launch it on my 30th birthday. And I did it!
I chose to leave the Wix banner on my website. It was an intentional decision, an attempt at making a statement to shed light on a few issues on my mind. Three themes in particular:
- Tech access issues/challenges underprivileged minority groups face
- Human judgement, and a push to be more accepting, to check our biases
- And what (arguably) should matter
Tech access issues/challenges underprivileged minority groups face:
To most of my peers in America internet access was a given. To me, it was a privilege. I didn’t have internet access in my parents’ home until around 2015, that’s after high school, college, and grad school, and more, and counting😅 For some context, the internet came out when I was 3 years old and I’d say adoption (even by slow standards) had a good amount of folks having internet access in their homes when I was 13 (purely according to my observations in my one neighborhood, I’m sure adoption was faster in more affluent neighborhoods). Even with conservative estimates, I was over 10 years behind the average rate of home-internet access on this front. While I’m an avid user of tech now, believe me when I say I wasn’t always so familiar with technology, but there were always hacks (e.g. those free AOL trial CDs; staying after school; camping out at the library; and staying at your best friend’s house after dinner for late night research projects — these were the hacks I used as an adolescent). When you grow up with limited resources, you learn to creatively hack and you learn that hacks don’t stop with adulthood, you just have new challenges and new hacks. The below is an example of my adult hacking.
While I’m grateful I’m a fully financially independent and gainfully-employed adult who does have internet access and can afford to pay for her personal website, I would like to shed light on an alternative reality for someone who came from my background. While $X to build and maintain your personal website may be considered a marginal cost, there are folks who don’t have the privilege of thinking about this as an option. Even $10/month used for your personal website just doesn’t make sense when you’re still thinking about how you’ll be able to afford the rent and food for your family this week. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs right? Need I say more? If so, maybe another time and in another post before we digress too much (taking requests though).
Anyway, I decided to leave the Wix banner on my website as an experiment. I wanted to create a personal website for literally $0, be open to any services I’d be “giving up” by choosing to spend $0 (taking one for the team here), see what hacks I could come up with, and share with the world (both “the haves” and “the have-nots”). For the have-nots, I’d like to build a how-to guide, catalogue my learnings, and share my hacks so you can try them, too (I will add my list of website hacks to this post or write a separate one later). For the haves, I’d like to encourage folks to care, feel, and fight for the have-nots and hope that reading this helps provide some perspective.
I hope sharing my story and thoughts will help shed a glimmer on the challenges underserved populations experience and that if you find yourself holding certain judgements, that this might nudge you to consider circumstances more and reconsider. This brings me to my next theme of human judgement.
Human Judgement, and a push to be more accepting, to check our biases:
I’m making the assumption that when you visit a website that does not have a paid domain name and does have a few ad banners, you’re quickly pattern-judging it as “unprofessional.” I hope I am totally wrong on this, that would be great for those who can’t afford to pay for freemium upgrades on their personal websites; but I have a strong inkling that in this case, unfortunately, I’m very right. And here’s where I want to challenge us to be more aware and more critical of our pattern-judging habits. Why does it have to be seen as unprofessional? Given that we know there are costs associated with getting a domain name and getting rid of ads, are we ultimately also saying if you aren’t able to afford these things then I deem you unprofessional and/or “lesser”? Personally, I don’t think that is fair and/or a valid judgement. Yet, I do believe that human judgement happens this way, we aren’t always super aware of the implications of our quick judgements. This is my attempt to bring more awareness to this issue. We often unfairly, and inaccurately, judge “the have-nots”. I don’t want to live in and accept a world where that is the reality. Let’s check our biases and critically think about what should matter to us.
What (arguably) should matter:
To me, it shouldn’t actually matter whether I have a paid domain name or if the Wix banner is on my site or on yours, I would like society not to judge this negatively, and to re-evaluate if quick pattern-judgements nudge them there. If you disagree, I’d like to hear your arguments for why. In the meantime, I’ll say I believe my content, my thoughts, my perspective, my value-add to the world is what should matter more on my website, not whether I can afford to pay for one.
Additionally, I seriously love Wix, so much so that I invested in their stock the same day I started using it. The platform and tool is great for non-coders who want to design and build their own websites. I do know how to code, but I would still elect to use Wix over coding my website to the exact specs that I want. I believe Wix should, and hopefully will via this post, get some credit here. They’ve built a great product, I’d like to help let the world know. (Side note: when first deciding to build my personal website, I did a comparison analysis between Wordpress — which I’ve actually used for a few years now, Weebly, and Wix and ultimately decided on Wix. I can write another post on this process and decision later. It’s a great product and should get credit).
So thank you Wix, I chose to leave your banner on my website very intentionally, and hope others might choose to start doing the same (and apologies this doesn’t quite contribute to your business model) — trying to make a statement for more fair human judgement practices and what should matter here.
Let the experiment begin. My personal website is now live with an unpaid domain and the Wix banner proudly displayed. You can check it out at bit.ly/msjadele (hint: hack#1: the domain name ;))
Happy exploring! :)
