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How do you determine which website building platform or content management system (CMS) is best? WordPress has been considered the gold standard for years–but is it still the best? We’re not just talking about the obvious branding or color scheme, we’re talking about the whole experience. So, what qualities do we as an agency seek in a website platform?
The websites we create for our clients have all of these elements, and more, because we use Webflow. Webflow is a visual web development platform that allows us to design, build, and launch fully customizable websites, while providing our clients with an intuitive content management system. By combining design, animation, content management, marketing, and ecommerce tools into a single platform, Webflow empowers our designers and our clients to promote and manage websites of all kinds in a faster, more cost-efficient, and collaborative way.
Webflow was built to allow creatives to design, create, build, and manage the end-to-end website experience without having to write a single line of code. Combined with their visual-first Designer, Editor, and other web building features, the Webflow CMS is a game changer. Because coding isn’t necessary on the designer’s end, the possibilities are endless when it comes to building, managing, and scaling your custom site. And because we design with clients’ needs (and their customers’) at the forefront, keeping up with design and content changes or additions is easy and efficient.
Just like WordPress and other platforms, WebFlow makes it easy to incorporate a variety of content including:
But you no longer need a developer to build the database for you–our agency can do it on the fly.
On average, mobile devices account for more than 50% of internet traffic. Fortunately, Webflow is a great platform for creating websites that deliver exceptional experiences across desktops, tablets, and mobile devices because we can optimize the essential sections of your website for any device your visitors may be on.
Webflow allows for the greatest variety for design–in pixels, REM, viewport height and width, auto-design, and percentages, unlike Squarespace (which designs off a grid system, limiting sizing and alignment) or Wix (a pixel-based-only grid system). While WordPress also allows for the variety of design measurements, it’s all done within the website’s theme code, whereas Webflow has built in the options to the development platform. Plus using the client-first system in Webflow, developed by a close partner, responsive design is taken into account from the start, saving time (and dollars), as creatives no longer need to build the site separately for desktop, tablet, and mobile.
We’ve already mentioned that creating a Webflow website does not require any coding—all of the elements can simply be placed with drag-and-drop functionality, empowering creative and marketing teams with unprecedented autonomy that extends beyond simple static pages or blog posts.
Our designers can construct new, customized, and responsive layouts, styles, interactions, and animations with the intuitive Webflow Designer, and see how the platform effortlessly translates their instructions into clean and meaningful code (that we didn’t have to write). Writers and editors can effortlessly create and modify content within the Webflow Editor. Then, once the pages are ready, they can be published to the web. Behind the scenes,
Unlike out-of-the-box platforms like Wix and SquareSpace, Webflow includes a sandbox environment, so the agency and client can review new pages, make changes to content and more before publishing to the main website. To do the same thing in Wordpress would require a separate development environment to be created and hosted by the developer. With Webflow, it's all included, making proofing new and changing content that much easier.
In short, Webflow expedites workflow by allowing simple updates and content-rich experiences to be made easily and efficiently. We build the database, which fuels the content management system, so our clients are able to edit daily content, while we take care of larger, more stylized changes.
Webflow has several tools to help make sure your site loads quickly and efficiently, and part of this is using a cleaner HTML, i.e., clean code. This is important for website speed, because when visitors are on your site, they want information and answers quickly. The slower your page loads, the more likely your viewer is to leave. As well, Google has been known to penalize websites that take longer than normal to load.
When it comes to meta descriptions, being able to easily and quickly change the page’s meta description is vital for any content management system. While most website builders require a 3rd party plugin to edit meta descriptions, Webflow doesn’t require any plugins and metadata can be customized or automatically generated.
What about analytics? No website should be without it. Most website builders encourage you to install Google Analytics, but with Webflow, no additional plugin is required. All you need is your Google Analytics ID, then copy and paste, and you’ve got the numbers you need.
Website hosting never seems like a big deal until there’s an issue, and then it’s a huge headache. Webflow hosting provides us and, in turn, our clients, access to the fastest and most scalable hosting technology on the market, and it’s included. Unlike WordPress, where hosting requires an inconvenient third party platform that requires additional management, plus security plugins by yet another third party, Webflow’s all-in-one solution simplifies the management and includes the security (SSL) that comes with it. No need for additional security plugins to keep your website data safe. We can manage all that for you within one system.
To summarize, what Webflow brings to the table is unmatched. The efficiency at which we can build and design coupled with the ease and convenience of revisions, additional content, pages and integrations, and easy staging make it unbeatable. While management and back-end work is able to be done without a dedicated web developer, learning WebFlow’s platform is akin to learning Adobe Creative Suite.
A deep knowledge of UX/UI and SEO are still critical components when building any website. Understanding UX/UI is critical because simply making something beautiful and on-brand doesn’t necessarily make it functional or drive results. Good UX/UI blends the brand and the design to create a seemingly effortless flow through the site, creating an easy-to-use experience for website visitors. Our mission, after all, is to get our clients’ customers to take action, so we spend a lot of time determining how to encourage those behaviors.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is also of utmost importance. Website building teams still need to understand the complexities of how Google interprets your website structure, code, and content to deliver in search results. It’s not simply making it look nice. We take this into account from the sitemap to the information architecture to the copy and design.
Webflow just makes it easier for our team. At Pyper, Inc., we go with Webflow because it allows us to focus on delivering our clients the most customized and effective website in the cost-effective and efficient manner.
