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General Discussion

Thomas Daugherty
Thomas Daugherty
23,983 Points
Posted by Thomas Daugherty
Thomas Daugherty
23,983 Points

Graphic Arts Instructor bent on using wysiwyg editors

I'm good friends with a Graphic Design Instructor a local tech school who teaches Graphic Design, Photography and now Web Design. Only he's bent on wanting to skip learning any code and just use a wysiwyg editor like Dreamweaver. I've dropped by to see how the students are doing and they all seem frustrated and their drive to design is gone. It kills me to see them run away from it because of a wysiwyg program! Should I convince my old instructor to change his ways to embrace learning code?

4 Answers

Dave Yankowiak
Dave Yankowiak
9,105 Points
Dave Yankowiak
Dave Yankowiak
9,105 Points

Easy answer: yes. :)

Maybe if you can get enough yes answers on this thread, you can show it to him to convince him that pros prefer to code. And FYI, I used Dreamweaver way back in the day. I have never once regretted switching to a hand coding approach (Coda is my editor of choice).

James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points
James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points

My suggestion would be to teach them to use Webflow it's basically:

  • responsive frontend framework
  • drag & drop UI
  • hosted published

Webflow's got a video course on building a responsive web site that would probably come in handy for teaching a course.

Greg Barbosa
Greg Barbosa
9,874 Points
Greg Barbosa
Greg Barbosa
9,874 Points

+1 for Webflow. I completely forgot that had launched.

Greg Barbosa
Greg Barbosa
9,874 Points
Greg Barbosa
Greg Barbosa
9,874 Points

Answer: Yes.

Going to McDonald's and ordering off the menu is cool. You know what you are going to get 99% of the time. But learning how to make your own burger, and truly make it your own, is even better.

PS: Dreamweaver is cool, and WYSIWYG editors were great in the past. But with all the new technologies (web browsers on phones, computers, TVs, tablets) granular control through code is the BEST way to produce the most compatible of websites.

James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points
James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points

> WYSIWYG editors were great in the past

They were useful back in the early days, then they there were a few years when weren't and now in the past year they have experienced a renaissance.

Sarah Bradberry
Sarah Bradberry
7,115 Points
Sarah Bradberry
Sarah Bradberry
7,115 Points

Yes, embrace the code! I'm here at Treehouse because of wysiwyg editors.

I've been running a website for 18 years. I began with a great big book on html 1.0 and notepad. Then I started using Dreamweaver which was great for a while. However I began wanting to make changes to my website and even though the editors were "good enough", I needed to understand the code to make the changes I wanted, and have control over my project.

Embracing the code = control and getting the result you want

wysiwyg editors = being stuck with something that's "good enough" but not always what you wanted.

I still use Dreamweaver but I use the code panel and write it all myself. Only don't check my site because that version isn't live yet ;-)