Review for Prospective Customers

Community resources Product feedback
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I’m leaving Webflow, and I thought I’d leave a little feedback.

Webflow is a pretty great tool, especially for static sites. It allows almost full design control. The UI is fairly intuitive, particularly if you’re familiar with design programs like Photoshop and Illustrator.

The support, however, is not good.

I had the Personal plan, which promised email support. And, to be clear, whenever I emailed, I received a quick and polite response. I have absolutely no complaint about the people answering my emails.

The online documentation (videos, etc.) is often inaccurate, out-of-date, and skips steps that are critical to completing tasks. Many of the videos are purely promotional, and offer no information about completing tasks. (I found this most frustrating of all, because I like to solve my own problems when I can.)

Of course, the poor documentation meant that I tried to use the email support I was promised. However, unless my issue was a blatant bug, I was told to create a post in the forum. I was also told twice that support people are NOT ALLOWED to help with forum posts while they are “at work.” In case this isn’t clear, that meant that I took the time to do in-depth research (which meant watching oodles of useless videos and webinars), decided to contact support when I failed to find a solution, was told to construct a post (which meant re-creating all my careful descriptions and screenshots), and was then largely ignored.

Webflow seems to have a very weird culture around communication (as you can see if you read old forum posts about the release of the CMS).

There are some limitations to Webflow (such as how you can’t decide whether a class is created as a combo class or not), and I’m sure they will work these out over time. There are also viable work-arounds that exist right now, but absolutely no official documentation about using these work-arounds. This fits perfectly with the communication weirdness – rather than empowering users to succeed, the company pretends there isn’t a need.

I hope they get the whole documentation and support thing worked out. If they applied the same standards to documentation and support that they apply to the tool itself, things would be golden (some QA, content strategy, user testing, etc.)

I actually feel really bad for the guys (and gals?) who respond to support requests – it seems like they are caught in a terrible system that doesn’t allow them to actually provide support.

So, to summarize: The tool is great, but the support is bizarre and sucky. I think Webflow is very promising, and if I had a lot of extra money, I would stick around. I may be back in the future.

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I think support is here to support the working infrastructure, and maybe less to help resolve HTML, CSS design issues that may fall under web design best practices. You really can’t put the blame on support for not being able to assist you with your personal projects or bringing you up to date with coding/design. Its been my experience that the assistance for platform issues have always been approached speedily. Resolving for other issues (using Tram, Jquery, HTML, CSS, Javascript) has ALWAYS been directed to the larger community and often replied to by Vlad, Danro and others spearheading Webflow. The community is EAGER to help and I always find someone willing to help if stuck in process. If you want to learn more about Web/Interactivity Design and Coding you should probably refer to sites like Lynda.com, plurasight.com and code academy. These will help you better in your quest to decide what platforms are best suited for the purpose of your goal. In my case support has never been sucky, but on the contrary, rather helpful. They are a newer service and likely going through growing pains but carelessness has never been their approach. I do NOT work for Webflow but have certainly found this to be one of the better communities out there that is VERY supportive of the designer community.

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@tkister I’ll have to disagree completely! Support from the Webflow team is excellent! I’m on a Pro plan and if I email them, I hear back usually with in a day. There are video tutorials that walk you through creating a complete site and to my experience didn’t leave out anything http://help.webflow.com/courses/full-website-tutorials. There are courses about specific topics http://help.webflow.com/courses. Did you visit the support area and YouTube pages?
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCELSb-IYi_d5rYFOxWeOz5g
http://help.webflow.com/ .
There are live Webinars that you can participate in as well.

The documentation that was updated with the release of the CMS is super handy and covers most of the basics.

If you are looking for support on how to structure divs, content and such that is where you have to rely on the forums. It’s more skill support than product support. The forum is very active and collaborative…other users always seem to be willing to help and when the Webflow team chimes in on a topic they are truly interested in resolving reported issues.

I’ve been in other product forums where users basically have to spend hours convincing the developers that there really is an issue. Only to prove the issue exist and still not receive a fix.

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Hi I"m really sorry you feel this way, left alone with your issues. i checked your forum history, I didn’t really get the chance to help you, maybe not the right time or the right topic.

I can’t help, I have to say that I find the jugement about support undeserved at best. I can totally picture that you haven’t found answers to your issues, I can feel the frustration. I would like to say that what others have been writing about WF not unveiling plans and dates for CMS is not fair: no developer disclose those things, they’re too sensible.

So maybe you came at a not so good time to start with Webflow. Just around the unveiling of the CMS. It means everything has to be redone, all the tutorials, all the help files etc. Also, I see it, WF is recruiting quite steadily…; we keep seeing here new developers, new support team workers… they seem to have a fast growth and I’m sure they’re doing everything to address this.

And I’m sure it means a lot for Webflow people when you say you’re leaving. I don’t know what to say to make you stick around… I’m not working for Webflow so my real interrest in it is limited :smiley: But that would be great if you could see the good things as I see them. All I can say is I don’t think the support is terrible, at all, quite the opposite. And if you find the product good, if you can cope with the limitations, then you should maybe stick around. I reckon I have less need for the help files and videos than others, and I may not be realizing the truth in what you say. What I’m sure about is that they’re working on it, all the time, and it will improve.

