… inspire, engage and inform women showing how bloomin’ marvelous the digital world can be.

As I explained to .NET Magazine when I was contacted by them to comment on my involvement, I’m not comfortable with women only groups and events where they encourage an “us and them” attitude. I don’t think we do ourselves any favours if we simply huddle up in a corner together. However, given that there are fewer women involved in technology, it doesn’t hurt to make sure that those of us who are working in the business are visible. If only so that women thinking of this industry as a career can see role models, see that there are women working right across the industry.

I presented new material on “Launching a Product“. This is something I have been wanting to speak about for a while, and was based on our experiences launching Perch two and a half years ago. I had some nice feedback on Twitter after the event and I hope that the attendees enjoyed it.

The problem with presenting online is it is really difficult to get a feel for if the attendees are enjoying it. Essentially I was presenting to my own computer for an hour, trying not to get distracted by cats wandering around the office car park. None of the clues I pick up when presenting live are there. I’ve done a few online presentations now and the only way to get a feel for how it went is to check Twitter and hope someone says something about my talk!

I had some encouraging feedback on Twitter from this presentation but it led me to wondering how we can improve the feel of an online conference for speakers and attendees. In addition to feedback when presenting onstage, another important place I get feedback after a presentation is in the breaks afterwards. It isn’t about people coming up and telling me they loved it, but rather the questions they come and ask. The ideas they want to discuss. Then I know that the things I have said have hit a chord with a person, and may also pick up something that should be added to the presentation another time.

For attendees an important part of a real world conference experience is discussion with speakers and with each other. The online conferences I have been involved with have generally had a short period of questions after the presentation. Is there a good way to facilitate a more relaxed question and answer session, perhaps using IRC or similar?

With many companies cutting back, employees may find they don’t have the budget to travel to conferences, so I think online conferences are valuable and here to stay. However with so much of the conference experience being the bits between the presentations, I wonder if we can partly create that atmosphere for speakers and attendees albeit in a virtual way.

The first thing I got about the web was its ability to empower the maker. The year was 1995, and I was tinkering at my first website. The medium was raw and ugly, like a forceps baby; yet even in its blind, howling state, it made me a writer, a designer, and a publisher — ambitions which had eluded me during more than a decade of underachieving desert wanderings.

I say “it made me” but I made it, too. You get the power by using it. Nobody confers it on you.

The Maker Makes – on Design, Community and Personal Empowerment

I would be the first to admit I’ve been incredibly fortunate. I stumbled across the web in 1996. At 21 I was pregnant, out of work and with no realistic chance of going back into the job I had been doing. Working as stage crew is not compatible with newborn babies. I had left school at 16 with terrible GCSE results to study dance and all I had ever intended to do was in the theatre in some capacity, it was all I really knew.

Teaching myself HTML, then Perl and Linux systems administration might have been an odd choice, but the web saved me. It enabled me to go back into work in 2000 in a technical role; to use skills I never knew I had; to make wonderful online friends at a time when I was terribly isolated from everything I had known. As I learned things I wrote about them. It seemed obvious to me as I had learned everything I knew from things other people had written, and given freely, that I should also write – just in case it was helpful to someone else.

I helped people out in forums – at the time I used Dreamweaver and the active Macromedia forum had been really helpful to me, so I picked off the easy questions that I could answer and answered them. Paying back the help I had been given.

In time I was offered the chance to write a couple of chapters of a book. I didn’t see the articles I was writing as really writing, I was just making notes to help other people. As I’ve already explained I had no real qualifications, not even traditional qualifications in another subject, and this left me feeling pretty scared. Was I about to be “found out” as this unqualified fool who had the nerve to write an actual book! I said yes. I kept saying yes, and somehow here I am 10 years later and working on the fourth edition of the CSS Anthology. I frequently hear from people who feel one of my books really helped them to get started in this business, and that is a wonderful thing.

However you will not find techniques out there with my name on them. I’m not the inventor of a CSS trick or technique that everyone uses. All I have ever done is worked out how to do things and then written down what I did, in a way that someone who hasn’t worked it out yet can understand. I keep a list, it contains interesting things that I have done at work, that I think would make a good article, presentation or blog post. When I have time I write one up; include them in a book I’m working on or pitch it as an idea for a conference presentation.

