I’m new around and just spent an hour looking at the website, tutorials, built sites and the forums.
Apart from the really confusing pricing structure that seems to add new money to pay on ever additional thing you need and also hide limitations instead of clearing communicating prices i’m still confused if Webflow would be right for me.
Basically webflow looks exactly right: I’m looking for a CMS that enables me to have a blog with a bit of a complex data structure as i don’t only want to post blog posts but also do product rewviews and therefore have different products listed based on their types and add some more complexity. This could be done with Wordpress utilizing custom fields and post types but would require quite some coding and individual template work. Webflow looks great for this on first sight though it might probably be a bit more limited than wordpress.
But then again Webflow seems to focus so much on designers and i’m really unsure about how solid it is for real data driven webapps? All sites that i have seen in the public site listing are somehow design prototypes. I couldn’t find a single real data driven website that offers more than a standard blog? Also i don’t see any details on hosting - how are the limitations there, how performant and reliable is the “CMS hosting” that costs me additional 20$ per month? Don’t get me wrong - 20$ could be a fair price if it’s able to handle a medium amount of traffic on the db driven sites. But how about if the site is growing and needs more attention. The walled garden of a custom CMS that can’t be self hosted doesn’t allow any take away if i get that right. Is there any form of export for the data? I know i can export HTML and CSS but how about the more important stuff: the data?
Maybe i’m just too blind to get my head around all that stuff now but somehow i wish the structure of pricing and plans could be so smart and clear as the application looks to me on first sight.
So a few things - Webflow can definitely help in terms of the blog and data listing for products, what it can’t do (yet ;)) is have users add reviews themselves. But I’m not sure if you wanted that.
In terms of why you haven’t seen other sites with more than a blog, the cms was just launched yesterday! people are just getting to grips with it and realising it’s full potential ;). Within weeks you’ll be seeing some awesome things - I promise .
In terms of hosting for a cms site it’s $20 a month with Amazon Cloudfront CDN (very reliable and fast) you are allowed 25,000 page views a month. If you have any more questions on this I’d suggest emailing support@webflow.com directly.
The pricing scheme is new and the Webflow Team are listening to the feedback and will likely be refining it shortly.
You can make a cms site for free on a webflow.io subdomain and only pay for hosting once you connect it to your public domain - and I’d encourage you to learn it and play around with it before committing.
thanks for stepping in and kindly answer my questions. I didn’t realize the fact that CMS was just introduced yesterday - in this case it’s amazing how many tutorials and stuff are already online. Good work!
I know Cloudfront very well but it of course only serves static files like css, images and stuff so it’s only a part of the game but surely will lead to fast delivery of the sites.
I didn’t realize the limitation to 25k view a month. This isn’t all so much - and additionally isn’t communicated clearly in the pricing & plans section as far as i could see.
Of course you are right that i could start using the free plan and see how webflow works but this still takes time. I’m not yet confident that Webflow is a good thing on the long run. I’ve also read about the price change that just happened where existing users seem to be disappointed about how this worked out and how they were informed.
Using Webflow as a CMS for a new site is something you have to rely on for a long time as data exports are difficult or not even existing and moving the site to other systems later maybe a big heap.
Hopefully the webflow team will react on critics of their users and decide to be more clear and transparent in the future.
The webflow team ARE LISTENING! They are totally hearing the feedback of the community and should be clarifying things soon… Like I say - the cms was just launched and the team made a bunch of changes to the pricing model, cms, and new site - they made a bunch of changes and things will likely be refined soon, having listened to the feedback
In terms of the 25,000 pageviews monthly - you can contact webflow support and they should be able to sort you out in terms of an extension
people are just getting to grips with it and realising it’s full potential ;). Within weeks you’ll be seeing some awesome things - I promise