Webflow (YC S13) Lets You Design Responsive Websites Visually, Publish Instantly
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
138 days ago, we posted a Show HN [1], and the feedback was so massively encouraging that we doubled down on building the best possible responsive design platform imaginable. Thank you HN for playing such a big part in the first chapter of our young company.
I can see how this can be a huge time saver for me on the front-end - even if just another level of high-fidelity mockups (vs. production).
I find it really hard to justify dropping the money and then my time if I'm working through a web-based cloud service though (vs. a desktop app - even like the ones that call home like Creative Cloud).
We've seen a lot of web-based essential services go out of business. If I've mocked up 100 sites in WebFlow, the company goes out of business, and suddenly I don't have those resource files - it would be an even larger loss to me than any amount of money I had paid to purchase the software.
worse case scenario you have to go back to hand coding.
- Webflow is meant for production site implementation, so your actual "source" files would be on your computer (in Photoshop, etc). You'd still need to use PS to slice images, optimize them, etc - we're not trying to replace Photoshop wholesale, just improve the workflow around the actual creation of the live site (something for which Photoshop was never intended).
- All your work completed in Webflow (to implement the initial design, and make it responsive), can be easily exported to a full HTML/CSS/JS bundle that can be run hosted anywhere you wish. A good practice could be to download completed sites and archive them in source control as a contingency.
While use of the compiled output of your service may be a fallback, it's certainly not a good contingency. In particular, wouldn't consider the complied output "source code" any more than I'd consider assembler language output "source code".
Very false. This space has started to see a lot of action (Over 10 high quality products come to mind, one of them another YC company) and will only continue to. It's going to be interesting to see how it all plays out (disclaimer: my company has products somewhat in this space).
Congrats to Webflow though, it's a great product.
I would like to add them to the StartHQ SaaS directory, if they're not there already: https://starthq.com/apps/?category=creative
I envisioned it as a way to integrate it into my current workflow, instead of it being a completely seperate and independent webpublishing platform. As it currently stands, it feels like a slightly more design-ish squarespace with the kicker of responsive design. Nothing impossible to do with squarespace.
All you can do (at the moment) really is to set up some nice looking static sites, but the moment you want anything more interactive or custom features, you are out in the dark. Like I can't even enter the store on the second example on the landing page.
Just my two cents.
It always seemed that this should be the logical way to go, but for some reason I've never really seen these things stick around (at least in my personal experience). Is it a matter of chasing trends/technology?
Looks slick. I owe it to myself to give it a whirl and keep an eye on its adoption.
I still don't know how to implement backend code with a front end website, but I'm sure this wouldn't be a problem considering the code is exportable.
Great work, I played with the demo for a while and I really like it.
1. An editor like the one Bret Victor talked about in his "Inventing on Principle" talk[1]. I want to edit HTML and CSS and see updates reflected in real time[2].
2. A way to hook this into a DVCS (Or better yet, a desktop application/desktop plugin). My development workflow relies heavily on Git and I don't think I'm going to download a zip payload and extract it every time I need to do a commit.
[1] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=PUv...
[2] - http://livecoding.io/
So nice work. The core still needs some work but there's a lot of potential.
What I mean with this is that normally (as we all know) we design from a pretty strict color palette. Text, backgrounds, spotcolor, linkcolor, even gradient begin end endpoints. You get the point. In a tool like Webflow, all the links between the color-palette and the code that uses a particular color from that palette are known. In other words: the position of a color in the palette determines the way in which this color is applied in the design, this stays the same between different palettes.
IMO it would be great if you could input different color-palettes (by your own design, cycling through kuler variations, etc.) and have the design automatically reflect that.
Just a suggestion :)
I tried the demo and the interface looks great but I feel restricted. My process usually begins in Inkscape. I build all the layouts in vector and once I have a good idea of how they should look like I grab my WordPress boilerplate folder and build the theme from scratch; no static first, just dynamic as I go. They're not complete themes though, just what's needed for the given project.
So yeah, great product, looks good, but I won't use it. I had the same thoughts about Adobe Reflow. Tried it, liked it, maybe for a static portfolio site but other than won't be useful.
Personally I don't want the design tool to make those assumptions around what my infrastructure might be, although clearly this particular tool is aimed at non-tech users.
Yep.
They are suspiciously similar.
With Webflow, we're looking to build a more comprehensive hosted platform that allows designers to create production websites and actually deploy them live. Down the line, this means that content management, functional web forms, eCommerce integration, and a variety of other things are possible out of the box, without the need to export code and change it manually. Even simple things for programmers like script compression/concatenation and CDN acceleration (all of which happen after the design phase) are hard for many designers to set up, so we want to take as many headaches away as possible so designers can get back to work.
Your plans to compete with every CMS out there, plus Shopify sound like a world of pain. I would love to see you guys stick to your core product and make it awesome without taking on that gargantuan task.
Luckily for me, there is a bunch of competition in the space if you guys slip up.
"This browser does not have native cryptography support :("
Having to switch browsers (from a very modern version of a very capable and very widely used browser, no less!) and having to manually resize the browser window merely to view the site is not what I'd consider a good experience in any way.
The "native cryptography support" error that some of us are getting with quite modern browsers isn't very encouraging, either.
These techniques are forcing the user to be responsive to the website's deficiencies, rather than the website being properly responsive to the capabilities of the user's browser and device. This is "responsiveness" in all the wrong ways.
The build tool needs more screen space than iPhone/Android can offer (left and right columns + content editing in the middle), hence it make a perfect sense to "force" you to use a larger viewport.