MBA1349 Should You Build Your Website with Webflow?

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The other reason why I wanted to do this episode is that my buddy Wes Bush, the author of Product Led Growth, loved that book, asked on Twitter should he build his business website with WordPress or webflow? Now this is a bit of my background. For those who don't know. I started my business career by building people their own personal websites and my platform of choice was WordPress. And I know my way around WordPress very well. I've built websites, I've built themes, I customized them, I know how it works. And when I answered that question on Twitter I kind of gave him a blanket answer like the pros and cons of WordPress and webflow. But I wasn't satisfied with my own answer. So I started looking into webflow. Now I've seen Webflow before. I kind of checked it out about a couple years ago, but it's changed and grown a lot in the last few years. Now, in today's episode, I'm going to talk about why you would choose webflow over any other website builder, whether it's Squarespace or Weebly. Now, that doesn't say that it's better than these other options. Tools are just tools. You gotta find the tool that works for your job, what you're trying to pull off, what you're trying to do and with the resources you have. This is not a sponsored episode and webflow has no idea I'm doing this, but I just want to share the research I found by looking into webflow and what that research has led me to do in the future of our business. We're going to take a deep dive on your choices when it comes to creating your business website and why you would choose webflow. So let's get into it. Let's. Let's get down to business. I want to start by saying that creating a website could be a thing that you could do over the weekend. It could take months. It all depends on your needs and what you need to get done for your business website. So I want to start with the type of website that you may want to build. The options. Okay. Because if your website is not in need of the functionality that webflow gives you, then there's no need for you to go down that road. So I kind of want to rule out who webflow is not for. If you're going to build a website to have a presence online, a site that's not really going to change much. It's sort of like your calling card. Whether you're a speaker and you want to kind of put your information, your bio, how to contact you, and you want to have a simple website, maybe some videos to put up of your keynote speeches. You may want to update it once in a while, but it's not something you're going to really change or redesign or add to frequently. You don't need webflow because it's going to be a lot of work for something you don't need. And I'll explain what a lot of work means, what I mean by that. Number two, if your website doesn't get a lot of traffic, meaning people only really go to your site unless you give them your business card or they see you on social and they look up your website and you're not playing an SEO game, meaning that you have like a great blog and content marketing as a part of your strategy. Then really webflow is not going to be for you because its superpowers really are not going to serve you Again, I'll talk about those superpowers in a moment. The third thing is if you have an E commerce store where you're selling actual items that get delivered to people, webflow is not a horrible option. They have an E commerce option and they actually just launched it recently. But it's not as full fledged as something like Shopify or Weebly or even Squarespace. So the idea of inventory and units and stocks and multiple items on a shopping cart and all that kind of stuff, you're probably best to go with a Shopify website or a WordPress site that has a great shopping cart or theme. So if your website is any of those three low traffic, very simple sort of a portfolio website, when I say portfolio, I mean like people are going to go there just to check you out or your E Commerce. I would go with a different option. I would either go with WordPress. If you like to have a little bit of functionality, you want to customize the themes, things like that, you want to add some plugins, or you would go with something like a Squarespace, like a Weebly. I really like Weebly, they were a former sponsor of ours and we really think they're a great tool. If you go to weebly.com mba you can get a special offer, but it's a really good product with a good price. Or of course Shopify, which is a huge, huge player in the E commerce game. Now if you are a SaaS business, if you're a business that is going to get a lot of traffic to your website, when I say a lot, I'm talking about over a hundred thousand visitors a month. If you want to design your own site, if you're a designer and you want to design your own site from scratch or get a designer to do that, then webflow is probably one of your best options. Let me explain why webflow is different or how it's different. Most website builders or platforms like WordPress, you start off with a theme and you customize that theme and you're kind of boxed in within that theme. Same goes with your blog. You kind of got to use the layout they give you and you just put in the content, you put in the images, you put in the words and you just got to be happy with that theme. That's generally how any website builder works. Now of course you can get themes built for you, a custom theme, but that's an additional cost. And even when you have that custom theme, you can't change that theme so easily. You have to go back to the developer and say, hey, I actually want to change the way the layout is for this or that or the other thing. Webflow does away with all of that. You're basically working with a flexible canvas. You could do pretty much anything when it comes to the design of your website. The way it looks. You could change the way it looks on the fly. And basically I would say it's like Photoshop for web development. It codes automatically based on what you design and they have a pretty easy layout to play with. Now I say pretty easy because it's not