Clients editing pages – what's the best way?

All my clients want WordPress so they can edit their own sites. I do it because I think WordPress is good for other reasons, but all of us developers know how limited laypeople are editing their own sites through WordPress (or any other tool.)

TinyMCE, on the Pages page of the WP control panel, lets clients style text with colors, justification, etc, but positioning is impossible. (No tables in the kitchen sink??)

I tried using the Custom Class Styles plug-in to allow for positioning and it just doesn’t work. It’s too hard to accommodate multiple page layouts, and I don’t want to try and explain clearing floats to my clients. It just doesn’t seem like a viable solution.

So today I decided to try making the site pages all widgets. The widget area spans the whole content div. That way I could float the widgets via the style sheet and make columns on the pages. Each page has its own page template, and I’ve inserted one of the widget sections into the template. This gives me so much more flexibility for customizing the layout of individual pages.

The clients can edit the text in the widgets and woohoo, I thought I had a great solution. Until I realized now clients can’t style the text. No colors, justification, font-sizing etc.

Neither strategy works for positioning AND text styling.

Anyone have any insights on this?

Argh.

Thanks.