Feedback on the Webflow site redesign

  1. Create a more distinctive visual language. To go along with our efforts to give Webflow more professional, technical spin, we wanted to introduce a new, sleeker visual language that would support that messaging.

No guys. Just admit it, please, for your own sake at least: you wasted precious time doing a new visual design of the site.

The previous two were perfectly fine. The first visual redesign, alone, was a waste of time. And now you did a second one. You could have spent that time working on one of the numerous feature requests or bug reports.

Come on, we paying users are waiting for essential functionalities for years already and you have been doodling around with a new sleek design of the site which was completely unnecessary. It’s a shame.

We keep hearing on the forum how much time new features take, how we must be patient, how much work you are doing…but you did find time for this nonsensical redesign!

From the conversations we had with both current and non-Webflow users, we confirmed our suspicions that most designers want to see a product in action when they visit the website, and our old site simply didn’t do this clearly enough.

And this one does it clearly enough?

I don’t want to repeat myself, but you do not even have a sandbox mode for new users to stop by. There’s no better way for users to see your product in action and you do not have it.

  1. Differentiate us from consumer WYSIWYGs. We wanted to move away from — if not directly contradict — the misleading association we’ve had with consumer WYSIWYGs like Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, etc., and make it clear that Webflow is a modern, professional, and technical tool.

And you think, users, upon visiting your site, differentiate Webflow from WYSIWYGs now!???

Do you really believe that?

Can you realize that you have lost connection with reality? That you are slowly killing your (once?) great product?

Time wasted for a second time on new visual design, marketing messages mediocre at best and site’s UI even deteriorated (look at your pricing pages, I already mentioned that in a previous post) and you even brag about all this, and waste even more time explaining at length how exactly you planned and implemented this bunk!?

Drop the mic :neutral_face:

I must say some of the ui in the designer such as the Symbols new home is really awkward and kinda clunky.

An I must agree a sandbox for first-time users is a great idea for Webflow, even though the team may have thought about this feature and decided not to go that way in their marketing @uzzer

I like the redesign, personally. If the Webflow team thought it would bring more users onboard, then that will be good for the additional revenue of course, time will tell.

However, I really, really would like some indication around timelines in regards to some of the missing features. I can begin to understand some of your frustration here.

For myself, native dynamic lightboxes/galleries (and bulk/folder uploads for this) are sorely needed and something I think should be of high priority. I only have a couple of hosted Webflow sites under my belt, but they have all needed this functionality and it’s painful relying on workarounds to get there. Pagination also…

I know they’ll be working on something which I’m sure will impress us once it’s ready, but yeah, it can be frustrating being left in the dark most of the time.

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I like the new website. But the previous one… was good, too. :worried:

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Hi there,

Not sure the Webflow site redesign is a waste of time, and if it is, to err is human.

The previous site was really good too, but not as professional as it is now. Now when I go on webflow.com I can feel immediately that Webflow is a professional tool, made for professional designers.

The new design is coherent with the path Webflow takes.

Sorry for the mistakes,

Best

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I agree I think the new website does look professional, also who’s to say that the website was designed by someone who is working on new features?

@callmevlad @cyberdave @PixelGeek 1 thing that I would like to see on the website is some sort of feature time line, features have been promised for months and months and we always seem to be left in the dark. We as the community need to be updated on what you guys are working on and give us some deadlines for these features.

Even if its a progress bar for each feature which is being worked on, or just being honest with us and saying we haven’t even started on this feature yet. We want to see what is being prioritised.

Best regards,
Matt

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Similarly, I would like somthing like this for Bugs. I.e. which bugs are ‘open’ (aware but not being looked at yet), which are assigned to someone (being worked on), and ‘closed’ (fixed). It would make everything a lot more transparent and me a little more chilled.

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What difference does that make? Whoever designed the site was paid to do that and was managed to do that. Same money and time could have gone to an extra hire to work on the Webflow tool.

@daniel_cleayweb

There’s already something public like this out. https://www.flexboxgame.com/

It’s for Flexbox but you can really use any of the tools once you’re in there. Would be cool to see other “games”, to show how the tools can be used.

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@Callmevlad changed the title from “This is pathetic :(” to “Feedback on the new marketing site redesign”… speechless

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@uzzer Thanks for the feedback. I changed the title to better reflect your feedback in the main topic list.

Also, please don’t assume that work being done at Webflow is a zero-sum game. The work done on the marketing site took no time away from our engineering or product design team, which is working hard on new features and product improvements. All the work was done by two new hires on our marketing team as a way to get onboarded to the Webflow team faster - it helped them get acquainted with the product faster, and helped us better communicate what Webflow does (which we’ve seen validated in our metrics since the new design was released). Your allegations of “wasted time” are not accurate, and I’d like to keep the discussion here in our community more civil.

@daniel_cleayweb Thanks for the feedback on the Symbols UI change - we agree, and are addressing it. A few hours ago we rolled out a change to switch that UI to a list, and have some other UX improvements coming.

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I have to agree with callmeviad. We are all on the same team regarding goals for Webflow, even through the ups and down which we all know can be frustrating.

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Discussion should be civil of course. At the same time civility should not prevent us from calling things by their true names.

