So your client used a WYSIWYG?

The Designers' Sympathy - The Clients' Education
Dear God, if I could provide some of the screen shots from the sites clients brought to me based of their own WYSIWYG website builder! This is both maybe one of the most frustrating and also the most promising situations that arise in my experiences. Two quick experiences I'd like to share.

The first one came with a client I had about 3-4 years ago. He had built a site to promote his product and the site had become so clustered, he finally decided to direct his look and feel to something more "webby". Previous to my re-design, anything that could rotate, blink or flash DID!! Links flashed, stars rotated, etc..

He asked for a re-design for a site that had a lot of good information and alot of bad "webby" stuff. I was excited at the possibilities. At the time I was still somewhat unexperienced myslef and solutions diverted to sites with white text on black backgrounds - you know, to stand apart from everyone else. Both of us had gone in the wroong direction with the best of intentions. In those days well written content, optimization and non-distracting design, unfortunately weren't well-interpeted practices.

My client wanted to present the site well, but in sharing the design process with him, he still requested an appealing site, but hoped I could keep as many of the blinks, flashes and rotating thing-a-ma-doos as I could. I killed them all in the first design. And now that I looked at it I may have moved it from one bad design to another. It was terminated by the client within a couple years. The site was off a reasonable builder if I remember right. And I think they may have even offered some templates.

The other WYSIWYG builder was more of a pain to work in. The website builder converted your files to it's own file extension. I guess this is good for some form of protection against something down the road. When uploaded, the files seemed to save as regular html files. Somehow we got around this after a half a day of trying to figure it out, but it was a painful process.

This particular client didn't have the flashing, rotating or blinking circus pages, but instead had linked extremely large image files that were sized down in the code to his pages. Some of his pages took minutes to load. That's loss of viewers who, like myself, click away after seconds. being that most small clients don't know or don't care to reduce the sizes of images or create thumbnail versions, I had no problem fixing this for him.

To The Clients
So here's one for those who don't want to spend the moeny on a designer now, but hope to later. USE THE TEMPLATES!! They are most likely built correctly by professionals. Look for the templates which are layed out in your desired style and have imagery layed out in your style. The text is easy to update. Ask yourself how much information will YOUR site have. If you go after a template that holds the information/content you think your business will have in five years, keep in mind without all that content it will look empty for five years. Is the time spent searching templates that fit your content and size worth it? Yes, I believe so. Isn't your business worth taking that time?

You can provide the designer with all of your largest images and we'll compress them down for you. Also, if you want a sharp design, don't send poor and pixelated images. Track down or create vector images for logos and artwork specific to your business. Find stock images related to your website and mark the links to these images. I now tell my clients to go to http://www.istockphoto.com and create a lightbox or send me the links. They have cheap images there with high quality.