WYSIWYG Web Builder

What WYSIWYG Web Builder is

WYSIWYG Web Builder is a drag-and-drop website builder for people who want to make websites without writing code. The company's site describes it as a toolbox for designing, building and publishing sites with drag-and-drop tools, advanced features and full creative control, and says the HTML code is generated for you. It is a program you download, with a Download and a Purchase page on the site, and the template instructions refer to a folder inside a Windows user account, so it is a Windows desktop application you publish from. The site announces Version 21 as available now, with more than 125 new features and improvements. The pages do not say where the company is based.

What you build and how

You build pages on a canvas. You place objects, style them and publish, and the program writes the HTML. Version 21 adds what the company calls Easy Breakpoints, which let you make individual elements responsive without creating full-page breakpoints. For a single object you can control visibility, font size, margin, padding or alignment with one simplified breakpoint, which the company describes as suited to quick, maintainable mobile-friendly adjustments. Version 21 also lists a Text-to-Website and Image-to-Website feature that generates a complete website using AI. The pages shown do not say more about how that works or whether it carries a separate cost.

Starting points are templates. The templates page says you can choose from more than 250 templates on the platform, with more available from third-party sites, and it names several of those sites. A template is a downloaded zip that you unzip into the program's template folder. You can make your own category by adding a folder, and you create a new page from a template with File, then New Web Site From Template. Users who have templates to share are pointed to a forum section, and the page warns that some images in templates are copyrighted and should be replaced with your own before you use a template for a real site.

Forms are a first-class job here, and the forms page spells out four ways to process a submission:

• mailto, which opens the visitor's email application and which the page calls unreliable and not recommended
• the built-in PHP form processor, which needs a PHP-enabled server
• a custom script that sends data to your own server-side endpoint
• a third-party service that sends data to an external form-processing provider

The built-in processor needs a notification email address and a subject, lets you add CC and BCC recipients, and supports an error page and email customization with an autoresponder. The page tells you to set the form page's file extension to php, to test on a real server instead of a local preview, and to configure PHPMailer under Advanced properties when your host needs authenticated SMTP and a fixed From address on your domain. It also advises using the visitor's address as Reply-To rather than From.

Content management comes in two forms. The home page lists a built-in, PHP-based content management system that lets you or your customers manage content online, and a more basic Editable Content feature. The CMS tools page says you need MySQL database support from your host, and you supply the server, database name, user name and password. The required tables are created automatically by the online admin tool, so you do not build them yourself. For rich text editing in the CMS you can add third-party editor setups. The extras page lists CKEditor (versions 3 and 4), CLEditor, TinyMCE, nicEdit, scEditor, trumbowyg, summernote and suneditor. It also lists CMS plug-ins such as File Manager Plus and an experimental Web Shop, and marks them as for advanced users only and not officially supported.

Other built-in tools are SEO and member areas. The home page lists a Google-compatible sitemap and robots.txt generator and a built-in SEO Assistant. Its password protection tools cover multi-user login, sign up, password recovery, an online user administrator and user roles. For selling, it describes integrated support for third-party ecommerce solutions like PayPal and Ecwid.

Extensions widen the toolbox. The site says more than 250 are available, covering galleries, slideshows, form processors and menus. The extensions page names a Dark Mode switch, Falling Snow, Fireworks, a Happy Birthday and a Happy New Year animation, jQuery GoUp, Loaders, Google Maps, Leaflet Maps, OpenStreetMap, a Store Locator, a Weather Forecast, Google Geo Chart, NiceScroll, Odometer, PDFObject, Price Tables, QRCode and Secure FTP, which adds the ability to publish a web site. Icon sets listed include Icofont, Captain Icon, Bootstrap Icons and Material Symbols with 3500 icons in 3 styles.

The evidence from the pages

The pages give a lot of facts about features and few about commercial terms. No price appears in the text on these pages. There is a Purchase page, a Special Offers link and a banner offering 40% off an upgrade to Version 21 for a limited time, but the figure for a license itself is not on the pages shown. Support options are named in the site menu as Support, Tutorials and a Forum.

The counts the company states are specific. Version 21 has 125+ new features and improvements. There are 250+ templates and 250+ extensions. Material Symbols is 3500 icons. The extras page tags some downloads with the version they need, for example summernote needs Web Builder 16 or newer and suneditor and spotlight need 19 or newer. That tells you the program has been updated across many major versions.

The pages hold no security or compliance claims, no customer count and no hosting offer. You supply your own hosting and publish to it. The CMS depends on a host with PHP and MySQL, and the form processor needs PHP.

Who it suits and who it does not

WYSIWYG Web Builder suits a designer or a small business owner who wants direct control of a site's layout on a canvas and already has web hosting. A freelancer building a brochure site with a contact form can use the PHP form processor, the SEO tools and a template. Someone building a site for a client can hand over the CMS so the client edits content online, provided the host supports PHP and MySQL.

It also suits people who like adding functions from a long extension list, such as maps, price tables, QR codes and weather displays, rather than relying on one vendor's fixed feature set.

There are trade-offs. It is a program you install, not a hosted service, so there is no included hosting, no built-in team workspace and no browser editor on these pages. Forms depend on your server setup, and the forms page itself warns that many hosts need authenticated SMTP before notification email arrives. Ecommerce runs through third-party services rather than a native store. The CMS plug-ins are labeled as not officially supported. And the pages show no price, so you would need the Purchase page to see what the software costs.