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Kontent.ai hates: WYSIWYG

Although WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors might seem like the easiest way to ensure your page looks right, this approach fails to separate your presentation and content layers, messes up the code of your website, and disables content reuse. Well, if not WYSIWYG, what then? 

Jozef Falis

Jozef FalisUpdated on Sep 18, 2023Published on May 12, 2021

WYS (What You See) is not WYG (What You Get)

At first glance, a WYSIWYG editor is great for every marketer and content editor—text formatting is easy, the possibilities of using fonts, colors, or font styles are unlimited. It’s kind of a web Word. However, what users often don’t realize is that the content they create in WYSIWYG editors is usually not reusable, often doesn’t follow their brand guidelines (e.g., a different typeface or color), and makes a mess in the HTML code.

Content copied from Word into a WYSIWYG editor
Content copied from Word into a WYSIWYG editor with an excessive amount of formatting that could break the design of our page.

Here comes the rich text editor

Since I started using the Kontent.ai headless CMS, I’ve realized that it’s totally unnecessary to create landing pages in a WYSIWYG editor. We have strict brand guidelines we need to follow in our company, so the overwhelming majority of functions (fonts, spacing, colors, etc.) offered by WYSIWYG are useless.

Our design manual is implemented directly into the web graphics, and Kontent.ai’s rich text editor gives us enough freedom in creating text while providing us with boundaries so that we don’t produce any off-brand content. As a result, we’re communicating consistently everywhere.

💡 Rich text editor enables basic work with text such as creating paragraphs and headings, adding images or other media, and inserting other content items (e.g., an ebook, testimonial, or a YouTube video). When structured like this, your content is future-proofed and can be easily reused. You can find out more about the editor here.

Rich text editor in Kentico Kontent
Rich text editor in Kontent.ai

You won’t break the design

The rich text editor also gives us the ability to effortlessly deliver content to any other device, and it does not break the layout of the page like WYSIWYG editors do when a content creator or marketer uses non-standard formatting. Moreover, web developers are happy because no unwanted code gets into their HTML and CSS.

Even though we no longer use Word in our team on an everyday basis, we can’t avoid it in certain situations. However, when we receive a Word file from someone outside Kentico, we can just copy and paste the text from Word to Kontent.ai. The rich text editor removes all unnecessary formatting and keeps only the important stuff (H1-H4 headings, bold or italicized text, paragraphs, bullet points, etc.).

Conclusion

When working with Kontent.ai, you no longer need to use the functionality of WYSIWYG editors, which can sometimes make your job stressful and more difficult. Kontent.ai, with its rich text editor, fully supports omnichannel strategy and consistency in communication.

Thank you for taking the time to read the blog post from the Kontent.ai loves series, which discusses the benefits a headless CMS brings to marketers, covering everything from content creation to distribution. If you have any questions about how to use Kontent.ai in your marketing team, feel free to contact me on LinkedIn 😊.

Check out other articles from this series:


Jozef Falis
Written by

Jozef Falis

I’m managing the Demand Generation team here at Kontent.ai. I love creative ideas in the technical world and making communication to customers as relevant as possible.

More articles from Jozef

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