Posted on Monday November 28, 2005 in Work
All customers want a content managed website. “I want to be able to update the content myself!” they say. They want to be able to change the colour of the text, the font size, drop in tables and cut and paste content from their Microsoft Word document.
This is bad news. Good news that they want to add content to their site – but bad news that you know that all those hours of hard work perfecting the CSS is going to be for naught once they get their hands on a WYSIWYG content editor.
Quite often you will hand the site over so that the client can familiarise themselves with the tools you have set up for them. After a few days of playing, they get back to you telling you that the site has broken. You go to the testing URL to have a look and voila, they have copied the content from the old site (including the hodge podge of tables used to lay out the content) and it has blown out your lovely tableless layout.
Or you get a call because they can’t get the text to look the same – lo and behold, there are dirty tags all through the content they have added, negating the CSS you have spent so long matching to the corporate style guide you were told was so important.
So you decide to give them Textile, a simple to use, lovely text editing system that takes the “huh?” out of producing nice code. You tell them that they can do their headings, paragraphs, links and quotes with just a few characters. You tell them where to go if they need clarification.
Clients do not like this. They want their CMS editor to look and behave just like Microsoft Word. Bah.
So back goes the WYSIWYG. And very quickly, they are intermittantly using Comic Sans and Times New Roman when the style guide calls for Arial. They are using line breaks instead of paragraphs. They are doing blocks of text in different colours, then complaining that the site looks “rediculous”.
Sigh.
Can I hear a hell yeah!
I’ve got 2 projects going at the moment with medium-savvy clients who I’m hoping will be able to deal with Textile. I think a simplified crib-sheet like the basecamp/backpack formatting guide may help.
A solution that works well for me is to use xinha and then limit the functionality that is available.
... It also has a nice button that strips rubbish from MSWord when people paste it into the textarea.