[thelist] Good WYSIWYG Editor

Keith cache at dowebs.com
Thu Jun 9 21:24:40 CDT 2005


At 02:44 PM Thursday 6/9/2005, you wrote:

>>Build? If you want to actually *build* a wysiwyg there are components for 
>>doing so (htmlArea.com has such a list). But if you want to install a 
>>fully developed editor, you can buy them for a fraction of Contribute's 
>>cost, install and be editing in less time that it takes to download 
>>Contribute. Contribute is a cheap option, if you already own it. But at 
>>$149 a seat Contribute is one of the most expensive options.
>
>Are you expecting the designer to do this for free? Or are you expecting 
>the client to do it themselves?
>
>Even integrating an open source editor is going to take me at least a day; 
>I would be charging in the region of $500 (equivalent) as an absolute minimum.

Question of comparing apples to apples and oranges to apples, Ian.

I've been selling two different wysiwyg editors for the last 3 years. About 
1/3 of buyers are designers who are not going to charge their clients. They 
are installing a wysiwyg so their client can do the routine site changes so 
the designer can get on with doing their business - design. They are happy 
to get rid of those mundane chores that they never were able to charge 
design rates for. Another 1/3 are clients who've been abandoned by their 
designer. Yes if you are installing freshmeat out of the open source 
market, expect to take a day cleaning it off and cooking it. But a lot of 
these wysiwyg programs are mature enough for anybody to do themselves, with 
self-installers, free installation, control panel setups, etc.  I have a 
lot of these abandoned end-user customers who are installed and editing 
their site within an hour. A lot of customers are churches - Mable's nephew 
built the site and has run off into the world. In a couple of hours, some 
average church member has installed and delegated site management to half a 
dozen members. Often that requires a half hour of customer support on my 
part, but that's business. That's the Apples.

Oranges are different. You want to set up a sites so only certain parts of 
the page are editable? Even make some parts of a page editable by Joe while 
only Alice can edit another part of the page? You want to set up 
Distributed Versioning, so Alice's edits are not live until Sally has 
reviewed and published them? Yeah that's going to take some work. And $500 
for a day's work sounds right.

But back to the church. $900 for 6 seats for Contribute? They'll take a 
chance on Henry's niece first. She's only 13, but she's got something 
called FrontPage.


Keith
cache at dowebs.com  


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