At one time, in order to build a website from scratch, you had to know HTML, or "Hyper Text Markup Language." And truth be told, you are still better off knowing at least the basics of HTML. But, it's not required. Especially if you find easy web design software that does most of the work takes care of this for you. Now, every single HTML editor on the planet now features a "WYSIWYG" interface. (What You See Is What You Get.) So, theoretically, you shouldn't have to know the first thing about HTML.

The truth is, however, not all web page editors (or "web design software") does WYSIWYG well. Little annoying problems tend to crop up. For example, say you typed the following sentence using your site builder:

"Discover the best places to SCUBA dive in the Cayman Islands." Say you want "best places" to be italicized and "Cayman Islands" to be bolded. Here's what's supposed to happen:

Behind the scenes, your HTML editor is supposed to 'type' the phrase as such: Discover the < I >best places< /I > to SCUBA dive in the < B >Cayman Islands< /B >. (Extra spaces were added between the tags for this example, in order to keep the article publishing software from parsing it like normal HTML.)

But instead, this is what you get: "Discover the best places to SCUBA dive in the Cayman Islands." Even though you highlighted the words "best places" and clicked the little graphical icon on your html editor's toolbar that represented italics, your phrase comes out non-italicized. And on top of that, your bolded words are not bolded.

Well, in this instance, you'd have to go to the "Source View" of your HTML editor and manually insert the above HTML tags to make these things happen. This is a very annoying problem with too many popular web design software titles nowadays.

Another problem that will frustrate the heck out of you, is seeing a totally different result in the web browser than you see in your HTML editor window. For example, your formatting changes are (apparently) taking effect as you type--just as it should (remember it's advertised as WYSIWYG)...

However, they don't show up when you publish the page to the internet! I don't know why, but this problem still plagues most web design software to this day.

Luckily, there are a few (very few) shining stars that work for cheap, while doing all the other things to make your website pretty and (if you're so inclined) draw visitors by the hundreds.