It’s not going to crawl into your bed, your cereal box or under your refrigerator and jump out and bite you. Yet it seems HTML and other web coding technologies are being systematically ignored by business owners who may be searching too hard to find the perfect, code-free web solution. This is not by any means a new phenomena. Since the invention or conception of the idea of a content management system (CMS), what we are calling htmlaphobia has run rampant amongst SME.
What I’m referring to is the obsession or tendency for small business owners to seek out complicated solutions to simple problems. More and more products out in the marketplace appear to offer perfect solutions allowing a user to never have to touch code to run a website. As a rule of thumb, some knowledge of HTML, CSS and a server side language is absolutely inevitably necessary if you plan to be successful in online marketing. There are no two ways about it, some things just cannot (or should not, we will address this shortly,) be programmed into a graphical user interface (GUI).
WYSIWYG BNWYN
What you see is what you get, but not what you need. For those of you who have not had the misfortune of dealing with a poorly implemented WYSIWYG editor before, consider yourselves lucky. Though there finally seems to be a trend away from these terrible, terrible creations, many of them still exist and can cause confusion if you don’t have the expertise to understand what’s happening on your page. The issue we find most recurring is the terrible CSS compatibility of some WYSIWYG editors. CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, exists to promote uniformity in a website, or so the theory goes. The practical problem that occurs when you use a WYSIWYG editor is that it often tries to usurp the role of the style sheet, causing your content to look like a dogs breakfast.
Pasting from Word Doc’s
Word processors are great pieces of software, they are the WYSIWYG editors of the print world. We have no doubt that they do a fantastic job of your cover letter, CV or report. But as far as creating content to be pasted onto the web is concerned, they should be thrown onto the back seat. Particularly Microsoft Word, but also most RTF (rich text format) editors will give you additional baggage when you decide to press copy/paste from your document to your website. Sometimes these additional styles usurp the style sheet or sometimes the style sheet overwrites them partially. The picture is rarely pretty, and as someone who doesn’t have the time or the skills to shift through HTML, its a disaster to sort out.
Practical Solutions
So how do we get past this fear of coding without having to take up degrees in software engineering? Its very simple, have a plan. If you are purchasing a website, make sure you get your developer to teach you simple posting and updating techniques. Very little technical details are required for daily updating and maintenance of a website if you don’t become over ambitious. Make sure your developer is competent in the use of style sheets so that your fonts, text size and colours are all consistent when you post. When you are writing, use a basic text editor like notepad and do your additional formatting inside your web application. Finally, be pedantic. If something doesn’t look right, or isn’t performing the way you meant for it to, do something about it. Tinker with the code, there is no way to void your warranty by playing with your website. Everything that can be broken can be fixed again, so you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Again, if you’re someone who has had bad experiences in the past with this sort of thing, have a plan, backup your site.
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