So what I do now is not so different to what I did then. I do interesting things in the course of my job and I write – and speak – about them. That path is open to anyone. As Jeremy points out, there are always sites looking for article submissions and conferences needing speakers. If you have something interesting to say – whether it is a new technique or just a good explanation of something useful – then pitch it! If you have no writing track record then your own blog is a good place to start. If you have no speaking track record then look for local events that need speakers for short presentations.

Make 2012 the year you go out and do it. Don’t complain about the “same old faces” – be a new face! If you have something to say you will be most welcome. Don’t worry if you have nothing ground-breaking to talk about, there is always a place for well written tutorials and practical conference sessions. Pitch your work to the places it best fits. Say yes a lot, especially to the things that scare you, and be part of making the web better for yourself and for the people who will be helped by what you contribute.

A few years ago (pre-Twitter!), if you disagreed with some technique, you had to post to your blog or at the very least write a comment on an article. Blog posts of 140 characters telling someone they are an idiot tend not to get much of an audience. So, one would have to actually write up an alternative point of view, a proper argument. Proper arguments are excellent, they are how we are where we are today. Through reasonable debate we hammer out what does and doesn’t work, and in which context. This is really important because we all have different parts of the picture. Someone who has experience of high traffic, high performance sites, working in a team of 50 developers is going to propose different solutions to the person whose experience is in helping small businesses get their first website online. The correct solution for a person on shared hosting who has very little control of the stack, is going to be different to the person with access to their server configuration. We all see solutions from inside the context we work in and all of that experience is important and valid.

So, argument is good. Disagreement should be encouraged. However, what is not good and what should not be encouraged is personal attacks and one-liner snarky remarks on Twitter. Abusive ad hominem attacks do not encourage good argument, they usually serve to simply entrench positions on either side. They leave people afraid to contribute, and then we all lose out because we lose that person’s knowledge and experience. I know from experience that once you get a couple of personal, nasty remarks about something that you have contributed, it is then very hard to be open to the constructive comments and sensible criticism. It’s easy to go into “everyone hates me” mode at that point. Do we want to be an industry where one has to be thick skinned and aggressive to succeed? I hope not.

We should continue to disagree with each other. This is an exciting time for the web. There are so many new techniques being hammered out, we can do so many interesting things and some of those things don’t have a “right way” to do them yet. There will be disagreement, we’ll argue this stuff out together. However let us not do so by silencing the voices of all but the most thick skinned. Let us be kind to one another, and as an industry give no time and attention to those who try to build themselves up by attacking other people.

Rather than just talk for half an hour about myself I tried to base the presentation around advice that I think has been particularly important for me in my business, and give them an honest and realistic account of what it is like to run a business. One of my points was to “work hard” but another was to “look after yourself” – to get enough sleep, exercise and eat properly. You are no use to your business if you try and work all night or don’t take time to get to the gym, go for a run or have a decent walk. Running a business, particularly at the start, is hard work and you should work hard, but balance that with enough time to recharge before you burn out.

Then, I read this post by Michael Arrington. I’ll avoid unpacking all of the nonsense, although I’m not convinced that the company behind Farmville are really “putting a dent in the universe”, and the programmer quoted in the article has already spoken out about his name being used to support Arrington’s argument. What I will say is that this is a horrible, horrible example of how to do business well. Glorifying bad working practices, expecting people to work ridiculously long hours and berating them when they object not only flies in the face of common sense but is an incredibly bad example to set. You can read Amy Hoy’s excellent post on the matter on her blog, Unicorn Free.

If you have a “startup culture” that glorifies long hours and complete dedication to your cause then you are essentially stating that you don’t want any person who has a life, any other interests or (heaven help them) a family working in your company. You rule out a lot of older people, really those over the age of about 25 or so, who have figured out that working all night isn’t something worth bragging about, you rule out anyone with a health issue or disability that makes working long hours difficult and in particular you rule out a lot of women. The dot com culture that I escaped to run my own business in 2001 was very much the same as the startup culture of today. As a woman with a small child, I needed to hot foot it out of the office every day at 5.30pm on the dot or risk annoying my lovely childminder, and not getting to spend a bit of time with my daughter. I quite frequently then worked at home after she went to bed – but then felt bad at work the next day hearing the team talk about how they had been in the office, “most of the night”. It was never said to me openly, but I always felt sidelined in that culture because I couldn’t be part of it as a single mum. There are of course fathers in the same position, either as single dads or as dads who take on the majority share of the childcare. However, due to biology, there is a certain amount of time where the woman is likely to be the one doing the majority childcare and so this kind of culture does effect women more than men.

