Webflow has secured $76m in funding, are we going to see any improvements in your dev team?

I do hate to pile on to this, but it is pretty disheartening seeing how quickly others pump out fixes and features and then see Webflow not take the Wishlist seriously at all. Extremely important and seemingly easy stuff like coupons for e-commerce and date formatting for other regions are still not in after years of people asking. Often, asking their customer support for help results in a “you should add it to the wishlist” response, which is frankly a bit insulting when you see the immense pile of 3-4 year old highly upvoted requests not being fulfilled.

I sincerely hope Webflow, which has a terrific product, steps it up going forward, or they risk someone coming in with a similar product with the lessons learned and taking over.

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Hate to be demanding. But that’s so true.
The development of long waiting features are just too slow…or they are simply being ignored?

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I agree that we can extend goodwill and patience to all during this national crisis, though all of us are stuck home with clients demanding this and that, plus bills that must still be paid- including those from webflow.

While we are at home, it is a good time to start a dialogue about the state of our favorite platform and things that need or can be improved. In my opinion, eCommerce and democratizing the web is low laying fruit that Webflow switched gears towards, but which leaves us pros waiting for important QOL features like the ones listed above, plus:

-Partner program after bulk hosting was quietly discontinued.
-Granular control over CMS editor roles

When I joined Webflow in 2014, the forums were alive with lots of professionals with regular in-depth discussion of web design and development. Maybe it is just me, but it seems less so now which is why I’d love to see Webflow really start pushing the original initiative of rolling out new and exciting features similar to when IX 2.0 was announced and connecting with the freelance crowd. I miss that Webflow :confused:

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@rmjjkj It would be nice if we could get a sub-forum for pro users so important topics worth discussing as professionals don’t get buried in the endless stream of “my site won’t work on mobile” threads.

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An example for me is that the API is severely lacking in some regards. You can’t search by queries for example. The “delete an item” function is completely broken if the item is referenced in other collection items (it refuses to delete it), meaning I have to manually get 100 and 100 of the items and then pour over the results to try and find the items referencing them, manually remove the reference (which is no easy task either). I do 100+ queries for something that could be done in one or two.

When I contacted support with a feature request fixing this, they just directed me to the wishlist. I got three upvotes …because people were either voting on other extremely common issues (like duplicating CMS collections, send form data to cms or folders for assets… why is it still not in??) or just because not that many people are using the API. It’s never ever going to get made. Why even have the wishlist at this point. Just say it’s not going to happen.

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I got three upvotes …

The problem is that the current wishlist platform does not let you spend your votes productively and people run out of votes, too soon.

One workaround: Wishlist users, you can re-affect many of your votes now :)

Anyway, voting is one of the most inadequate methods for prioritizing suggestions and on top of that, Webflow obviously do not care about it.

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are probably focussed on looking after their teams and families at the moment.

The original post is not about the moment, but about a period of about three-five years up to present.

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or they risk someone coming in with a similar product with the lessons learned and taking over

They do not risk anything any more. They got the big funding and that’s it. The only risk from now on, is if any of their investors does not feel appeased enough and does something to stop or limit their funding.

It’s a game about making their investors happy now, not their (paying) customers.

And, yes, you guessed it right - what makes their investors happy is not exactly what makes their (paying) customers happy.

Also, with investors, it is not “they” any more. “They” sold out and now it’s their investors who have the final say.

This is why, generally, you never see improvement after big funding. It ends up as either acquisition by some bigger, mediocre platform or steady decay (like the one that we are witnessing now).

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I think the forum is totally fine. I am really happy with the community support and Webflow staff’s participation here.

But as suggested by @NewInBoston, having a Pro or Dev section is really a good idea.

Webflow is a really bit too slow in rolling out new features, especially in some highly voted / coming soon features that mentioned in their homepage.

Some long-waiting features and basic functions that should have asap:

  • Login and membership functionality for ecommerce
  • Discount and Coupons functionality for ecommerce
  • Basic multi-language functions
  • CMS enabled Slider
  • Different emails for different forms
  • Search function of classes in Style Manager
  • Text color in CMS’s Rich Text Blocks
  • Adding custom classes or ID to elements or span in CMS’s Rich Text Blocks
  • Client Billing support more countries
  • Inserting media items from current Assets library in CMS editing
  • Media library for CMS, eg. showing media that is in use
  • More date formatting, or custom date formatting like Wordpress

Some fancy features I see on the wishlist are not necessary and some can be improved eventually. So, just as a common development principle – I hope Webflow can roll out small and improve.

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Totally agree - it feels like Webflow is falling behind. Especially with the CMS, try using Contentful for a while then come back to Webflow. Admittedly Contentful is a lot more expensive, but it still highlights just how limited the Webflow CMS is. And don’t get me started on its API…

However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Webflow can’t even fix what they already have. The designer is frequently so slow and laggy that it’s unusable. This issue gets raised regularly on the forums but never actually gets resolved. I’ve been using Webflow for years had been a massive proponent, but now days the designer is so unusable so much of the time that I can’t see myself recommending any serious projects get built in Webflow. There is something wrong when it’s quicker and easier to write HTML, CSS and JS by hand!

