Is it possible to make an edit and have it work?

[notleftaligned]

I hope this is being asking in the right place. I was recently hired to make someone's shopify website look better, and to add more items to their online catalogue. I spent the weekend trying to get the page to stay left-aligned. I'm not interested in or looking for fun ways to drive traffic to my site, or print shipping labels faster, or in watching a webinar explaining the importance of mailing the thing your customer bought to them.  All I want is to take one page at a time from this site, make all the fonts the same, change the sizes of the font, add some bullet points, include some hyperlinks, make sure the hyperlinked words are underlined—you get the idea.

I'll make a few changes and save my work. I refresh the webpage to see what I did and the whole page from top to bottom is center aligned. One of the words I underlined now isn't. I'll go back and underline it, save, and look—no underline appears no matter how many times I try. I can backspace the word and type it again, more weird things happen. I've already made this too long a post. Basically, this page and description box editor is impossible to work with. It's like trying to grab a cookie away from an 18-month-old. What am I doing wrong? Do I need to offer sacrifices to something/one? What should I be doing to get this work done right the first time? Is it possible? Does everyone struggle with this? Why are we here?

[Jason]

Without examples there's not a lot to go on but it sounds like you are trying to center align some things, or add underlines to things within the description editor. Let us assume that's the product description box.

Some themes could have CSS code in place that could be overriding what you are editing. So in the Admin you see an underline, but on the live site you may not. 

If you can post back here with an example of what you've done and a link to the page where it shows differently I'm sure the members here can guide you to a solution.

[axis80]

The WYSIWYG editor gets confused easily.   When that happens, what I usually do is copy the content to my clipboard, blank out everything in the editor, and paste everything back in as plaintext with Ctrl-Shift-V.  Then I will slowly carefully re-apply all formatting in the WYSIWYG editor.

I also sometimes just use HTML mode, taking care to structure the code according to HTML5 rules.

[notleftaligned]

Thank you for an answer acknowledging the problem!! Here’s the thing (things)

1) Because—and I want Shopify to see this—editing text using their own tools is so rudimentary, my entire approach to this new job of mine is to copy everything of interest into a word processor and make it look nice there. Then, paste it back onto the Shopify editor.

2) Shopify, a big bizniss, ‘easy to use’ web host, shouldn’t have a web development tool that “gets confused easily.”

3) “Blanking everything out” every time it gets confused means starting over every so often, maybe 10–20 minutes depending on what I’m doing and how it’s going. But, I am getting paid by the hour. Slowly and carefully starting over is actually the reason for my frustration and why I came to ask my question here in the first… hey! You didn’t offer anything except what I’m already doing! This solves nothing. It only highlights the problem I asked if there was a solutions to, namely, “Is it possible to use the text editor without atrocious difficulty?” The answer seems to be a firm “No.”

[axis80 · Accepted solution]

You're not wrong about any of that.

That has, unfortunately, been par for the course for browser-based WYSIWYG editors over the decades.  Shopify's is particularly bad - and hopefully they'll eventually improve it - but it's not at all alone.

I guess I have just learned to work around it.  I am a developer, so I tend to avoid the WYSIWYG editor entirely, and just create HTML layouts in Liquid templates.  Like, you can create separate templates for one-off pages, i.e. About, Photo Gallery, etc.  Maybe that would help you get through your project.

[notleftaligned]

Thank you for talking to me like another human being. Thank you for acknowledging the faults of the service. Thank you for actually reading and replying to what I said. You used to be the baseline for interacting with another person. I want to put you in my pocket and take you everywhere with me.