Designing sign up workflows

Design help Layout & Design
1

So I’m in the process of designing a website that will allow my employees and customers to communicate between each other.

I’m having a hard time with some design decisions.

My employees, are going to have update abilities on their profiles (public profiles) which then are populated to a different part of the website that customers are able to access.

Initially, I wanted to go with a basic simple sign up process that both my employees and my customers could use, however, I realized that if they use the same process, then this would allow the customers also the option to update and essentially post their profiles in the same space as the employees which is problematic.

The other option is I could duplicate the sign up process for my customers but have it post in another location, which my employees would have access to but I’m not exactly sure if that’s the best decision.

Is there any basic way to route a sign up? Basically, I would like to figure out a way for the website to say okay this is going to be a customer sign up, then redirect them to the customers portal which doesn’t have CMS. Or this is an employee sign up so route them to the profile Creation tools that do?

Not sure if I’m doing a great job explain this, I’m very new to webflow.

2

I just thought that maybe if I could figure out some code that would tag an account as employee or as customer then it could potentially disable CMS in their profiles or hide their profiles from CMS?

3

Only if you design it that way.
Your goal would be to switch on and off parts of the UI depending on the role of the user.

Employees get an “edit my profile” page.
Customers get a “search the directory” feature.
etc.

If you are using two entirely different membership systems, you’ll have some complications to overcome but you have two separate systems with two separate content-security approaches you might be able to leverage.

If you’re using the same system e.g. Memberstack, you have two sign-up screens and therefore the advantage of collection different data and setting different access groups at signup.
This doesn’t change how your website works though, it’s just a sign-up process convenience.

This concern isn’t related to sign-up, it’s more related to the login and content security model, essentially the same as my first answer above.

If you’re not comfortable with figuring out how to use Memberstack to hide and show different elements and pages by access group, or you want a deeper level of security, there is a different approach that could work involving two separate websites.

Site 1 is your public site, has customer sign up and login, and your directory.
Site 2 is your private site, for employees only. It has employee signups or some form of internal oauth authentication which both Wized and Memberstack support. You build your UI using Wized (nocode) or Memberstack (some custom js work to build it out).

The trickier part here is your data, as they can’t directly share the same Webflow CMS. You’d either need to sync them somehow ( powerimporter pro, whalesync, or automation ), or you’d use an external database like Xano for your content. It depends on how complex your data is, how you’re querying it, what features you need, what your budget is, etc.

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4

Wow thank you so much for the incredibly detailed response! You’ve definitely given me a lot of information to look into. I think part of my confusion is that I’m still very new to the platform and don’t fully understand how the whole CMS system works. Do you happen to know of a good resource to learn more about how it functions?

Again thank you!

5

@Donald_Barlow - Webflow has a university that has detailed information about using the product. Some of the content does not show the new interface and is due for an update but the concepts are still the same.

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