What Is a WYSIWYG Editor and How Do You Use One to Build a Web Page?

A WYSIWYG editor ("what you see is what you get") lets you build a web page on a visual canvas — typing text, dropping in images, and arranging blocks — while the tool generates the underlying HTML and CSS for you. You use one when you want a finished page without hand-coding, and you should still preview the result and check the generated code before publishing. Dynamic HTML Editor, for example, describes itself as a WYSIWYG HTML editor that supports both CSS and table-based layouts and emphasizes "simplicity and ease of use" with "virtually no learning curve."

How the visual canvas maps to HTML and CSS

The core mechanism is a one-to-two mapping: everything you place on the canvas becomes markup, and everything you style becomes CSS rules (or table attributes, in older-style layouts). You are not editing the page directly — you are editing a representation, and the editor translates it.

That translation is why the same visual result can produce very different code. Two pages that look identical on screen may differ in how cleanly they render across browsers, how easily they can be edited later, and how well they hold up on mobile. This is the single most important thing to understand before you start: the canvas shows the result, not the quality of the code behind it.

A concrete example: you drag a heading and a paragraph side by side. In a CSS layout, the editor writes a container with float or flex rules. In a table layout, it writes a <table> with two cells. They look the same now; they behave differently when the window narrows.

The basic workflow

The steps below follow the general pattern of visual HTML editors; Dynamic HTML Editor's own materials describe the same create-arrange-preview cycle.

1. Create a new page. Start from a blank page or a template. Templates are the faster route if you are new — they give you a working structure you can edit rather than an empty canvas.
2. Add and arrange content. Type text directly on the canvas, insert images, and drag elements into position. Use the editor's alignment and spacing controls rather than pressing Enter repeatedly to push things around.
3. Choose your layout approach. Decide between CSS layout and table layout (see the next section) before you build much — switching later is tedious.
4. Preview. View the page as a browser would render it. Check it at more than one window width if the editor supports it.
5. Inspect the generated code. Open the HTML/code view and read it. You are looking for obvious problems: deeply nested tables, inline styles repeated on every element, stray empty tags.
6. Export or publish. Save the page and its assets (images, stylesheets) together, then upload to your host or use the editor's publish function if it has one.

How to verify it worked: open the exported files in a browser directly from your computer (not through the editor's preview). If images are missing or links fail there, they will fail on the live site too.

CSS versus table layouts: when each matters

Dynamic HTML Editor explicitly supports both, and the choice has real consequences.

Choose CSS layout for anything you expect to grow or be viewed on phones. Table layouts still work and are sometimes the pragmatic choice for a small, fixed page or when you are editing an existing table-based template — but do not build a new multi-page site on tables if you can avoid it.

Common beginner pitfalls and fixes

• Broken image paths. The most frequent cause of a page that looks fine in the editor and broken online. Fix: keep images in a folder alongside the page, use relative paths, and test the exported files from your own disk before uploading.
• Broken links. Same root cause — absolute paths that point to your local machine. Fix: use relative links for pages within your site and verify each one after export.
• Messy generated markup. Visual editors can produce redundant inline styles and nested containers, especially after lots of dragging. Fix: build with the editor's layout tools rather than manual spacing, and clean up in code view before publishing.
• Trusting the preview too much. The editor's preview is not a browser. Fix: always check the exported page in a real browser.
• Skipping the code check entirely. You do not need to write HTML, but reading it once will tell you whether the tool produced something maintainable.

Where this fits

A WYSIWYG editor is the right tool when you want to build a page yourself without learning to code, and it is a reasonable choice for small sites, prototypes, and template-based pages. It is a weaker fit when you need precise control over markup, tight performance, or a design system — in those cases hand-coding or a developer-oriented tool will serve you better. Either way, the workflow above holds: build visually, preview honestly, and read the code before it goes live.