Content vs. Design separation and Editors

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anselm13's picture

I'm setting up a website for my mother-in-law's education consulting business. It will basically be just an advertisement site for her business, allow people to contact her, and have a newsletter. She has little technical proficiency, but knows how to use Word which she's used to provide me a mockup for her site. I'm looking at setting up FCKeditor for her to create and edit content. Currently I've got a theme created and the framework for her node content.

My question is, what's the wisdom of implementing much styling within the body content of a node instead of separating it from the content (whether it be using a wysiwyg editor, bueditor, or just the default form field)? I imagine the suggestion is to have as little as possible in the node itself. Is much image positioning and node styling possible/advisable via an editor running within drupal which would allow her to have more control over content style on various nodes she's drawn up (particularly some she has with an awful lot of graphic content)? Or is it just necessary to do any required per node styling via theme templates/overrides/css and limit the node to mostly text? On a site like hers, where I would even setup a sandbox site, and where there are no other editors/admins other than myself, could she use an offline html editor (e.g. something like dreamweaver) and copy the source and paste it into the body field with full html input format (or would images be just too big of a pain to upload them and then relink the source to the remote paths)? Anyway, I imagine the answer is that she simply can't be a designer and styling via the wysiwyg editor should be used sparingly. Lastly, even if I'm the only one using the editor, how much html/css or even php should I store in the node itself?