Imagine how much worse the designer could get if they were to roll out any major new features :scream: I don’t even want to think about it.

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To be fair it was only in August of last year that they got the funding. Anything they’ve done since then wouldn’t really have come to fruition yet.

But it sure would be nice to hear anything about their roadmap, anything about what they’re doing with the funding, are they getting more devs etc. And they really really REALLY need to address the wishlist issue.

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I don’t think it is and I find it unfair how everyone in this thread says this, and at the same time claim they’re professional developers and fail to realizing how hard developing such a software is.

Webflow is merely 6 years old. Look at the pace of the updates, new features. Show me what apps or services that achieve the same or go faster. Are you expecting a young app to be on par with what the market has best to offer in 2020 and took decades of development?

Chose the tool that fits your needs now, it is counter productive to demand features right now because people voted for it. Numerous votes means the tool is successful, not that we have the right to demand stuff.

About the forum being inefficient, where are your posts helping others, your free templates, experiments, advices, where do you give back to the community?

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Webflow is excellent indeed.
This forum is really great as well!
@vincent …and totally agree with you development is hard and it’s not magic.

I don’t know about other guys, but to me, Webflow is so good that I always want to convince our clients to use it.

But just because of a few reasons (such as some points I mentioned), they refuse to use Webflow… People just cannot understand why we are suggesting Webflow just because we can design freely and efficiently, they think we can simply work harder and archive anything with WordPress, Drupal, etc.

Anyway, I did not mean to complain, and I think voices are good.

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Sorry Vincent, but your comment is probably the least constructive here. You’re getting furious over people asking for their favorite nocode builder to be better? For asking about better communication about a product we’re paying for? I don’t see a single person here that don’t like Webflow, only people pointing out the obvious and wanting to better the product. I personally really like the forum and try to help whenever I have the time, and I don’t agree with there being a need for a “pro” forum yet, but I won’t dismiss the discussion or get furious over people debating it.

“it is useless to demand features right now because people voted for it”.
Webflow themselves are actively encouraging using the wishlist, but three - four year old features that are upvoted in the thousands go unfulfilled or in worst case aren’t even responded to. Like come on Vincent, is it that strange people are picking up on it as Webflow gets more exposure?

(Integromat was founded 4 years ago, and has had 94 updates so far this year btw)

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And they are right. They make a strategical choice the believe is good. they hold the funds, they decide. And your enthusiasm should have little to do with the choice.

That’s true but that has little to do with the final product they want. Very coold that you’ll achieve a better result with Webflow, and have the maintenance facilitated because the site in on Webflow… but if they don’t have the features they want, what’s the point?

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No. That’s the role of the whishlist. I’m getting furious about the tone and the rudeness of the original post. I very rarely get furious here.

My comment could surely be more positive but “least constructive”? I am the only one here giving arguments, explaining things and asking all of you to show me other examples, to show me how you are participating in this thing. So thanks for that.

The keyword here was “demand”.

Not the same tool, also it’s very much easier to craft API bridges one the tech is in place, and… the number of features, really?

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The whishlist is addressed, regularly. The pace is staggering IMHO https://www.man1fest.me/cms-timeline. Development is uncertain, testing is long, reworks are legion, disclosing a roadmap is risky, and rare (again, show me who does and how).

As for the roadmap, read the blog posts, especially those concerning features, read the release notes, watch the quarterly interviews, participate in the community.

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You literally said you thought we were all wrong and that we don’t realize how wrong we are. Sorry for not understanding you only meant the OP, I guess. Answering me and then editing your post afterwards…

Most people here are complaining about the Wishlist backlog specifically. Only a single thing has been shipped from the wishlist the last 11 months if I’m reading it right. For me that’s not a staggering pace, even if some other features are being put out. Many of the features released are nice, don’t get me wrong, but my wish is that they’d work on the most sought after features before adding nice-to-have features like the lightbox gallery or the prebuild layouts. The wishlist is clogged, and customer support sending people there is the same as slamming shut the door. It’s the most visible roadmap-like thing we have, and it is evidently something people look at and form opinions on. That’s the wishlist issue I want addressed.

They are. And that doesn’t block other minor features to see the light. There isn’t one path of development, also important features need the appropriate ground to be developed, I’m sure things are being refactored all the time to avoid bugs and to guarantee a healthy, steady future for new features.

It is not as simple as taking one request and make it, it’s never been, it will never, and that should be easy to understand. Because reading what OP and you are writing, it seems that they hold the new, important, desired features on purpose. How come that be true?

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Allow me to add water in my wine. I write here with my real identity, it costs me to be furious and engage in this as I could just brush it away. You just have a nickname, no risk.

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