Wix is one of the world’s most popular web design companies, offering custom-made drag and drop websites hosted on their cloud platform. It’s a really user-friendly solution which I used to recommend for my clients who are not tech-confident, are on a limited budget, and want to be able to 100% manage their own websites. Their ease of use and beginner-friendliness is second-to-none, and while the trade-off is that Wix is the most technically-limited of the web solutions that I offer, their new Wix Studio offering provides fully responsive website design – a feature that they had always sorely lacked. This was an exciting development and would have been a great option to be able to offer to my really small business clients.
Unfortunately, Wix is also an Israeli company headquartered in Tel-Aviv.
The far-right government of Israel has been actively bombing Gaza since October 7, killing more than 30,000 civilians and injuring approximately 70,000. In total, this is enough people to fill Melbourne’s MCG. Many of those killed are children. The north of Gaza is now in deep famine, with another massacre committed by the Israeli Defence Force on hungry Gazans seeking humanitarian aid since the time I first published this post on February 28, 2024. Multiple Israeli politicians have overtly compared all Palestinians to “animals” and expressed a clear intention to annihilate Palestine from the map. The IDF has even gone so far as to run over and crush civilians using tanks, and target unarmed people with precision drone. We are effectively witnessing the second holocaust and the lack of international representative response – in response to clear civilian opinion in favour of a ceasefire and ICJ ruling on “plausible genocide” – has me furious.
The rate and scale at which Gaza has been levelled by destruction, and the nature by which civilian infrastructure has been targeted, is not a reasonable reaction to the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians. Rather than listening to the international community’s calls for care and civilian protection and using a pinpointed and careful method to dismantle Hamas, the Israeli government has annihilated schools, hospitals and refugee camps with indiscriminate carpet bombing that has left millions displaced, in famine, and dying. The level of indiscriminate killing was made even clearer when Israel accidentally shot and killed their own hostages because they thought they were Hamas. The disproportionate response indicates that Israel’s objective is to make Gaza completely unliveable for civilians and to force them to leave, die, or live in complete submission after decades of conflict over the land.
As a result, I am boycotting Wix indefinitely, and will be continuing to offer web design only on WordPress, Squarespace, and Shopify.
Over the next 8 months to my renewal period, I’m also looking at alternatives to my current WordPress design approach so that I can stop using Elementor – another Israeli subscription-based web building tool – without impacting my clients’ sites. My intention is to completely sever my business from Israel and I encourage other designers to do the same.
Ceasefire now.