WYSIWYG vs custom code design

Posted on 29 July 2018

For as long as web pages have been around, people have been trying to make website design easier and easier. There’s so many different IDE’s and WYSIWYG software around, it’s hard to know the right and wrong ways of building a website. Not just building a website though but building a website; that is valid by the W3 Consortiums standards, responsive or adaptive across a different range of devices, reliable, secure, efficient to produce and finally, a better website than competitors.

What is a WYSIWYG

A WYSIWYG — What You See Is What You Get is a piece of software that allows dragging and dropping of HTML elements into blank webpages. This allows people that aren’t savvy with HTML and CSS to build websites.

The advantages

1. Faster to produce than manually coding a website
2. No need to learn extensive amounts of HTML and CSS
3. Viewing edits is usually instant as you’re manipulating the output in-front of you

The disadvantages

1. Too much code! WYSIWYG editors may add unnecessary HTML elements
2. Ability to make mistakes that are hard to trace back
3. Can drastically damage scalability

Custom Code

The advantages

1. Cleaner code output
2. Page load times should be quicker
3. No limitations other than knowledge and time

The disadvantages

1. More time required
2. More skills required
3. Changes can’t be seen live

What do we do?

We like our work to be refined, we like to be able to test our work on multiple devices and we like to know that we’re not limited by the abilities of a software package. Writing websites from custom code is our choice all day everyday.