Trust me, I derive no personal pleasure in using harsh words on Webflow. I strongly desire Webflow to succeed - for the very least, because there’s hardly any decent alternative out there.

This is exactly why I think Webfow should receive criticism before it’s too late.

The community is supportive and nice and this great. But this is great only to the extent to which we help each other with our daily design work. Beyond that, it goes to the extreme of some sheepish admiration of Webflow, dismissing anything which may hurt the rose-tinted version of reality.

I can see far too many red flags and I raise my voice about them, because I do want Webflow to continue to be great. Great, not just good enough.

No uncivility intended whatsoever, but you are totally lost when it comes to marketing. I am not aiming to insult you by saying this. I am stating what I perceive to be a fact. I might be right about this, I might be wrong - but in all cases I am supporting my statement with specific arguments. If I were not, it’d have been rude and insulting, but that is not the case.

I am not accusing you either - I just wish that you realized some things, which are too evident to an outsider. I have been propagating Webflow all the time to all sorts of tech & design guys. That is not a representative sample of course, but it does hint at some highly probable, common sense conclusions. My observation is that it is mostly the extra smart and open-minded guys who grasp the value of Webflow and appreciate it.

The majority of other people, the huge volume of potential customers - that is, the big money - they sneer just at the mention that an alternative of Wordpress could possibly exist. And you are not addressing them properly.

Your sponsored Facebook posts, your design workshops, your new redesign - that goes unnoticed or ignored by them.

And then we have your pricing. Pricing is one of the pillars of marketing. You’ve been failing on that miserably, on a consistent basis. I think this aspect does not need any detailed explanation and examples…

Don’t get me wrong again, I am not accusing you. Blame is not what I care about. It is not even relevant, as you are designers first of all, not marketers. I just wish you did not live in an illusion world that your marketing is doing well. It needs serious fixes. You seem reluctant to admit that, though.

For instance, you say above: “which we’ve seen validated in our metrics since the new design was released”. But what if your metrics had been deeply flawed, just as your preliminary research on pricing had obviously been? Something of the sort that you had done research about the new pricing and it had been thought out well, and proven to be acceptable, was mentioned on one of your webinars… Given the actual outcome, wasn’t that laughable?

You seem to believe that a sleek site and social media activity would bring you new customers. This is so naive. This is so incompetent. When you released the visual Flex controls, I shared that post to a Facebook group about freelancing. It had something like over a hundred comments full of excitement. This is social media marketing - creating a great feature, worth talking about. All the rest comes free and naturally.

Sponsored Facebook posts telling me about design trends for 2017 or “15 unique website layouts”, are a pleasant read, but they are useless from a customer acquisition point of view. (Even though the so called “digital marketers” would like to lead you to believe otherwise.)

There’s nothing in such articles to make one want to try out Webflow. Simply because they are not about Webflow and what is even more important, they are not about Webflow vs Wordpress.

And all that pompous and bulls*it language in the “Redesigning Webflow.com, part 1” post… Come on guys, let’s get real, “To go along with our efforts to give Webflow more professional, technical spin, we wanted to introduce a new, sleeker visual language that would support that messaging.” is nothing but a piece of pesky commercial crap. Honestly, civility and uncivility aside, would a sentence like this keep you reading?

I don’t know about your metrics, but thinking that your redesign contributes towards making users differentiate Webflow from WYSIWYGs… Guys, you think I am uncivil, but I do respect your talent in building Webflow. And this is why I just cannot figure out, how is it possible for you, given your intellect, to be that naive to think that. If you really do, then, maybe, you are too insulated from the external world, within some stronghold of an over-comfortable comfort zone.

Webflow is a kind of product, which is immensely susceptible to organic word-of-mouth advertising. And this is great news. In order to stir up word-of-mouth the only thing you need to do is to improve the tool. Nothing more.

You do not need those two hires on the marketing team. You do not need the old hires. You do not need any marketing team different from product development and support. Any money spent on those two hires and other hires with similar functions, is money not being spent on improving the product.

That means no topics about great new features to take over social media organically and free, no over-enthusiastic users to evangelize Webflow, no unique selling advantages over Wordpress, no intuitive UI requiring much less support than it currently does and that on turn means no greater user base bringing more profit, which then means desperate attempts to generate cash through disproportionate price increases.

There seems to be this misguided belief that design and development are the same people. They’re not. Them doing the development on their website was most likely done by their designers. And their actual dev team is still working on other milestones in the actual webflow product.

Now, if they started doing other pet dev products outside of their main product, yeah I’d get a little mad.

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A post was split to a new topic: Issue with creating Symbol with a right click

@Jakev The point is not who (is in which team) but what. Redesigning the site for either marketing purposes or onboarding purposes, is not a wise investment of man-hours. Those same designers/ new marketing hires/ whoever could still had been involved with the actual webflow product - e.g. design of the UI/ support/ improving the Help center, etc. Just look around this forum, there’s tons of work to do on the tool for any role.

Spot on. This is what a of people… (Designers included) don’t understand.

@uzzer

  • I agree with a lot of what you say
  • I personally do not like the “new Webflow website”

but I think you are not guiding this topic in the right direction.

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