Webflow seems to forget the designer

Community resources Product feedback
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I am just giving my feed back, I had a Webflow account once before I figured I would see if anything changed in a year… For a professional it has not, Everyone has their opinion. I am not saying it is not a good tool I just don’t think it tips the need in a studio setting.

a few posts that made me laugh.

it would be fun to see a speed challenge where a fast coder VS a Webflow designer go head-to-head and publish a single page, fully designed with animations and interactions.

Well all I can say about that is… speed is nothing without quality. lets just say for the sake of argument speed is essential. bootstrap & foundation are the 2 largest and widely used frameworks for responsive design. coffeecup, layout it, pinegrow, mobirise just to name a few are about 20 times faster for laying out a ready site then Webflow and most of them are free with animations included and they allow you to structure the way you want.

A tool is only as good as you.
and I can say your absolutely right. have you tried dreamweaver? brackets? oh you mean a non hand-coding tool gotcha.

and the list can go on…

Im a zend certified programmer, Adobe professional just to name a few and I still see no use in webflow for me. Like I said its my opinion. I am sure it helps those who are not professional writers throw some sites together.

Webflow gives the appearance of only being for those who are not as skilled as a pro. why do you think they discontinued adobe muse? well if you follow adobe they listen to their base. designer and developers were limited but their were not enough non writers to cover the cost of up keep. when adobes customers talk they listen.

Everyone says webflow this webflow that so it seems the customer base you have is happy with that.
webflow has cms, webflow has eCommerce. well when reading the forms I still hear more of what webflow cannot do. what if your client needs and ecom site but they want to host with their host? or they want it written in PDO? or codeigniter? or Mysqli? what if they need cronjobs? what if there using ssoauth? or curl?

So ill be the first to say I challenge any webflow designer you might get done faster but my quality will be better and the functionality will be better and smaller in file size.

I read one post where the user told another user if they wanted to disable animations on mobile they had to create a copy of it with no animations really? WOW

Webflow we have had this convo before this product could really take off if you focus on everything and everyone not just a base you want to hold on your services like hosting and non studios. This software really has potential and you could corner the market.

Web design, CMS, & hosting features | Webflow if you look there it says

Every CSS property
Enjoy total design freedom with access to many CSS styling properties from the latest specs, from alpha to Z-index.

and that is far from the truth.

I could name 5 off the top that are not in there…

Why not take a chance and listen watch your profits double.

I have since cancelled my subscription not even 3 days in

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Congratulations, you’re a pro developer. You have no need for Webflow. For those who are not a pro developer, I think Webflow strikes an amazing balance between ease of use and providing enough advanced things to keep people interested.

Different horses for different courses, in my opinion anyway.

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This could be me you’re quoting :smile: It was a while back. Yes maybe a silly challenge, a high quality website takes time in what ever way you’re building it. I know how to code websites but for me it feels like it takes for ever so Webflow helps me save some time.

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LOL. I love this post. What did I actually read? I’m not even sure… So in the end, did you like Webflow? Or not? :joy:

Don’t worry, even with Webflow in our life, we still need the ultimate professional developers such as yourself, @Digital. You must be so good at what you are doing.

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It’s absolutely your opinion, but I think webflow provides a pretty significant tool for a large chunk of people. It provides solutions for the majority group and can still absolutely be utilised for full dev projects… Of course it can’t be entirely matched with a full custom dev, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an incredibly usefull tool.

For instance, Adobe Illustrator provides a number of great solutions and is an excellent tool. However, we very often utilise photoshop in the process of creating the design. It’s a tool, it doesn’t solve every single issue but provides a pretty great solution for most of them.

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Webflow changed many designers lifes… not yours… they can’t have them all!

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@Digital, very interesting feedback and I totally understand where you are coming from.

Here is my perspective though. I fall under Webflow’s demographic user. I’m working on a startup, I love having control on the tools I use and learn as much as possible from it too. However, because of my focus on running a startup, I don’t have time to become a zend certified, or simply learn the depths of HTML, CSS, etc. Having a website for me is just more of an intro to my business, not the business itself. Therefore, a nice front page with some animations and a contact us page will do.

But here’s the best part, unlike Wix, Squarespace etc, which have extremely basic tools and is most dependant on templates, Webflow actually allows me to do almost anything. And that for me and for many others is the selling point (CMS etc). Although I’m not coding, I’m learning quickly how to build a website that looks and feels professional.

I absolutely respect developers. But I simply don’t understand why developers like yourself make these observations and compare. For the average joe like me out there, what’s the alternative? Pay over 10 grand to recruit someone like yourself? The demand for developers will always be increasing despite the rise of Webflow, Wix etc. After all, it wouldn’t surprise me if Webflow only recruited senior programmers for their product (ironic I guess).

Conclusion, like @Koen said, Webflow changed many designers life’s and even startups like myself. And I think thats something to take into consideration. Maybe when my business scales I can move away from Webflow and hire the smart guys like yourself!

Peace :v:

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