Where is my god damn WYSIWYG editor?

Here’s my extending the olive branch moment to marketers:

I'm a developer. I can work with design systems. I understand the logic behind atomic components, headless CMSes, and structured content schemas.

But I also come from a marketing background and do CRO – and I know for most businesses, relying on developers to custom code each test variant or make minor changes to websites is suboptimal.

So I have one question:

Where is my god damn WYSIWYG editor?

This isn't nostalgia, it's sanity

I’m not romanticising Dreamweaver, or clunky CMS editors.

But at least those tools tried to bridge the gap between code and content. They gave people a sense of control, however fragile, over their own business.

Below is Framer – what this site is built on, and a rare example of a true WYSIWYG editor based on Figma's model:

Yet today, platforms like Shopify get away with not offering a true WYSIWYG experience even though the majority of their customers are small merchants.

Below is the Dawn theme in Shopify – you can control border widths, alignment, and typography, but not a lot else. It is not a WYSIWYG editor in any sense of the word:

There’s a wider point here: modern web development has become needlessly difficult for a huge portion of people who just want to build and grow online businesses.

We’ve chased component-driven purity, atomic design systems, and “scale” to the point where making a simple change feels like open-heart surgery.

What’s the modern user-first dev experience like?

Let’s say you’re a marketer using Sanity or DatoCMS (or take your pick from the modern headless crowd). You want to:

• Create a custom homepage hero with a variant layout

• Add some new copy to support a campaign
  Shuffle around product cards or feature blocks

That should be easy. But in reality?

• You have to create new schemas or block models

• Wire them into serializers or components

• Deploy the frontend to reflect changes

• Maybe even jump through Git-based preview or rebuild hoops

And if you want any sort of visual control? Tough. (Below: DatoCMS)

You’re deep in structured content land, where everything is stored in nested fields and rich text blocks that don’t play nicely with layout-level styling or flexible visual components.

You’re not editing a site. You’re editing data that eventually renders a site – and that abstraction, while elegant on paper, is murder on iteration speed.

The enterprise-ification of the web

A big part of the problem is that web tooling has shifted upmarket. Today’s dev stack is built for teams – component libraries, CI pipelines, design tokens, Storybook, CMS integrations.

It works… if you’re a 50+ person company with product managers and a dedicated frontend team.

But if you’re a small business, a solo dev, or CRO person trying to run fast experiments? It’s exhausting.

We’ve over-engineered ourselves into complexity. Not because it makes the work better. It’s because it makes us feel better. Like we’re doing it “the right way.” The scalable way. The enterprise way.

Even though 90% of sites on the web just need:

• Some well-written copy

• A fast, mobile-friendly layout

• And someone who can iterate on both

But what about AI? Isn’t this getting easier?

Here’s the irony: while we’ve made it harder for regular folks to edit existing sites, moderately technical people can now spin up entire React apps using AI.

ChatGPT, Vercel’s v0, Wix’s AI builder – they can scaffold entire React UIs faster than your CMS can push a change to production.

We’re in this weird moment where creating new things is easier than editing old ones.

And that should worry everyone.

We need to rethink “scalability”

We love talking about scalability. But what most orgs really need is agility.

That means:

• Giving marketers more power to test and iterate.

• Letting non-devs make changes without fear.

• Embracing messy but fast, when it beats perfect but slow.

And yes – maybe even bringing back some god damn WYSIWYG editors. Not because we want to relive the 2000s, but because we want control back.

Not everything needs to be headless. Not everything needs to be atomic. Sometimes, you just want to move a button and see it move.

Final thought: it’s not just about editing

This rant isn’t really about editors.

It’s about the direction we’re headed. Are we building for builders? Or are we building for developers?

Because if AI can scaffold an app in 10 seconds, and yet a content manager still can’t edit a landing page without raising a ticket… we’re optimising the wrong things.

Bring back fast. Bring back fun.

Bring back the joy of changing something and seeing it change.

And for the love of god, bring back my WYSIWYG editor.