For those of you that don’t know WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get. A WYSIWYG is used as tool to construct HTML, giving the user a close approximation of what the resulting HTML will look like while editing content. A popular example is the design view in Dreamweaver.
As well as application based WYSIWYGs there is also a large choice of online versions that you can use in your websites and web applications to enable visitors to create their own HTML content. One of our sites (among many) that that includes a WYSIWYG is www.voodoochilli.net. The WYSIWYG is used to allow site members to update their own CV’s, giving them the ability to easily change font, sizes colours etc.
This ability to change so many things is part of the problem with WYSIWYGs. Giving users that have little or no understanding of HTML the flexibility to design web pages might be quite empowering for them but it can easily cause problems for your site. If you have used WordPress lately you may be aware that the open source developers have made the wise decision to cut down the HTML WYSIWYG functions in favour of a plain text editor that allows for the insertion of some limited tags. The downside to this is that any advanced stuff still needs to be done the old fashioned way by hand coding, which is fine for web developers but sort of misses the point for the majority of WordPress owners.
The pros and cons of WYSWYGS vs. plain text editors could be discussed forever, however I wish to simply list the best free online WYSIWYG’s that I have used over the years.
1. OpenWYSIWYG
This is bar far the best free open source WYSIWYG in my opinion. Its easy to install, supported by all browsers and can easily be customised. This is the one I would recommend. It’s just perfect, I cant think of anything I would add except maybe a built in spell checker and an online file manager. All of these things can of course be cutom built for your web application if needed. OpenWYSIWYG, as the name suggests is completly open source which is something I am in favour of. Other classic open source software can be found here.
A Content Management System or CMS is basically an interface that allows textual and visual content of a website to be managed with little or no need to understand HTML. At Voodoochilli we custom build our own Content Management Systems. We find that this gives us the most flexibility; however it has the major drawback of taking considerably more time to develop. Pre-made CMS’s are developed before hand and enable the easy editing of website content.
Over they years we have used a few of these when clients have already had systems in place. Below I have listed three open source CMS’s which I think you may find useful.
MODx
www.modxcms.com
Modx is an advanced CMS. You can pretty much do everything with it that you would want to. As with most CMS’s it has plenty of plugins and templates to help customise the look and functionality of the site it is powering. Modx is also quite suitable for large scale websites.
I personally found it difficult to find my way around, but you have to bear in mind I was working on an existing website post site launch.
I found a very positive, and more detailed review where by the author says “blows me away that I still even hear about Joomla and Mambo while something like this is on the open source market.” Read the rest of this entry »
As someone that is always trying to improve my own skills, I find it important to read around the subject of web design and development. I have list below my three favourite web design and development books, all of which I would recommend.
3. Web Re-design 2.0 – Workflow that works by Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler
This book is written by two experienced web designers and its focus is project workflow. The book concentrates on site re-designs but the information within can just as well be applied to new projects. I brought this book as a way to better understand the workflow of my own projects and it has given me significant insight. It discusses project management, project scope, clients and pretty much everything to do with a web design project. My only small criticism about this book is that when mentioning software, the authors seem to concentrate mostly on the Macintosh. Read the rest of this entry »
I think the best tool I use often in developing a website is the internet itself. If there is anything I don’t know or am stuck with, I “google†it. As you probably know google is now actually a verb in English dictionaries. This is due to the fact that so many people use google to research and seek out information due to its superiority over other search engines.
Over the last few years I have come across many tools and utilities that have helped me complete various tasks and I have decided to list them here in the hope that the will be of help to some else. They are not listed in any particular order as they are all great.
Edit Plus
Download
Edit Plus is a great text editor that supports probably every known programming and database language there is. It has great colour highlighting, ftp, customisable scripts and extensions and much more. Its a 30 day free trial, but in the past I have used it for much longer than 30days meaning, I guess that purchase is voluntary. No doubt you will find it so useful you might consider paying the shareware fee.
