Top 7 WYSIWYG Tools

Perhaps you’ve been thinking to yourself, “Man, I really want to make a website but I’m just not sure those two months of Photoshop I had in 8th grade are gonna be enough. If only there were some kind of tool I could use that wrote all the code and built the site for me, and I just moved stuff around on the screen.” Well if so, you’re in luck! Enter the WYSIWYG editor.

Pronounced /ˈwɪziwɪɡ/ WIZ-ee-wig (no I’m not making that up; yes there are several youtube videos dedicated solely to said pronunciation), WYSIWYG is the rather cumbersome acronym for “what you see is what you get.” But instead of deliberating the merits of the largely accepted pronunciations of overly lengthy initialisms, let’s just check out the top 7 WYSIWYG tools.

From the company the brought you classics like: the PDF file, Photoshop, and flash player comes Adobe Dreamweaver. And just as many of their products are leaders in their respective fields, Dreamweaver too is the biggest name in the WYSIWYG arena, and with some history behind it.

It was initially released in 1997 meaning you were using it to build pages for Netscape Navigator and the newly released Internet Explorer 4. Yeah, it’s pretty old—but that could be a good thing. Adobe has been working on Dreamweaver for 20 years now and has managed to make a product that has keep up with the times. Today’s Dreamweave is used to build modern, responsive web apps and has a slew of features. If you’re looking for the industry standard, don’t feel like thinking, and are ready to part with only $19.99 a month, well then I guess Dreamweaver is the way to go.

If however you’re looking for some alternatives and perhaps want to part with a mere $0.00 per month, then stay with me.

Netobjects Fusion is another web classic—even older actually having been released in 1995. The angle here is that it’s super easy to use. That means of course it’s pretty limited in the features it offers. It does the basics very well, but no more than that. Also, you’ll need a different product, NetObjects Mosaic, if you want a mobile site. As for price it is exactly $129.95 away from being free. So if you want to do the basics and nothing more, and want to put the minimal possible effort into it, this could be the way to go.

Next up is BlueGriffon, a “next-gen Web and EPUB Editor based on the rendering engine of Firefox.” It inherits “proudly” from its famous ancestors including Netscape, Mozilla Composer and Nvu. And for the record, that’s two Netscape references so far—bet you didn’t see that coming.

It has a good amount of features including CSS3 2D and 3D transformations, transitions, shadows, columns, font features etc. which are available in the free version (yay, free). However, you will need a license for many features, some of which are pretty important including media queries, meaning you’ll have to pay if you want to build a responsive site. The basic license is €69.99 and with it you’ll really be able to create a very good site.

BlueGriffon is a native standalone application available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Microsoft Expression Web is a “full-featured professional tool for designing, developing, and publishing compelling, feature-rich websites that conform to web standards”, and is free to download and use. It features integration with other programs such as Adobe Photoshop, FrontPage and Visual Studio, and is similar in feel to older versions of Dreamweaver.

If you’re looking to make your site mobile friendly it will be best to find a responsive design template, otherwise you’ll have a lot of manual coding work to do.

Expression Web is no longer being updated so you’ve got the final version here. A good choice if you’re new to this and want to start experimenting with WYSIWYG, but not the best choice for the more advanced user.

TOWeb is another freemium WYSIWYG tool with an emphasis on building mobile friendly, responsive websites—a crucial element considering traffic from mobile devices now outweighs that from desktops. It includes several quality templates, its live content editor is intuitive, and it has a host of other features.

So let’s talk money. The free version allows you to build one website of up to 10MB, not exactly huge but a reasonable size. From there you have premium licenses ranging from €49 up to €199 with features like unlimited website size and very good ecommerce features. TOWeb is easy to use but also allows for quality site building and should definitely be at the top of your considerations.

TOWeb is available for Windows and Mac—linux users will need to use Wine to run the app.

Alright fanboys, here’s your editor. Meet Flux by The Escapers—a no code WYSIWYG editor exclusively for Mac (OS X El Capitan). Flux allows for a mobile first, responsive design using Bootstrap and Skeleton, two of the most popular frontend frameworks in use today.

It also supports FTP and SFTP so you can work directly on the server version of your site, yeah which kinda sounds like not really the best idea, but hey go for it I guess. In a nod to the glaringly obvious, they advise keeping a backup with this feature. Thanks Flux.

Flux comes in at a one time cost of $99.00, which for Mac users I guess is pretty reasonable. It’s perhaps not the best choice for the first time builder due to its relative complexity, but if you’re motivate you can go far with this one.

Rounding out our list we have KompoZer, “a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing.” It’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux and is based on Mozilla’s Gecko layout engine.

First off, I’m gonna have to deduct a few points for improper use of CamelCase. You don’t just randomly capitalize letters, that’s not the point. Then it’s like, “what’s a Kompo? What’s a Zer?” You see how that makes no sense? Good.

However, KompoZer earns back those point in that it is free. No licenses, no premium, no freemium, no emiums of any kind really (just a little donate button in the corner which I’m guessing no one has ever clicked on). And it super easy to use if you want to make simple, oh let’s call them “old-school” websites. A good choice for the non-technical with basic requirements, but not the best choice for the more advanced or those wanting a mobile friendly site.

There you have it—from super simple to “official interwebs guru”. Now get out there and see what you can make.