Why is anyone encouraging this behaviour? I am all for hard work, I am all for putting in the extra hours when they are needed. If you are running your business well however, those late nights should be the exception not the rule. You are doing something wrong if you need to expect yourself or people working for you to work long hours as a matter of course. You will not get the best out of yourself or anyone else if you are exhausted and you will not attract experienced team members if you expect them to give up their entire lives for the company. There are other ways to do business. There are more sustainable ways, with less risk to your health and sanity, to run a company and develop a product. There are ways to bootstrap your products, and at least then if you are putting in the long hours you are doing it for YOU, and not to line the pockets of your funders.

As I explained to the young people on Monday, when I started the company it was just me, and it was a service business. It is very hard to scale a service business as you are swapping hours for money, adding an extra person allowed some level of scaling as the admin work didn’t double so the amount of billable hours we could work between us more than doubled. This allowed us to bootstrap our product, Perch, out of the income from the consultancy business. Perch is completely owned by us, and we’re sure that our customers will be pretty happy to know we aren’t looking to sell the business, that’s not our model. We intend to keep doing what we love – developing Perch, helping our customers and doing a small amount of consultancy and development work for clients – in places where we think we can really make a difference.

There are other ways to do business. I’d like to see the bootstrappers, the tiny service businesses doing great stuff for their clients, the parents combining business with a successful and happy family life, the small companies treating their employees with kindness and compassion held up as great examples – not those who think sleeping under their desk makes them better than the rest of us.

For reasons I’m not entirely sure of – although I think it may be linked to the focal migraine I occasionally suffer from – I can’t read text if there is something moving in my peripheral vision. I’m not alone with that problem, people with ADHD or other cognitive issues can also find it hard to read text when there is something moving on the same screen, distracting them from the main content.

This is an accessibility issue. WCAG 2.0 deals with the problem thoroughly in Understanding Success Criterion 2.2.2 making the suggestion that if moving content is required the animation should pause after 5 seconds:

“Moving content can also be a severe distraction for some people. Certain groups, particularly those with attention deficit disorders, find blinking content distracting, making it difficult for them to concentrate on other parts of the Web page. Five seconds was chosen because it is long enough to get a user’s attention, but not so long that a user cannot wait out the distraction if necessary to use the page.”

Going on to mention advertising specifically when describing examples of meeting this success criterion:

“An advertisement blinks to get viewers attention but stops after 5 seconds”

After posting to Twitter mentioning how annoying these advertisements are, several people suggested that I just block ads. I don’t want to block ads. Many of the sites I enjoy using are ad supported, I often find interesting products and services via ads and my own product Perch is promoted by (non-animated) advertising. Some ad blocker products do enable “whitelisting” of certain sites, however that is shifting the problem onto me, the user. More importantly, I’m not a typical user, I can find ways to stop these ads showing and animating, as annoying as it might be to have to do so. Can someone who is using a computer at school or in a library do so? Or someone who doesn’t know much more about using a computer than which icon to click to get “the internet”?

I would like to encourage sites to consider advertising when they are checking the accessibility of their site. If you are including advertising space then consider what your policy will be for that space. We purchase advertising for Perch through BuySellAds.com and they allow advertisers to specify that advertising be non-animated. If your content is important I strongly suggest that you require advertisers to submit non-animated artwork. Or at the very least restrict them to an initial 5 seconds of flashing, scrolling or other animation as outlined in the WCAG 2.0 Success Criterion quoted above.

Do you allow animated advertising and think I’m making a fuss about nothing? Have you had experience of advertisers refusing to take out an ad if they cannot use animation? Do you simply block all ads so don’t care? Do you have any examples of sites that ought to be awarded a special prize for the number of animated ads on one page? Let me know in the comments.

