WYSIWYG: What You See...

The WYSIWYG Myth:
First off, real true W.Y.S.I.W.Y.G. that works 100% of the time and never does anything other than what you see on the screen, is a myth. There are always minor usability issues and some things where the formatting issues are just to complex. Nothing on the market today is a perfect solution for everyone all the time, it is only a matter of degrees.

As a rule, the WYSIWYG tools, whether of the browser plugin or standalone application variety, are ill suited for comprehensive site designs or as a page layout tool. Browser compatibility issues alone make this impractical. To put it in more common terms, you would generally not want to use Microsoft Word to publish a newspaper, but it would work just fine for a reporter to write a story for it. (for example see this article Handcoding vs. WYSIWYG - Which Is the Best for You?)

This is why we believe in managing a site's primary style elements as part of a master site template maintained by professionals and the site's content dynamically driven out of a database and maintained by the content stakeholders. The result of this methodology is a website that is utterly consistent from page to page, allows global updates to the site's style elements with little effort and is nearly impossible for a user editing content text on the site to break it.

So much WYSIWYG, so little time:
There are lots of solutions for WYSIWYG plugin components as well as standalone applications for building web sites, all touting ease of use and little or no programing to learn. Just Google "WYSIWYG" and the list will keep you reading for a year.

But there seems to be an apparent disconnect happening. The "plugins" only work if and when you actually plug them into something. Ironically, the people that need WYSIWYG editing the most are not real likely to know what any of that means, much less what exactly to plug it into.

The standalone WYSIWYG applications are not cheap and by themselves not terribly useful as they still require the web site to be hosted on. The standalone applications also tend to function as all encompassing page layout tools, which is not necessarily what you want once your site is already published. Once your get the main look & feel elements in place, your really want them to be consistently applied on a site-wide level. Using an edit tool that change all aspects of a given page is a recipe inconsistency from page to page. The standalone applications also tend to be page centric and don't lend themselves easily to building useful site-wide category structure. Again, it is a little like using Word to publish a newspaper.

What we provide is the practical implementation help needed get the site up and running. We give you a place to plug those WYSIWYG components into and the underlying tool set to support dynamically driven content and a category structure beyond a three or four page site.

Most of the nuts and bolts of getting the site up falls on our shoulders, but the relationship you have with the web hosting company is your alone. That relationship is a long term one, as long as you have a website. Think of us as home builders and the hosting company as your utility company. Once the house is built, we are pretty much done unless you want to add a new room. But power, water and garbage are going to bill you until you move out . . .

Try it now... try online on our demo site livedemo.ecomdelta.com.

Oh, and we almost forgot to mention, THERE IS NO CHARGE FOR THIS! The WYSIWYG components themselves are NOT written by us, they are freely available open source projects. We integrate them into websites that we build, as part of our Website Setup Service, because they are useful. It is just common sense . . .