Anyone have any good Windows Webflow->FTP workflows?

Design help Webflow integrations
#1

Another Muse developer looking to make the switch. Been viewing all the tutes, including MuseGrid’s ones, and like everything but

  1. The pricing Seems like for one/two page sites it’s terribly expensive to host at Webflow. I have a bunch of those I do for small companies. Basically a nice Muse landing page with parralax, contact form, full page images, etc and it never changes. Charging me or them $14/month seems a bit rich. I have no problem with the subscription authoring plans, but the small site pricing is pretty steep.

  2. The FTP workflow. Like most of us Muse converts, we already have FTP accounts set up for our customers. In Muse, it’s literally a single button press to move files up to our hosting provider. Many of us have plans that allow for unlimited hosting of domains with limits on bandwidth usage (hint hint).

Here is Muse’s FTP site workflow:

  1. Choose the FTP site menu.
  2. Hit the Okay button.
  3. Watch the progress bar and close the dialog when completed.

Just so I understand this correctly, the Webflow user experience for FTP’ing to an outside server looks like this.

  1. Press the EXPORT button and then click Prepare ZIP and then Download Zip (3 button presses).
  2. Now, the zip file is in your downloads directory. You then expand the Zip file (Right-click Extract To)
  3. Now a folder opens with all the files. Next you open up the FTP client you use.
  4. Depending on the client, you need to login to your FTP site.
  5. Now you should clean up old files before adding new ones as you don’t want to have them laying around. So, best is to delete all the files at once (thus taking your website down).
  6. Drag/Drop or use a menu to select the new files and upload them to your server.
  7. Open the browser, launch the site and check it.
  8. Close the FTP client.

I’m wondering has anyone figured out a slimmer workflow for Muse users? I can already see this is much more work than Muse and especially repetitive.

This and the low volume pricing is the single sticking point for me and Webflow. The product looks great. The tutorials are off the charts good. Features are superb. If there was just a simpler way of managing the transfer of the files to my server…

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#2

In short, Webflow does not offer an easy way to achieve what you need. I guess it’s more lucrative for them to encourage people to host with them rather than making it nice and easy to host yourself. I agree with you on the Webflow pricing, it’s pretty ridiculous now.

Just a thought, in the case of a website with only a few pages, what’s to stop you from trying this idea…

  1. Build your website in Webflow
  2. Publish it to a free webflow.io domain
  3. Take note of your urls (home page, secondary page, etc)
  4. Pass these to a nodejs html scraper like website-scraper https://www.npmjs.com/package/website-scraper
  5. Pass website-scraper a path to create a directory and save the files
  6. Use website-scraper to copy the contents of each page and then save them as a .html file
  7. Upload the .html files to your ftp server

Or even easier, just download a program that clones websites and does all this for you. Then get the html files and upload them to your ftp server.

I’m pretty sure Webflow just uses http includes and links for scripts and css, so scraping the site and copying the whole lot would probably work just fine.

Maybe I should build this as a product for the ex-musers…!

Jason

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#3

Hi Jason, Thanks for the suggestion. I have no problem paying webflow for the ability to export HTML, it’s just I think it should be easier workflow wise. Perhaps someone for Webflow can chime in on the reason they haven’t made this a one button click thing?

I don’t want to pay to host 1 pagers on Webflow. I might consider for larger projects but it’s really too expensive for really small sites.

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#4

Yea agreed, also it would be great if they had an api for this.

You could try something like HTTrack, or if you are on Linux / MacOS you could simply use wget from the terminal. As far as I can tell, Webflow injects all their css links and scripts using https script includes, so I don’t see any reason that you couldn’t just publish the site for free with Webflow, use a tool to clone it, then serve it from your own web server.

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