I may well be old-fashioned but it seems that setting up a business with the aim of an exit by way of a sale to a bigger company is unlikely to work out. Investors throw a lot of money at projects because they know that perhaps 1 in 20, 1 in 50 will pay out in a massive way. It’s a lottery – you might win, you’ll probably lose and have nothing to show for it in the end. For the investors it doesn’t matter – they win in the end when one of their 50 lottery tickets turns out to be a winner – however every person in every one of the failed companies loses. From the founders to the employees.

Making a thing and selling copies of it at a profit may not make you a billionaire overnight, however it can make you a nice income, may very well allow you to employ people and provide them with stable employment. You can own 100% of your company, and be truly independent. No investors pushing for an exit, no worries about where the next round of money is coming from. You make your thing, you sell it and with the money you make more things or improve on your thing. It’s slow and steady, but it works.

While this post has been sat in my drafts, I discovered that I’m not the only person who is concerned about this. Amy Hoy writes on her blog Unicorn Free,

I’m angry that it’s become an assumption that “success” means getting a big fat investment, not turning a profit. That success means founding your own company in order to determine your own destiny, then happily become an employee again when some megacorp snatches you up.

- The Truth about Success – Brick by Brick

Gary Vaynerchuk also recently posed the question, “Why is raising money celebrated more than making money?”

I don’t think companies funded by venture capital are always a bad thing. If you have a great idea, with a real roadmap to profitability, that needs a chunk of cash up front in order to put plans into action, then it can be really helpful. Many investments also come with valuable business help and input – which can be worth as much as the money for an early stage company with founders who have little business experience. However I am afraid that people with a business idea are heading straight down the investment track without considering if they can be profitable from the outset, bootstrapped by founders who then can own their entire company. When the bubble bursts, a lot of small, potentially excellent companies will go under with it, as they will be unable to survive without further investment which will be in short supply. The bootstrappers will probably survive, as they are growing within their profits and know how to live within their means as a business.

I don’t know a lot about the world of venture capital and investment. I know quite a bit about running a profitable business though, and while I love the fact that running a business is being seen to be a good thing, and something for young people to aspire to, I think we should be careful that we are not setting people up to fail. I’d like to see the bootstrappers celebrated, and seen as role models for young people. I’d like to see more resources and information for people who want to do that, more stories from those of us who have done that and are currently still engaged in the process of growing these businesses in a sustainable way. The big investment stories are far more newsworthy than, “small business launches new product built during evenings and weekends, while founders do other work during the day to pay for it”, however I’d like to read more stories like that. I’d like young people to see that they may have options rather than just assuming they need a big cash injection to pay for all the trappings of business, before they even get started.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is the source of large amount of misinformation and appears to be becoming a nice little earner for companies who will help you to become compliant. If you are only using a hosted Pay Page as described in my last post, card numbers are never entered on your server, and you do not take phone/fax or in-person orders that you process through a physical or virtual terminal then PCI Compliance is a simple process of filling out a form. It takes a few minutes.

You might first become aware of needing to comply with the PCI DSS when your bank sends you a letter telling you that you are non-compliant and so they are going to take an extra percentage of each transaction they process. This letter will point you to a third party company who will help you to become compliant – for a fee.

I object to paying people to fill in forms for me and so when this happened after switching our payments for Perch away from PayPal to a full PSP and merchant account solution, I told the third party that I would be completing the form myself and was given an email address to send it to once I had done that.

Completing the SAQ A

If you are only taking payments via a third party hosted payment page and the PSP is “Level One PCI Compliant” you need to fill in the form called SAQ A.

The role of this form is to declare that you don’t handle any card data but outsource all of that to your PSP, however you need to declare this in the most confusing and unclear way possible. Below I have explained what was accepted for us – I am not an expert in PCI compliance, so use this information at your own risk, and obviously if you are touching cardholder data in any way you need to get advice as to which SAQ you need to complete.

Part 1 and 2a contains some basic company details you need to complete.

Part 2b. Eligibility to complete SAQ A is where the form checks that you are not actually doing anything other than using a PSP. So you should be able to check all of these if you never touch, see or hear credit card information and have no access to it.

Part 3 is where you confirm that you are compliant, so you can tick the compliant checkbox. In Part 3a you need to confirm that PCI DSS Self Assessment Questionnaire was completed according to the instructions therein. The questionnaire this refers to will be at the bottom of the document you are completing if you downloaded the SAQ A Self Assessment Questionnaires rather than just the Attestation of Compliance.

