After spending 7+ years in the static site generator world, I recently started using Webflow exclusively for all marketing sites and landing pages and have been blown away with how much better it is than dealing with the complexities of the Static site + Headless CMS ecosystem. It seems you've actually delivered on the vision that dreamweaver was originally trying to create all those years ago.
I wouldn't be surprised if one day Webflow's market share on the Web gets to be Wordpress-sized.
With the recent funding raised, I'd love to hear what your vision is for the next 5 years of Webflow as a product?
I, like most developers, got swept up in the gatsby/Netlify/contentful hype and have been building marketing sites that way for a few years now (mostly for Saas and startups).
The problems with this approach are many. First, getting set up is a giant pain in the ass. And not just the fact that you have to code everything from scratch, it’s the build process headaches, fixing the shitty SEO defaults of the static site generator, fighting over whatever hot CSS framework to use(its 2021 so tailwind now!!), etc. Then hooking the site up to a headless CMS is another big nightmare—-and then training your team how to use it is another.
And that’s just the beginning. Guess what happens when your team(or you) wants to update the marketing site (happens all the time)? You have to go through the nightmare all over again, fix some inevitable build process errors, re-learn how everything works, re-hook up contentful to the new content models, retrain the team again, etc.
Contrast this to the Webflow approach. I built the entire site in a day and haven’t had to touch the marketing site since. Our designer owns it completely now and has already done 2 complete redesigns in the time it would take me to do a small update the old way.
Our copywriter logs directly into Webflow when he wants to change the copy, the designer builds new landing pages for marketing initiatives in a day, and I never get bugged by the marketing team to “update this small thing” since they own it now.
Honestly, I now think the entire static site ecosystem is designed for developers to set up a personal blog using whatever front-end framework they think is “cool” at the time and never add content to it.
I would guess 98% of gatsby/Hugo/etc sites have less than 10 posts on them. And of those sites, there’s a 78% chance the only post is “how I rebuilt this site in Gatsby”
I'm not in the target market (as I find coding easier than learning a new UI) but it's something like this:
- Select a starter template (free or paid)
- Customize text and css, add any elements, the UI is what you would expect from Photoshop or Unity
- Add forms / payment forms
- Publish on a xxxx.webflow.com domain or on a custom domain (for money) - pay extra if you are using e-commerce features
I guess the goal is to shift the market from developers who know how to code to developers who know how to use a UI (similar to what Unity did for game developers).
I'd put Wix, squarespace, etc. in a different category. They are classic sandboxed site builders, you can only do as much as they allow you to.
Webflow is like a modern version of Frontpage/Dreamweaver that actually spits out modern, semantic HTML and sane CSS. You start from scratch and can build anything with it. It's actually hard to use if you don't understand how HTML/CSS works, because the UI is basically just a faster way to do front-end code.
I wouldn't be surprised if one day Webflow's market share on the Web gets to be Wordpress-sized.
With the recent funding raised, I'd love to hear what your vision is for the next 5 years of Webflow as a product?