Sorry to hear about the bad experience. Is there one blocking issue I could help you with?

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Well, I’ll be checking back in the future to see if things have improved, and I’m sure they will. I just don’t want to pay to be a guinea pig. (I’d gladly help for pay! :grinning: That’s my area of expertise, after all! – I’m a technical and instructional designer.)

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One final note: It’s essentially all about expectations. If you stated clearly in the pricing plan that email support only includes addressing bugs, and that all other issues must be dealt with in the forums (for which there is no guaranteed support, and the support people are not allowed to assist with forum posts on work time), then I would not have been frustrated – I would have known what I was paying for.

(And by the way, it’s super bad form to make people pay you to help you find and fix bugs.)

And to all the prospective customers for whom this post was initially intended: I’m really missing my Webflow. It’s quite an amazing tool. I just don’t want you thinking that support is something that it’s not.

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Hi @tkister,

This is the first time I speak out on this forum. I totally disagree with you on this topic. Webflow is a platform for Web- developpers and designers. So, some base is required to work with it.

I’m not a webdesigner (and won’t be), have no background on this at all, my English is not very good.

BUT with the fantastic :tada: help from members on this forum, many, many hours reading on the forum and tutorials, the great support of the webflowteam on email, I’ve managed to make my websites (with templates) with Webflow (my latest with some help).

Every single (stupid) question I posted here was answered patiently and correctly and was solved. When I got technical issues I was helped by email support very good.

This is my experience, and this is what I want to let know,

grtzzz Corine

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@tkister i agree with you. there is definitely room for improvement when it comes to support and the tutorials. i too encountered many of the obstacles you did. it isn’t a slight to the webflow team to point out the pain areas that we experience. if anything, i would hope they see it as a good thing…at least we care enough about the product to leave some form of feedback instead of just leaving. so thank you and hopefully at some point you will be able to come back!

edit: i do think the title of this post is a bit agitating though

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This is what I love about this community. You all shine a light on what we need to improve on. Without the feedback, we wouldn’t know which direction we should go or what to build next.

No product is perfect. But when a community comes together to make it better, great things happen for everyone. :smiley:

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@PixelGeek

Hopfully a pricing structure that is made for freelance/small businesses :smiley:

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We are reviewing pricing internally, but no ETA on a change yet.

As always, we hear the community and are very happy you’re all sticking with us as we grow this very young product. We’ll make it right. :wink:

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@tkister I understand your frustation and like @vincent suggested i also had the worst-case-scenario: I joined Webflow 1 week before the CMS was launched. I didn’t had any programming experience at the time and i really need to say: Some of the Tutorials are more for showing than for learning, but the community here @ Webflow is perfect in case you got a problem. Solely the replys show how dedicated the Community & Staff is and the weekly Webinars really help me.

I’m frustrated too sometimes but then i see (nearly) weekly updates & the effort these guys put into that programm, and this is what keeps me here.

PS: E-Mail Support was perfect for the billing issue i had! Thank’s again @PixelGeek :heart:

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I’m really glad my post inspired a lively discussion! :grinning:

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I’ve been a member since early beta and also enjoyed some gratuity in return for my help on the forums and feedback in the growth and evolution of the tool a season or two ago. I’ve also seen some growth in newcomers to the WF team and my perception is that some of them react as enforcers of the policy (technically it is their job) but before considering actually helping which can often lead to this feeling. The founders, I know for a fact, want to help, even outside of policy because they love creating a beautiful web and empowering others with the same passion. However, with any growth of a business, the core team cannot continue to be this involved with us and must hire outside help, that in reality, may not be as passionate in deciding when to bend the rules a bit in favor of the original dream.

My standing has always been from the sole freelancer point of view seeking the tools to improve my workflow without breaking the bank. Ultimately, I still use WF occasionally for mock-ups and refer clients when they really don’t need my help to build a fairly basic but beautiful website. The CMS is a huge leap forward but ultimately doesn’t deliver for me because I write too many one-off applications for clients that I could never achieve in WF without having server-side access. However, where WF still really shines for me is in front-end development and I really wish this part of the tool will eventually become free to all with unlimited exports. Making the paid plans really tailor to those that can live within the boundaries of the CMS, hosting, CDN, backups etc. which are all great things that tailor to folks that don’t need more. But the tool itself still has value even outside of those things and to designer/developers that don’t really want/need them.

For example, I’ll use the tool to build sites I could deploy and build my apps around while maybe reselling hosted plans to clients that don’t need custom apps. Additionally, I’d love to use WF in which I had free access to the html, css and javascript while in the editor because frankly, point and click and drag is so much slower than just writing the code I already know, but the framework of the tool still provides value to me. I still however can’t justify $16mo to click and drag what I can write on my own much faster once all the elements are in place. It doesn’t really save me enough time to be worth it and it all comes down to improving my workflow. Just my 2 cents.

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