Self Assessment Questionnaire A

Despite the fact that we have declared that we do not touch or store any cardholder data, you have to indicate that you have completed a questionnaire which asks what you do with the cardholder data you store. Baffled? I was too. If you need to submit this questionnaire in completed form then go down the form entering N/A in the column headed “Special”. Then keep on scrolling until you find the … Appendix D: Explanation of Non-Applicability and here we can explain, again, that we don’t touch any cardholder data. Under requirement you need a line for 9.6, 9.7, 9.8, 9.9, 9.10 and in the column “reason requirement is not applicable” put something like “Cardholder data is never received or stored by us”, then create a line for 12.8 and write “cardholder data is never shared with service providers”.

You can then happily check the checkboxes under Part 3a, sign and date the form and send it by whatever method your bank or their third party company has requested.

If your situation changes

Remember that it is up to you to maintain compliance. As long as your situation doesn’t change and you continue to only take card payments via a page hosted on a secure PSP, then each year you will just need to fill out this form and you are deemed compliant. If you do start doing anything that involves you processing, handling or storing card numbers then you need to take advice as to which level of the PCI DSS you need to comply with. Having dealt with applications that do store card data in the past I am very happy to continue to outsource that liability to my PSP for my own business.

Let me know your experiences

It is really hard to get any reasonable information and guides to complying with the PCI DSS. The cynic in me says this is because the banks and third party security companies are making money out of this. If you are storing cardholder data then it stands to reason that complying with strict security measures is important, however for those of us who have sensibly opted to pass this responsibility onto a third party I really wish this process wasn’t made to seem more complicated than it is.

So, if you have any experiences or information that might help other people with the SAQ A or see any errors in my information please add a comment. I have written this purely from my experience, I’m sure it can be improved with input from other people who have worked with different banks and PSPs – let’s make sure this information is available so people aren’t paying someone else to fill in a form that essentially says “we don’t touch any cardholder data”.

Please note that this article is based on my experience for our own product and when working with clients. Please add a comment if you have any additional thoughts or recommended suppliers. We are based in the UK so this article is UK specific however the situation is similar in my experience in other countries.

What do you need?

You will need a merchant account with an acquiring bank – this is the thing than enables you or your business to accept credit cards at all. You will also need a way to validate and process card transactions from the internet to that account – Payment Service Provider (PSP) sometimes referred to as a “payment gateway”. As we are talking about a direct replacement for PayPal here, you are looking for a PSP which offers a payment page – this is a page hosted on their servers where your users can enter their card details. There will also be some functionality that allows information to be passed back to your site as to whether the payment was successful (much like PayPal’s IPN).

Many UK banks also offer merchant accounts, however you don’t need to go to them, you can use any bank that offers you good terms. We’ll discuss terms later.

Your merchant account provider will probably also have a PSP that they encourage you to use. You don’t need to use it – the two things can be completely separate which gives you the ability to find the bank which offers you the best terms and the PSP which offers you the best integration.

Example merchant accounts

In the UK the following acquiring banks offer merchant services – this isn’t a full list. You will see that they all promote their own PSP as well as the merchant account, however all of these will work with third party PSPs.

• Barclaycard Merchant Services
• Lloyds TSB cardnet
• Streamline (RBS and Natwest)

Example Payment Service Providers

• PayPoint
• SagePay

If you visit either of the above sites you will see they offer services for people without a merchant account. What this generally means is that they will find the merchant account on your behalf. In my experience this isn’t a bad way to proceed, find the PSP which offers the best integration for your site and get them to negotiate with the acquiring banks to find the one who will offer the best terms. You will still end up with a PSP and merchant account, and will be billed by both, however you don’t need to deal with the acquiring bank yourself and the pressure from them to use their PSP solution!

The practicalities of obtaining a merchant account

You are going to be asked to jump through some hoops to get your merchant account. The bank is going to want to know a lot of information such as details of your company, your trading history and what you will be taking payment for (be that software, subscriptions or events). They will use this information to decide if they can offer you an account and what terms that will be. These terms will include how much the bank takes from each payment they receive and also any “rolling reserve” or delay in transferring payments to your account.

