Webflow has secured $76m in funding, are we going to see any improvements in your dev team?

When I read some of the comments I smile because I’ve faced similar problems with website software. Once you get comfortable with something then, suddenly and unexpectedly, something changes and you are forced a few steps backward. It sucks. I was using a drag and drop website builder and got pretty good with it. Then other problems appeared and I asked for the company to look at it and told them what I needed. That didn’t turn out as I expected.

I’m now using templates that I convert into websites for my clients. It’s much slower because I have to get to grips with some coding and CSS. I also understand that the guys at Webflow are doing their best to improve things for you. I’ve found that there is no magic wand when it comes to creating websites and often you have to get to learn new things - I am still learning every day.

The only way forward for me is to sacrifice some of my time to learning more about coding and also practicing regularly so that I can master things that were impossible in the past. What I see in Webflow amazes me. My software can’t match their capabilities. I have to figure things out for myself. So, be happy with what you can do and give them a break.

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Hi :star_struck:

I used WordPress since more than 10 years, honestly Webflow allow me to produce website at light speed! I am very happy to really work at all design point directly, not wasting too much time to install the CMS, test plugins, bla bla bla :crazy_face:

Yes some basic functions are missing, but the tool is growing …
I am patiently waiting updates :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

I hope Webflow will be more important and be available in french (for some users and clients) and will be iPad compatible :crazy_face:

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Here’s another shining example of the frustration we’re talking about:

A potentially critical bug that loads in hundreds of kilobytes of unwanted and unused fonts without telling the user why - potentially slowing the site initial load by 30 per cent - and instead of it being fixed after a year from the bug was reported, it’s being referred to as a “feature”, flying in the face of their own published “best practises” post about the issue. That’s simply not acceptable from a serious product like Webflow.

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This is my post (i forgot this hh).

This is why, sometimes when I find a bug or issue I feel like it’s a waste of time to report this issue on Webflow forum (or as a wishlist idea/feature).

For example, a lot of my clients adds mega-size images to blog posts or collections (There is no way to really address this issue = Decrease site speed).

Any point to add feature request of some Editor upload images manager - Compress, Optimize images tool (Useful for 99.999% of the clients and even for devs) -or- even minimal validator (Some way to send error when clients adding 4000px width image). The short answer is NO.

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Hey everyone, I am the CEO of Webflow, and I wanted to personally respond here to the original post and to some of the replies.

No, this is not me saying that anything that is on the wishlist should be made by Webflow. It’s asking you to actually respond to what the community is saying (which can be by implementing these features, or simply by acknowledging them - the most popular items I am referring to, not every single request.

@liamemery You’re right – we need to do a better job of being transparent and accurate on our Wishlist. I won’t make any excuses, it’s a fact that we can do better here.

The original intent with the Wishlist was to provide this kind of transparency and give our community a voice into our product development process. As we grew, we faced more challenges trying to build more ambitious features that were often much more complex than before, given these features had to work on top of existing functionality. As a result, some had to be deprioritized after we had initially marked them as “In Development” on the Wishlist. We saw how disappointing this was for our community, and so we started erring on the side of caution and only updating the status once we were basically ready for launch. One recent example is actually something you listed that the community has been waiting for: nested collection lists. This feature was actually in development over the last 6 months and recently shipped (woo!). However, it was categorized (rather inaccurately) as “In Backlog” the entire time. Another example that @Fonsume mentioned was coupons for Ecommerce, which is now available in beta.

However, it’s clear that there are better ways to communicate these kinds of setbacks without limiting transparency for our community and valued customers. Our thriving community has expanded exponentially over the last several years, and so have expectations for what we should build next. While we want to live up to those expectations, we hope our community recognizes that building such a powerful product for such a diverse audience will also come with tradeoffs – and there will be times when we’ll need to prioritize some long-term investments that might not be at the very top of the Wishlist.

Speaking of long term investments, I want to address the funding topic mentioned in the subject of this thread. We primarily raised additional capital in order to ensure Webflow’s longevity for decades (and we’re especially glad to have done so in times of uncertainty like today). We don’t plan to deploy even the majority of that capital immediately – we’re still focusing on thoughtfully growing our team and our business to ensure that everyone relying on Webflow will have ultimate confidence that we’ll always be around and always keep improving. Our (awesome and supportive) investors have functionally zero control of our business, all the speculation about acquisition or decay is simply unfounded – I think I’m at risk of sounding like a broken record at this point in assuring you all that we’re in this for the long haul.

So… next steps. Luckily, Webflow’s product development and roadmap definition process is maturing quite a bit lately, so this is a timely conversation. We recently had Jiaona Zhang join our team as our VP of Product, and we’ve been working hard to get laser focused on not only working on the products/improvements that will be most impactful (which includes “invisible” investments like performance improvements that don’t come with fancy launch announcements), but also doing a much better job in keeping you all informed of how things are going.

While our team has been very active in informing everyone about what we’ve been shipping, we will do a better job of providing updates on what things are in flight on the Wishlist. You will soon start to see much more accurate and active updates on there. One small teaser is that for “user login and membership functionality” (the top rated item on there), we are already in very active development with internal goals to ship the first set of functionality within the next 2 quarters. We’re still figuring out how to best provide that information on the Wishlist, so please bear with us.

I know there is a lot mentioned in this thread, and I wanted to make sure you knew that I read every word. While I can’t address every point that was brought up, I hope you take away this main point on the original post – we need to a much better job of increasing transparency and accuracy on the Wishlist, and we will.

(Since this thread has gone in so many directions and it’s hard to keep track of all the topics here, I’m going to lock it after my response.)

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