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by workhere-io 4399 days ago
Once you leave design and layout to non-designers/non-layouters, they will ruin everything, and you will get angry calls from the companies' designers, complaining about how their beautiful design was ruined by someone using Comic Sans on a header. I've seen it happen. This is why CMS makers know that editors / article writers should not be allowed to design/layout pages.

Ideally, a WYSIWYG editor in a CMS should only allow users to use bold, italics, links, and perhaps insert small images. Anything more than that, and your web pages end up looking like MySpace/GeoCities.
1 comments
TuringTest 4399 days ago
There's no reason why designers and ''layouters'' couldn't use WYSIWYG tools nor should be forced to use plain text in order to design the visuals of the site. Your argument is against letting end-users control the whole process, but it's not an argument against WYSIWYG per se.
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workhere-io 4399 days ago
I see what you mean. However, given the large number of different CMSes, I'm not sure designers would appreciate having to re-learn how to design every time they use a new CMS. Right now they use a relatively small "default" set of tools, with PhotoShop being the chief one.

I'm not a designer, but my feeling here is that designers wouldn't appreciate the workflow you're suggesting. Any designers here who'd like to weigh in?

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TuringTest 4399 days ago
That's why design tools in visual CMS should be integrated with the current methods that designers use in specialized apps :-)

Who says you can't merely reuse the same basic workflows that have been refined by professional designers, augmented with general-purpose mixed visual-textual scripting? That sounds like a winning strategy to me.

Designers ''do'' learn ad-hoc batch processing tools for image transformation and publication of the final work; having those standardized would be a net win.

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