Rolling reserves and payment delays

When you hear stories of PayPal hanging onto huge sums of event organisers money, what they are doing is holding a 100% rolling reserve. The rolling reserve is an amount of money the acquiring bank keeps in case of chargebacks – this is where the customer decides they will claim their money back from the credit card company, who then need to claim it via the acquiring bank from you. The problem with PayPal is that they don’t ask for details of what you are doing up front, therefore they suddenly slap on this reserve without warning when they decide that you are doing something risky. It’s the without warning bit that can be crippling to a business. With a proper merchant account they will find out what you are doing up front and, if they feel it is risky, may offer you an account with a rolling reserve in place – so for example if they hold a 20% rolling reserve they will always hold 20% of cash on an ongoing basis. This covers their risk that you go out of business and people start claiming money back.

Another way that banks can cover their risk is to delay transferring payments to your account. When the acquiring bank transfers the money they have taken to your business bank account this is known as settlement – payments from each day being processed as a batch. If you are an established business, have a good credit rating and are not selling anything deemed particularly risky the bank will settle each working day any amounts taken. In practice this means they show up in your business account about 3 days after the person make payment with their card. However the bank may offer you an account with a settlement delay of a few days, even up to a month. Both rolling reserves and delays are not usually permanent and if you accept an account with one of these in the terms, you should be able to negotiate their removal or reduction once you have a trading history and the bank can see you are not getting a lot of chargebacks. Of course this works both ways – if you do get a lot of chargebacks you will probably find the bank imposing one of these on your account.

Things to consider when selecting a PSP

If you are sorting out your merchant account and PSP separately it is worth knowing who you want to use when setting up the merchant account as they will also want to know how you will process the online payments.

As we are going to use Pay Page then you should look at what functionality that gives you. If you have been using the PayPal IPN you will need to check that your systems can be changed to use whatever system the PSP uses for their callbacks. You should be able to get hold of the integration documentation for any PSP you are thinking of using to check that.

You should also look at their reporting, what functionality you get in terms of doing things like refunding payments and whether you can configure the templates of the payment page in any way.

While we didn’t want to fully rely on PayPal with Perch we did know that some of our customers would still want to use PayPal, so we selected a PSP that allowed PayPal as a payment method. There are lots of other features offered by PSPs in terms of services they integrate with so it is worth thinking if any of these might be beneficial to your business.

Costs

There is a general assumption that moving away from PayPal is going to be more expensive. This isn’t necessarily true. However if you are doing a very small number of transactions that may be the case. With your new system instead of just paying a transaction fee per transaction you will have to pay some or all of the following:

• Initial set up fee for the merchant account
• Initial set up fee to the PSP
• Monthly set fee to the PSP
• and/or % of transaction value to the PSP
• % of transaction value to the acquiring bank

So even if the % of transaction values add up to the same or less than PayPal you will also have the monthly and setup fees to take into account. At the point we moved Perch to this setup it made very little difference in terms of cost, however as we process more sales the new setup will work out cheaper in comparison to PayPal.

How it all fits together

Once you are all set up and have replaced the PayPal payment page with your PSPs payment page you can wait for your first transactions. Assuming you don’t have a rolling reserve or a delay on your account you can expect the following.

1. Customer pays via your payment page and you will get emails and notification from your PSP
2. At the end of the day all payments are processed via the acquiring bank as a batch and settled as one combined transaction as a payment to your business account
3. The batch will then appear in your business account 2 or 3 days later
4. Each month you should receive a statement from your acquiring bank with details of all transactions and batches so you can reconcile your accounts with this. The statement will include the amount owed to the bank (a % of each transaction) which usually is then taken from your business account by direct debit
5. Each month you will also get a bill from your PSP with monthly and per transaction charges as per your agreement

Things to avoid

Your PSP will have all kinds of other things to offer. They may allow you to take credit card payments over the phone using a virtual terminal or to integrate via an API meaning that you can keep payments on your site rather than going out to a Pay Page. I would suggest you think very carefully about doing either of these things because they will make your compliance with the PCI DSS that much harder and more expensive on an ongoing basis.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)

As this blog post was turning into a bit of an epic, I will cover the PCI DSS in a separate post. The important thing to remember is that you still need to confirm your compliance with the PCI DSS even if you and your server never touch any card numbers. I’ll explain how that works in part two of this post.

