An Open Letter to Webflow

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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Thank you for your feedback and know that we are reading everything and listening to all of what our community is telling us. We hope that you will attend this Community Update with an open mind and give us a chance to show you what we’ve been working on and of course how you can all help us become a better Webflow.

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Had to lol at that one. Clearly there’s an infrastructure thing there between static and dynamic content, but from a UX point of view it’s so silly and frustrating… :sweat_smile:

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I totally disagree.
We don’t have the crashes, we don’t have the speed issues, and we find that the overall value proposition is ultra compelling - far beyond any of the other platforms available.

The user thing needs to get figured out though - we need users.

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Message is back here, it had been deleted by me… :ghost: although unintentionally/accidentally/zero-idea-why-ly.

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Interaction overrides hover state

Hey I appreciate your response. As a part time developer, I understand how large the issues you guys are trying to fix, and I appreciate the fact that you are taking your time to get the scalability issues tackled right. I wish you the best of luck.

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Hi, following from the community update yesterday (which had some positive news, especially on scalability and GDPR), @callmevlad put native multilingual support back on the roadmap (YAY), but when he asked @Jiaona_Zhang to give more details about this, she completely dodged the bullet and talked about something else.
This awkward silence aside, when can we expect to have actual details about this ?

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The slides had multi-lingual as “researching”, which agrees with the statements given three months ago.

Hi all - this is not a priority in the immediate term as there are a number of 3rd-party solutions (e.g. Weglot) that allow customers to create multi-language experiences on their sites, but it’s definitely something we plan to build the right way within Webflow in the future.

To me, that reads “researching”. If there are any serious priority changes, from everything Vlad as repeatedly said, Webflow has put their foot down that they won’t be delivering anything multi-lingual any time in the relative future for any part of Webflow. Hopefully, they’ll make more serious changes to under-development and under-support.

Multi-lingual is not on any roadmap on the scale of “months”, but likely “1+ years”. Example: membership was discussed in 2016, promised in 2018, and then finally developed in 2020. It’ll land in Q4 2021 in a perfect world, if not Q1 2022.

FWIW, Weglot has so many limitations that Webflow should not be recommending it so eagerly: doesn’t work with plenty of lazyload image implementations, costs an arm & leg for anything more than 50k words, adds another external script, layout changes are a pain, etc. “Design visually! And a third-party paid service to change the HTML <p> from May → Mei in the CMS.”

If Webflow even threw a few bones (e.g,. CMS date overrides, turning August → Ogos), it’d save enormous time in maintenance.

If you were in the Zoom chat, people (from some 30+ countries) exploded that Webflow even mentioned multi-lingual. Alas, people who need websites in more than one language, “Lari sahaja dari Webflow.”

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Yeah, I saw the reactions when multi language was announced. But indeed, the “research” status is just what it was for the past 4 years… so maybe in 2027 then…

Nonetheless, kudos to @callmevlad for keeping such a good poker face when JZ didn’t give an answer to his question in front of so many customers… the Daniel Negreanu of webdev !!!

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I also attended the community update. To be honest, I’m quite disappointed. Just two slides on updates and it felt like the comments we got over the last month and years just in video form.

I’m pretty sure that nothing tremendously is going to happen any time soon.

Wouldn’t even be surprised if EditorX is going to kill Webflow because webflow talked the whole time instead of doing and bringing updates that are painfully needed, for years.

@callmevlad

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I’ve been angry posting out of frustration about user accounts for years now, but it seemed that instead of caring all I’ve noticed are redundant features that don’t make anyone’s life any better and frankly a very small percentage of users care about.

Another thing I’ve noticed though is how prices have sneakily been going up. regularly.
maybe it is time to consider another platform, because this one is starting to suck and is dragging behind every single trend.

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I don’t think that one’s correct to be honest. There was a (significant) pricing ‘adjustment’ towards the end of 2017 or early 2018 (I don’t remember exactly), but I believe pricing has been stable since. I personnaly am on a Pro plan since 2016 and haven’t seen other pricing updates (or I need to have a chat with my accountant…).

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Agreed. While it was nice to see how well Webflow is growing and scaling, as well as being part of the community, it felt that nothing was really addressed with only vague plans for the summer/fall mentioned. I was hoping for more after how the update has been promoted since mid January, with hardly any features released in the meantime.

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Woah. Didn’t even know about this. Yeah, competitors are popping up with hugely impressive tools and much better value. Time is really running out for Webflow if they don’t get their act together fast.

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Oh that is disappointing to hear! I was registered but ended up being unable to join the community update… and there’s no record or meeting notes available yet, that I can see.

I, too, was hoping for concrete roll-outs of features that are long overdue. I don’t know many companies that consistently point in a vague direction and say “around then” about key features.

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More kicking the can down the road for the most part.

I found one comment particularly telling when Vlad said something along the lines of “if we’re not working on a feature that you are especially interested in don’t be discouraged.” To me that says Webflow will be working on what they want to work on, not what you want them to work on. Thought that was a pretty clever/sneaky way out of that pesky wishlist.

FFS, I just want to underline something in Rich text.

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@jmkriz Maybe not the right place to put it, but finsweet has way to add custom styles to a rich text field. https://sweet-text.finsweet.com/

Perhaps this would help you a little :slight_smile:

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@WillNeeteson Without the finsweet contributions I would have bailed long ago.

The point is basic functionalities have been inexplicably ignored for years and will continue to be. There was a question specifically about Rich text improvements that Vlad straight up basically said they weren’t going to bother with.

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I can see only disappointment comments after this meeting and only one small yay to place multi-language back to wishlist (that actually doesn’t mean anything as it can lay there for another several years). If I can ask were there any news that large community can be happy about that will happen at least in this year?

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