An Open Letter to Webflow

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Thank you for the link, @Brittni_at_Webflow.

I sincerely hope at this meeting with yourself, Jiaona, and Vlad will have material & concrete plans about the entirety of Webflow and its systemic problems of under-development and under-support. The repeat “marketing” updates we seem to get feel like a slap in the face (e.g,. shouting into the abyss of Customer Support, the Wishlist, and the Forums).

I think many will only be looking at one answer: “Does this Q2 2021 update show Webflow continuing its complacent trajectory of 2018+ or is anyone at Webflow HQ serious enough to put their foot down for customers?”

I’d like to see someone at Webflow HQ put their foot down and say, “Our company has screwed up, here’s why (e.g,. we kept bolting on major features without technical leadership), and here is our concrete plan to fix it.”

#1 Issue: Under-Development

  1. Fixing the countless bugs (Designer panels, CSS, Interactions, CMS, API)
  2. Stabilizing the Designer back-end (stunningly poor performance, especially with CMS, on $3000+ developer machines on fiber internet on pristine browsers. Webflow crashes more often than Adobe Premiere Pro, which is saying something)
  3. Adding a modicum of the vast oceans of missing features, some promised and some bizarrely absent (CMS, Interactions, Assets, Pages, SEO, images, etc.); Webflow should leave the single landing page paradigm. Structural nesting, template pages, dynamic pages beyond the CMS, multi-lingual, etc.). For example, why are CMS images…not available in the Asset Manager? Who decided that?

#2 Issue: Under-Support

  1. Days-long delays on serious customer support issues, Webflow Customer Support unable to diagnose serious problems much further than Webflow University. Anything more complex?
  2. The Wishlist does not recognize customer feedback as serious platform limitations. Repeatedly, Customer Support tells you, “Put it on the Wishlist”, while Webflow just about struck out the 2nd-most popular Wishlist item in the history of Webflow two months ago. Not to mention the non-sensical updates: “User / membership back-end will help multi-lingual! Nope, not doing multi-lingual actually any time soon!”
  3. The just haphazard, overlapping, and Swiss hole cheese documentation: some platform limitations are only on the forums (why, just why), others only through Customer Support, others only on the YouTube channel. I’ve had a Webflow employee explain a platform limitation and immediately delete their forum post within minutes.

A genuine apology and a suggestion (will it ever happen? doubtful) deleted. Is this documented anywhere? How should new users know Interactions are purely JavaScript injecting CSS upon click? It just says “Interactions”. If Webflow supports two competing animation systems, tell users in your Documentation how they might clash. We shouldn’t need to trawl your forum posts to learn this.

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What I expect, unfortunately, from the meeting next week:

  1. Some positive updates on membership logins, some four years later, but with tight limitations, an unexpectedly high price (2x hosting?), poor Designer performance, and/or a very slow quarters-long rollout. By 2022, it should be mostly ironed out?

  2. Some copy-paste of what Webflow has written in 2019, 2020, and 2021. “We screwed up communicating [not developing]. We’re working on big things. It’s just hard to get into the weeds right now. Trust us. Action is coming!”

  3. Admissions of some problems purely focused on “we aren’t communicating well”, with loose plans and even looser commitments on development & support of the Designer.

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