WYSIWYG Editors suck because firstly, they are a flawed premise. What You See Is What You Get WHERE exactly? On a regular desktop browser, on your iPad, phone, in RSS, read out by a speaking browser? In most CMS implementations, you don’t see what you get on the web anyway, what you see is a textarea replaced by a box with a bunch of buttons at the top and you can see what your changes will look like in the context of that box – not on the site you are managing.

WYSIWYG Editors suck because they promote thinking about style rather than content. While content editors are busy changing headings to Comic Sans, pondering the use of a grimacing smiley on their about us page or getting creative with colour, they are not considering the actual copy they are adding to the site.

WYSIWYG Editors suck because as a designer you lose control over big chunks of the design. Anywhere that allows people to enter HTML via an editor allows them to get as creative as they like, using any mark-up that they like. Unless you carefully go through and remove all the creativity that stuff is going to stay there. For developers, even if you switch off most of the buttons, just allowing the administrator to enter simple formatting and links, you still have a situation where a user is entering HTML which you then display on the website. This can enable all kinds of stuff to get into your content, which is then very hard to remove and fundamentally tied to the current design of the site.

For a content administrator a WYSIWYG editor is actually a very poor way for them to add content to the website. They end up with a big area and need to work our what to add in order for the content to be formatted as the designer intended. Consider adding an event to a page listing events for example, the designer may have created rules in the CSS to make the title, description and date display a certain way – but only if the correct mark-up and classes are added. It is hard to get the average content editor to use the correct heading level – never mind use microformats to enter an event or contact information!

So they suck. What’s the alternative?

I think the alternative comes in two forms. Firstly, a lot of content that we are asking people to edit is not freeform, it has structure, semantic meaning. We need to provide a way to enable people to enter content in a way that maintains the meaning. This is something we’ve been doing with custom CMS builds for a long time over at edgeofmyseat.com and is really the core concept in Perch – our small CMS product. In Perch if I want the editor to add some contact details, I create a template with those details marked up using microformats.

In the admin this template turns into a form, the content editor just needs to fill in the form with the right details. She doesn’t need to worry about adding any style – the designer will worry about that and because the data is marked up correctly it is going to be very easy to use CSS to make it look exactly as we want.

We can use this approach to create templates for anything – a block with a chunk of descriptive text and an image, an event, a product listing and so on. The content editor just completes the form. As I have written before I think it is important that our systems make the job of writing good copy easy for the often non-professional content writer. By presenting her with a form – we can also add help text to remind her of the style and tone that the content strategy requires. This approach of using structured content removes much of the requirement for formatting tools in the CMS.

However there are valid reasons why editors need to do some formatting. This really comes down to adding links, setting text as strong or emphasised, and perhaps adding inline images or file downloads. Without WYSIWYG how do they do this? Even if we were to teach the editor HTML, as previously discussed, we don’t want HTML ending up in the database to be rendered straight out onto the site.

A new kind of editor

We need a new kind of content editing tool. In Perch the default editor we use is MarkItUp with Textile formatting enabled. Textile is pretty simple to learn and MarkItUP means that users can select a bit of text and hit the bold button which will then wrap it correctly so when the form is submitted Perch transforms it into HTML strong elements.

The administrator has access to just a few simple tools for adding formatting, and the formatting is related to the content and not the design of the site. If it is correct for content to be emphasised that should remain the same after a redesign or if the content is used elsewhere other than on the site.

When the form is submitted we have the data the user entered in Textile format, which we then run through a Textile class to convert it to HTML, stripping out any extraneous HTML elements first. That is the version we render to the site – we know exactly what is in that data because we converted it. We also store the Textile version – this will be presented back to the user at edit time.

This works fine for basic formatting and links, however we do see people using a WYSIWYG editor plugin in Perch – despite taking advantage of structured content – and this is mainly down to the following reasons.

“My client doesn’t want to see the codes” – the client has complained (or the designer assumes they will) about seeing Textile code rather than rendered output in the editor.

“My client wants to be able to embed images/files anywhere in the page” – rather than adding an image to a predefined slot they want to be able to insert these anywhere.