dead easy and you drag and drop a few elements to build your website. Now, having said that, webflow is not the easiest software to use. If you do not know any code, if you don't know any HTML, you don't know any CSS and you're not willing to learn how to code, just know a little bit to know your way around it, then this is not the tool for you. Now, if you're willing to learn, you can actually pick up the basics enough so you can be a master at webflow and nail your HTML and CSS skills pretty quickly, maybe in a couple of weekends. And one of the biggest advantages of webflow is webflow University. Basically they have tutorials on every single thing, including a bit of HTML and css, so you can work around it. Now, I want to be clear, you don't have to be a coder, you don't have to be a developer to use this. You really need to, don't even need to be a designer. Why? Because there are tons of developers and designers that will work within webflow. They know the platform, it's so friendly to designers and developers, I should say more designers, because there's really no development going on. Your design gets coded automatically. And what's awesome about webflow is that the code is actually pretty good. It's very good, actually. Now why is this important? Because usually with restricted Website builders and WordPress in particular, the code is a little bit of a jumble. And bad code or messy code doesn't do well on the Internet, meaning that it's slower, it doesn't rank as well on SEO, and the experience for the visitor is not the best. So the way I would describe webflow is that it's a middle ground between a website builder and building your website from scratch with a developer and a designer and all that kind of stuff. Now, if you're a company and you're like, hey, I am not going to touch my website. I'm not going to design it myself. I'm going to hire somebody to do this. Should I use webflow? The answer is yes, you can get somebody to do all that for you in webflow. And it's actually a lot less expensive than getting somebody to design and develop a website yourself or from scratch, I should say. So you can hire someone to design your website and to implement it, I should say in webflow, not code it, because there's no real coding going on and you can duplicate those pages and it's easy kind of to manipulate and change things on the pages once it's all built out for you. Same thing goes with your blog posts and things like that. Now you might be wondering, hey, Omar, you said you have to know a little bit HTML and css. If there's no coding involved, what's the deal with that? Well, what you really need to understand is how everything works. The structure, the logic of putting the pages together. And webflow does a fantastic job, uh, walking you through that with instructional videos. I actually watch about 10 of their videos and I was blown away about how well done they are, how funny they are and entertaining and how it actually walks you by the hand, even if you're just a beginner. So if you want to change things, even if you have somebody, you hired somebody to design it and implement it on webflow. If you want to change things and move things around, it's good to know your way around HTML and CSS because you're going to play around with some values, to change colors, to change fonts, change alignment, all that kind of stuff. Webflow has very little restrictions. The biggest advantages of webflow is that it's super fast and pages load so, so quickly. Number two, the flexibility of your design. Basically you could dream up anything. It's going to work perfectly and look perfectly and it's going to be very flexible for you to change in the future. Third, their blog is very flexible. You could change the design of the blog very easily. You can customize it again lightning fast. What they call the CMS is basically the blogging. So who do I recommend this for? I recommend it for somebody who one really wants to get into web development. Maybe it's something that you want to get into as a hobby or get your mind around and you want to see yourself doing that in the future a little bit in your website and you have the time for it. Webflow is fantastic. It's a great middle ground and it's going to teach you the fundamentals of web design as well as implementation. Number two, if you are a bigger business with more traffic and you want a professional website that's not going to be slow or get bogged down by a framework like WordPress, Webflow is fantastic. It's got an incredible reputation. Third, I didn't mention, if you want something that's totally encompassing, meaning that it takes care of your hosting and your domain and everything is under one roof, webflow is fantastic. Now, I have to say that webflow is actually designed for web developers. People actually create websites for a living for their clients, but they actually realized, hey, there's a lot of business owners that may want to use it for their business. So they started making sure that they cater for that market. And by the way, you don't have to start from scratch or you don't have to start with a custom design from a designer. There are templates that they sell that you can modify and they actually teach you how to modify their templates. Again, tutorials are great and hilarious. So, in summary, Webflow is something that between a custom website and a WordPress site or a website builder. Now, why would you want that middle ground? Well, one, you want the customization and you want the pixel perfectness of the design that you want and you want to be able to change it on the fly. That's the side of a custom website. And then two, you want the flexibility to be able to manage things yourself. You want to be able to jump in and add a new blog post. It's easy. You don't have to get your developer or designer or whatever to do it for you. So you could do it, or whoever's on your team can do it. So it allows you to manage your content yourself. You can make some changes. You can add a page, you can make a landing page to test a marketing initiative. So it has kind of the best of two worlds, and it's getting better every day.

