Beware of WYSIWYG Editors
Far too many times I have seen small business owners turn to wysiwyg (“what you see is what you get”) editors or online web design services (which provide wysiwyg editors) in order to build a website on the cheap. The allure of the wysiwyg editor is a free or almost-free website. Unfortunately, most business owners don’t know web design and don’t look at the markup. Ironically, they get far less than what they see.
What most wysiwyg editors deliver is a web page that is relatively attractive when viewed in a certain browser (but not all browsers). However, what wysiwyg delivers that business owners don’t see is a lot of archaic, redundant or even useless markup. Categorically, the largest offense is HTML table markup for page layout instead of CSS page layout.
What CSS that is used is often repeated, ad nauseam on a tag-by-tag basis. This unnecessary, verbose markup, in addition to being extremely annoying to anyone who actually looks at the markup, is detrimental to SEO by reducing keyword density. In addition, once a site is built by a wysiwyg editor, it is almost impossible to manage it except by using the original editor – a fact very comforting to those services which charge a monthly fee for the use of the wysiwyg editor.
In short, a small business owner can work with a knowledgeable web designer and receive a must more cost effective web solution.
Just bookmarked your blog. Always interested in reading about this particular subject. Kind regards.
Awesome, I didn’t heard about that up to the present. Cheers!!