Build branding into your product design with a WYSIWYG HTML editor

When designing software products, it’s important to consider your website or app branding and how you’ll control how your brand is represented. Consistent brand representation helps product teams save time, minimize rework, reduce costs, expand the team, and boost company revenue. We wrote more about these benefits in our blog on why more technology companies need to invest in brand management.

But consistent branding isn’t always straightforward to implement or enforce, especially when multiple users have edit access to your website or app. If your website or app includes a WYSIWYG editor, you can enable a much broader range of users to contribute content to your app or website, even if they have no coding or design experience. 

This kind of freedom is wonderful until someone goes a bit wild with font colors and style, or accidentally inserts a bit of HTML and breaks something. Your product can very quickly descend into a mess of inconsistent styles, and both your brand reputation and user experience are at risk. 

Fortunately, with the right tools, you won’t have to revoke authorship access. You might just need to make a few tweaks.

On-brand content is easier said than done

So, how do you keep your content on brand? It’s easier said than done.

While many companies have their own brand style guides, creating these guides doesn’t actually *do* anything. You know what they say… all talk, no action. To make your brand style guide effective, you have to educate your content creators, provide access to the most up-to-date version, and enforce the rules. 

And even then, you can still have issues.

People make mistakes. They overlook details, misinterpret your brand guidelines, and rush through the steps. They use Comic Sans (WHY?) and randomly change their font color to purple (also WHY?). The original staff that created your brand guidelines move onto new roles, and their replacement might completely miss the memo.

There are so many ways that your app branding or website branding can get off track. It’s no wonder that, despite their best efforts, so many companies end up with inconsistent wording, fonts, and colors. So, how do you get your brand back on track?

How a WYSIWYG HTML editor can help

You could hire someone to manually clean up the design of content as it’s published, but for most products, that’s just not practical due to the volume of content created. Usually, the best option is to switch to an advanced WYSIWYG HTML editor, with tools in place to manage the content editing and design process so that your content authors can’t stray off-brand.

You can set up your editor to automatically apply your web style guide, constrain user options, and build your brand directly into your app or website. That way, your content creators don’t even have to think about styling - at least, not as much. The right editor will make it easier for them to implement consistent app or website branding, and unify the brand experience for your users.

Plus, that means your content creators can spend less time fiddling with color pickers and fonts, and more time on what they do best: writing good quality, engaging content!

What to look for in your WYSIWYG editor

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

Every authoring tool has different features and options. But when you’ve got multiple content authors, and you need to stay on brand within your website or app, you need an editor that does one thing particularly well: control.

As the developer, you need to have control over as many UI and content formatting options as possible. And at the same time, you need to be able to create rules and limit what control your end-user has over these options. 

Fortunately, TinyMCE puts developers firmly in the driver’s seat when it comes to content creation and formatting options.

How TinyMCE can help keep your website/app content on brand

TinyMCE is the world’s most advanced WYSIWYG HTML editor. We’ve designed our built-in features and plugins, as well as our pro plugins, to help make content authoring simpler and easier.

Here are some of our features and plugins that can help build your brand into the design of your website or app:

• Custom CSS - Customize the CSS for your editor so that it matches your app/website
• Inline Editing - Enable inline editing mode so that content creators know exactly what their content will look like when it’s published
• Style Formats - Define set style formats (for paragraphs, headings, blocks, and other font options) to match your brand style guide
• Limit Toolbar Options - Hide or disable options like HTML editing, font formatting, and font sizes to prevent users from straying from the default style formats you’ve defined
• Character Map - Allow users to choose from a specific set of special characters
• Spell Checker Pro - Add your product and brand names to ensure all content creators spell and capitalize them correctly
• Format Painter - Easily pull styling from another paragraph, document, or page and apply it to your selected text
• PowerPaste - Copy and paste content from Word, Excel, or another location and have it automatically apply your own styles without breaking the underlying code
• Text Color Options - Remove the color picker, or edit the default colors to match or complement your brand palette
• Template - Create reusable templates of content that come pre-designed with your brand styles so that users can easily insert and edit them
• Accessibility Checker - If accessibility features as one of your brand values, this plugin will help spot accessibility issues before your content is published
• Emoticons - Override or extend the emojis available to your content creators so that they’re on-brand (and avoid any that may inadvertently offend some of your audience)
• Noneditable - Prevent authors from editing specific content areas
• Content Filtering - Configure the HTML so that your content output ends up consistent, despite all the different ways your authors may type and format it inside the editor
• Autolink - Set a default protocol when users type out links so that all links display the same style (e.g., https:// or www.) 
• Case Change - Make it easy to highlight text and switch it to upper or lower case, in line with your brand style guidelines

For more details on how to implement some of these customizations, check out our other blog on using TinyMCE to help keep your brand consistent.

Customize the UI, too

You can also customize the editing experience itself to be on-brand. With TinyMCE’s customizable UI, you can change your editor skins and icons to match the rest of your product ✨ Take a look at these blogs:

• Customize your toolbar on TinyMCE
• Give me some skin: TinyMCE skins and icons
• Skins and Icon Packs: a closer look at your options
• Emulating the Medium editor

Read more about customizing content with Tiny

We’ve written some other blogs about how you can edit styles inside TinyMCE to stay on-brand:

• How to change the default font family, size, and color in TinyMCE
• Blockquote CSS and styling in TinyMCE
• How to use Google Fonts in TinyMCE
• How to use variable fonts

We can help with that

Start with a 14-day free trial of our Cloud Professional plan - including advanced branding and compliance features like PowerPaste, Spell Checker Pro, Accessibility Checker, and Link Checker. Or check out our other plans available to suit your particular situation.

TinyMCE is already helping millions of products provide the best content creation experience to users. Contact us to find out more about how TinyMCE can enhance your product, while helping your content creators stay on-brand.