Webflow from a developer perspective
Hey people, this is Kevin. I’m a frontend developer at Overflow.
For the past month I’ve been working on Webflow to develop our landing site. As a developer I didn’t know what to expect. Will it be easier than coding? does it have a learning curve? do I really need it? what can I do with it? what can’t I do with it?
Most of these questions had unexpected answers. So if you’re a developer who is going to use webflow for the first time I think this article is going to set your expectations more accurately and, maybe, save you some time by avoiding common mistakes.
First of all: why a CMS and not code? We decided to go with Webflow because we needed a CMS solution and an easy editable copy editor for our design team to tinker with. Headless CMS options exist, which means you can connect your regular frontend code (any framework) with an API to easily manage your content, but the cost of these are either similar or higher than webflow. Also using one of these options wouldn’t allow our designers to easily edit details. So given these reasons we decided to test Webflow.
Is it easier than coding?
Webflow is very similar to coding. I would even call it visual programming. Is that a good or bad thing? I don’t know, I’ll let you decide. For me it was a relief because I thought the learning curve was going to be smaller. I inmmediatly found myself making divs, using flexbox and setting margins the way I know.
Having said that, it is not coding. Some things are different: nested classes, minimum use of IDs, symbols (Webflow’s version of components), etc.
I can hear a lot of people saying ‘well actually…’ and trying to refute this by pointing to similar cases in regular coding, but before you do that, let me say: yes, these things are possible with code, but they’re not obligatory. This is a huge difference.
What can’t I do with it?
My biggest pain while developing with Webflow was that I couldn’t do things the way I wanted. As a developer sometimes you resort to hacky solutions that just work. They might not be best practice, but when time is short they get the job done. In Webflow it is extremly hard to be hacky.
For Webflow to work you have to use it they way it was intended to be used. Symbols are very limited in their customization by page, not as reusuable as components in frameworks like React or Vue. Forms are a little archaic, I couldn’t even prevent the site to reload on submit, I ended up using custom code blocks.
This is not a criticism of Webflow, by the way. I believe this is done in purpose by the team. I’m just pointing to the fact so that if you’re reading this and this is a deal breaker, better to know now rather than later.
Later I found solutions to some of these problems, but it was too late. My developer brain was tired of not finding answers in stackoverflow (which we know is half the skills a good developer needs) that I resorted to doing the way the app wanted me to.
The app also has another limitation. It is not just a drag and drop like other tools (wix, square, wordpress). For a non-technical person to fully build a site, she or he would have to understand the basic aspects of HTML and CSS which is not small endeavor. Have this in mind when you ponder your options with your team.
What can I do with it?
CMS. Their CMS tool works like a beauty. It took me a couple of minutes to set it up and that was it. That was the main reason why we went with Webflow and I believe it met the expectations.
The design team quickly understood what to change and what not to touch. This made pixel pushing and copy editing way easier.
Publishing is literally a one click proccess which is better than having to push to a repo and wait for a CI to run and then be deployed.
Lastly
Do I really need it?
In my opinion, if you need a blog, store or landing page that is going to be mantained by non-technical people then yes. It is fast, easy to use and relatively cheap (we are paying $24 a month). Although be mindful of the learning curve for both technical and non-technical people.
If you want more freedom, something more advanced or highly reusable components then no. Webflow is not a substitute for code nor does it want to be one. Think of it as an abstraction of code. Do you need an abstraction of your code?