The first I feel is often a non-issue if dealt with from the outset by the designer. We’ve used Textile formatting for several years in large-scale CMS projects and once the benefits of not using HTML directly have been explained we have only ever had one client who insisted on “WYSIWYG” (and it came back to bite them). Once you are using structured content extensively the number of formatting “codes” are few in any textarea. However seeing Textile or Markdown in the content is something new for the client to encounter so lets keep this as a possible objection for now.

The second issue makes the first more relevant. If you have a news story for example that you want to drop images in throughout the copy, you don’t have a structured content area of one image plus copy – you have several. In this situation the most elegant thing to do would be to allow the user to insert any number of images via the editor, and those images be constrained by something set by the designer (so that the user doesn’t upload an image 2000 pixels wide for example). You can insert images using Textile or Markdown but this does add to the amount of “code” the user sees.

It’s at this point where we often see people decide to switch to WYSIWYG in Perch. Even if they accept the benefits of not using it.

How do we fix this?

I currently think MarkItUp is the best thing we have, and we could go some way in Perch by creating a plugin for MarkItUp that enabled image browsing and upload and file uploads. We may well tackle that. There is also the WYMeditor project, however that creates XHTML directly and I’d prefer to be able to transform content as described above. What I’d really love to see is some more thinking around this issue by everyone who uses or develops a content management system or anything that requires users to be able to format content.

I think that the prevalence of the WYSIWYG editor has held back this discussion because we have a way to do it, it might be sub-optimal but we can let our clients format content if they so desire. As a CMS vendor there are lots of interesting things to tackle and areas where “people have a way to do it” tend to get pushed to the back. Designers have settled on WYSIWYG being a necessary evil, and don’t insist we look at alternatives. I’m sure the situation is the same for all other CMS developers – we respond to what we are asked for by our users and prioritise accordingly. This is why I think this is something that could and should be discussed more widely than being tackled by each of us individually. How should we help users to format content on the modern web? How can we make best use of HTML5 and modern development principles in doing this? The WYSIWYG Editors we see today haven’t changed much in the last decade. I think we can do better.

I understand how hard it is to work with these systems and how difficult it is to actually develop something good, how many problems there are still to solve. However the biggest problem that I believe we have is that we seem to accept that content management systems are crap. We accept that they cause us to compromise our designs, we accept terrible editing environments, we accept them filling our pages with crufty mark-up and we accept the most unbelievably convoluted ways of doing things because, “at least there is a way to do it”.

Today I tried to encourage people to see their CMS as an important part of the project, and to see providing a great editing environment as a vital part of the site, not something to battle with. Once a site is launched it is quite likely that the person or people editing the content are not professional copywriters, just as they are not professional designers. Therefore we should be using the CMS to not only protect the design and typography – but also to promote the content strategy for the site.

How do we do this? Well to start with we don’t do it by sticking a “WYSIWYG” editor in the main content area of the page and letting content administrators play designer all over the content. I don’t think anyone at the conference today will be left in any doubt as to the fact that I hate so-called WYSIWYG editors. There are many technical reasons why WYSIWYG editors are a terrible solution, but also they are a problem because they promote thinking about style rather than content. What you end up with is a big block of manky html because if it is hard to get a client to select the right heading level, it is going to be impossible to get them to mark-up contact information using microformats or semantically using HTML5.

What I encourage people to do is to try and think of content management in terms of structured content. To provide content entry forms that enable the editor to think about the content – and that can also provide help and tips to promote the agreed content strategy. You could go as far as to work with a copywriter to create that help text. This helps the client not only add content in a way that leaves you able to keep control of the mark-up, but to add the right content with the right tone. So if they are adding an event – give them a form in the CMS which has fields for all the parts of the event, if they are entering contact information – provide a form with fields for the different elements of the address, phone and email.

By using structured content the editor needs to style very little, there is definitely no need for a full WYSIWYG editor. At the most they need a small toolbar to add bold, italics and inline links. Structured content is at the core of Perch, but we don’t have the monopoly on that idea. There is a fantastic thread on Forrst with people explaining how they deal with structured content in their favoured CMS. So this is possible in a lot of systems, with a bit of work and thought.

I really would encourage people to think of their CMS as a tool which helps editors curate not only the design but the whole site, including the content. We should be providing people with great editing experiences – not settling for something that kind of works. We can only do that by seeing the CMS as an important part of the solution, using the right tool for each job, learning how to really use those tools to their best and talking to our CMS makers about how they can make things better.