I'm an engineer, sell me on Webflow

Design help Custom code
1

Hi everyone,

I’m an old-school HTML/CSS engineer who’s been building on the web for over 20 years. I’m a bit “out of the game” on the frontend side of things and this whole “no code” sales pitch is scary to me. I’ve seen these thing before and the code they produce is usually garbage.

The whole “no code” thing is a bit like someone saying they want to compete with Porsche but they don’t want to bother with all that boring, difficult stuff like mechanical engineering and material science.

I’m hiring a team that uses webflow and actually it does seem to be quite “engineering oriented”, but I could use some convincing.

Is Webflow going to let me export our code and handing to my senior frontend engineer without him hating his life?

Is Webflow going to name variables well and keep our code organized and easy for humans to read and work with?

Am I going to be able to fetch data from our backend and combine a more “normal” data flow with whatever Webflow is doing?

Are the webflow APIs going to have some some bug deep in some proprietary code that creates a nightmare for my team?

Some of the complaints I’ve heard about webflow are actually that it’s “too hard”, which is a terrible argument. One video actually complained that “in order to be truly efficient in webflow you have to actually understand the fundamentals of web development”. I was pretty much sold at that point, but I’d like to give the community a chance to convince me further.

Thanks!!!

Here is my site Read-Only: LINK
(how to share your site Read-Only link)

2

Hey! Full disclosure I’m more a “marketing designer/developer” than a frontend engineer. I’ll try address your post point by point to start :slight_smile:

Is Webflow going to let me export our code and handing to my senior frontend engineer without him hating his life?

Yes and no. You can export the code, but keeping everything on Webflow hosting is much easier for CMS (collections). There are a few work arounds but most of my clients I recommend using Webflows own hosting! I export my static sites and host them externally, but anything with a CMS I stick with Webflow’s hosting. The one thing I ask is why are you needing to hand the code to your senior frontend engineer? If you’re building a web app, then Webflow is not for you, unless you are looking at using Wized with Webflow!

Is Webflow going to name variables well and keep our code organized and easy for humans to read and work with?

It’s up to you to name your variables in a way that makes sense! Webflow doesn’t do this for you, as it’s very much a “visual HTML/CSS code editor”. I recommend checking out Client-First Style System for Webflow by Finsweet as this is becoming “industry standard” for Webflow.

The code that Webflow exports is actually easy to read so thats a bonus! It’s up to you to ensure the classes all make sense using whatever structure you want.

Am I going to be able to fetch data from our backend and combine a more “normal” data flow with whatever Webflow is doing?

Yes, although you’ll want to look at using something like Zapier. Webflow also allows custom code so if you know what you are doing you can do “anything”. Again it depends on what you are doing, if you are building a Web app then I’d again, recommend against webflow. (Although they do have dev lnk which is a tool I haven’t looked at DevLink – Visually design and build web components for React | Webflow)

Are the webflow APIs going to have some some bug deep in some proprietary code that creates a nightmare for my team?

Honestly I don’t know! I’ve never used the Webflow API, I’m a designer/Webflow dev and run more on the marketing side of things.

Some of the complaints I’ve heard about webflow are actually that it’s “too hard”, which is a terrible argument. One video actually complained that “in order to be truly efficient in webflow you have to actually understand the fundamentals of web development”.

I agree with this! A lot of “squarespace”/“wix” users think Webflow will be similar, but it is truly in essence a visual code editor. You need to know what html/css/some JS to know what you are doing, but if you know that I think it’s a truly marvelous tool!

Again I come from a more marketing side of things, I’ve never built web apps, but I have applied business logic to websites using things like Zapier to do “if this then that” style responses! I think Webflow is great, however depending on the use case you may either want to look at Bubble, Wized/Webflow combo, or some other platform if you are actually building an app. As Webflow is best for brochure sites not full scale applications.

Webflow wants you to host on their platform and their CMS/editor capabilities are excellent for handing off to clients and allowing them access to only whats needed!

Hope this might provide some insight! If you have any other questions feel free to reach out.

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Thanks for all the info Tommy! This is very helpful.

Yeah, that would be a bit confusing. We’re a software company, so we’re building a webapp and a mobile app and a lot of other things, but we have a marketing and design team for the website and I want to let those guys do what they do best and they seem to love Webflow.

I’m starting to see Webflow as the Unity of Web Development. I was initially skeptical of Unity also but have been proved wrong (and have actually used it myself as well, it’s a great tool).

4

Yep, you get it. I describe nocode as flattening an area of mountains. It makes building in that little area easier, but the edges of that town become very steep cliffs that are now much harder to pass.

Actually yes, but the reason is actually Webflow’s limitations. It’s effectively the photoshop of the web, you can build excellent UI’s and then… that’s it.

When exporting, you’ll lose many of the hosted capabilities like the CMS, User Accounts, ECommerce, Form submission handlers… but you’d be rebuilding those anyway.

Your code won’t be in Webflow anyway, to build a good system you’d be delivering client-side code from Typescript repos, and server-side code would be integrated into your exported HTML.

Check out Devlink in particular which is Webflow’s bridge from the designer to React projects. This may work well for you- or even using it, but transforming the output to whatever framework you’re using.

Not really relevant, but if you’re talking about CSS vars, yes that’s a recent addition.

Devlink will give you some solid component interfaces as well.

You’re going to need to choose a path here. Hosting your site one Webflow is a completely different experience than exporting the code and building your own infrastructure. If you’re building an application like a SaaS console, export or use Devlink. Don’t host it.

The Hosting environment is the thick-walled garden.

Totally irrelevant, the API realistically only relates to hosting.
You don’t want to take that path, it’s a real battle to turn a Webflow hosted site into a system, and most of your infrastructure would be external anyway.

If you really want to explore app build hosted on Webflow, look down the Wized+Xano path, but it’s all targeted towards the nocode community.