Hey all, just finished my portfolio and wanted to show it. It’s available at www.coopercrosby.com, I’d love to hear any thoughts or feedback, anything is fair game.
This was my first time using Webflow on a project. It was a really good experience. I’ve been messing around with Reflow and Macaw since their early days, so I have a good basis for comparison, and I easily prefer Webflow. The fact that it runs in the browser and everything is controlled directly with CSS felt restrictive at first, but I quickly realized how much easier it makes it to maintain control over your design compared to editing the canvas freely and having the program try to generate the CSS later, like those other programs.
One tip I learned that I’ll use on other projects going forward - this might be obvious to some but it worked well for me:
I did a rough design of my site in Fireworks ahead of time, but a lot of the final design polish was done directly in Webflow. Since I was changing the design as I went, my site wasn’t set up very well as far as the CSS went - lots of weird, conflicting class names, difficult to navigate the workflow, etc. So I ended up doing two versions of my site. One messy version that I used as a playground to figure out how everything would work. Once I was solidified on the design, I created a new website from scratch in which I could easily maintain good structure and CSS. The same things that felt restrictive at first (needing to assign a class to any element to be able to edit it, not being able to drag and drop anywhere on the canvas but instead needing to think about the underlying HTML, etc) were awesome at this point. Being able to add a div, assign a pre-existing class, and have everything instantly look how I wanted it to look was great.
Overall, this was a really good experience. I signed up for a paid plan and I’m going to continue using Webflow in the future.
Awesome site @cooper! We’re glad to have you be part of the Webflow community. Can’t wait to see more of your work showcased on our gallery.
As for feedback for the site, the only thing I could think of is keeping the navigation on the top consistent. What I mean by that is either have those links all point to sections on the page or all point to different pages. Currently you have About pointing to a new page while Contact takes the user down to the bottom of the home page. The experience is not great when you are on the about page and click on the contact page. I would make the contact section into a symbol and create a new contact page and plop it in there.
Also I love the clean and simple design. The only thing that seems not consistent is the white border around your profile picture. I don’t see a border pattern in use anywhere else. I see large images and solid white fills. Maybe play around with the profile pic design to see if there is a style that would fit the rest of the site. But this is a really minor details / personal design opinion. Good job overall!
That is the beautiful thing about Webflow compared to other WYSIWYG editors. I find working with the HTML structure a lot more practical and initiative than having the ability to drag things around freely on the canvas. I also think it is a brilliant learning tool for those too intimidated with the code. The UI takes some learning as all software does but for designers that are use to Adobe UI this takes no time at all to get comfortable with.
I am loving the software so far and have been messing around with it for awhile. I think it is time to become an actual member to show my support.
The one thing I am waiting for is when or if they will release an actual file format for designs created within Webflow. I work at a theme website and it would be awesome to make themes for Webflow.