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All right. Do I recommend webflow? Well, if you take what I said in today's lesson into context, in your own business. I do recommend it. I think it's a very, very powerful tool. And it's, in my opinion, where web development is going, where you just design it and you implement it and that's it. There's really very little coding and messing around. I also like the fact that I don't have to mess around with plugins and all this other mumbo jumbo that you have to deal with with WordPress and updating the software and hacks. You know, WordPress gets hacked a lot, unfortunately. And that's why it's so important to have a good host that will make sure that you're hack free. And webflow kind of takes care of that. I kind of like that. Now, will I be using webflow? Well, I've done a lot of extensive research on webflow and it's something we're really considering because we're going to redesign our own website at Webinar Ninja. This is our sales site and the blog. And we're looking for something that is exactly what webflow is. And, and we're very close to making that decision, saying, yes, webflow will be our platform. We're going to start using webflow. But having said that, when and if we move to webflow, we will be hiring somebody to implement it for us. So we have a designer in house with Webinar Ninja and we would hire somebody who is an expert at webflow implementation, who take our designs of every page on our website and our blog and implement it for us. And that way we can just duplicate pages, modify pages on the fly. We don't want to deal with the learning curve because to be honest with you, I just don't have the time to implement it myself. Now, there's a difference between implementing a website design and modifying it. I could definitely modify because I do have HTML and CSS knowledge, enough knowledge to be able to modify things. I've played around with webflow. I actually designed half of the homepage that we currently have just to see how easy it is to reproduce something. And I was like blown away by how simple it is and how fast it is to implement some things. So I'm very much sold. And if we find the right person to implement our designs, we are going to move to webflow. Now you might be wondering why. Well, we are getting bigger as a company at Webinar Ninja. We're getting more traffic to our website. We need our site to be faster, more responsive, and it's a good time to switch because we're redesigning anyway. Now, you might be asking, what about the price? Honestly, the price is not actually an issue. Webflow is pretty affordable if you count what you would have to pay with WordPress or with any other website builder. It's very comparable. Just depends on your needs. Because again, with WordPress, even though WordPress itself is free, you gotta pay for hosting, you gotta pay for the theme, you gotta pay for any kind of customization you need. So at the end of the day, webflow ends up being pretty much the same price as any other option. It's just the upfront investment that it would take if you're gonna hire somebody to implement the site design for you. Now, if you have some time on your hands, you have somebody on your staff that could do it, you could definitely implement it yourself, they can learn it and do it. It's not that hard. It's not rocket science. They have great training. But we're a little bit in a rush and we would just rather have somebody do it and do it right as soon as possible. Well, there you have it, guys. That's my lesson for today. Check out webflow.com, watch their videos, check out what they offer. I think it's something worth considering if you're looking to build your own business website. Now, at the start of the episode, I told you that, you know, Westbush told me, hey, what do you think I should do? WordPress or Webflow? At the time I answered that question, I said, hey, probably WordPress is your best option, but I'm actually gonna have a chat with him, a video call soon. And after doing all this research and, you know, doing this episode, I'm gonna hear a little bit more about his needs and I may recommend to him what flows. Well, it's a great option if you're looking for something between a custom website and a website builder. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. But before that, I want to leave you with this. Whenever you have to choose a tool for your business, think about your needs. Think about the maintenance, think about what's going to save you time and get the job done. If it fulfills your needs, go with that tool. But does it efficiently go with that tool? If you don't have the resources to hire somebody to implement this site on webflow, or you don't have the time to do it, then maybe webflow is not for you right now. A website builder will be fine. Squarespace, Weebly, WordPress, that could suit your needs. And then when your business grows and you have the ability to hire for it. Go for it, make the switch if it works for you and meets your needs. Thank you so much. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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