Building a New Startup Marketing Website? We chose webflow.

At Prepared, we have gone through 5 different marketing sites. Checking out our historical websites on the Wayback Machine is a real throwback.

We started by building our first website in plain Javascript. 6 months later, we rewrote the website in Vue.js. Then got tired of writing real code and switched to SquareSpace. Then finally got annoyed at their inflexibility — landing on WebFlow back in late 2020.

I am extremely happy with this decision.

How did we make this decision?

When deciding anything related to build vs buy, we ask ourselves: What are you in the business of? If your marketing website is your core competency, building in house entirely may make sense.

For Prepared, our marketing website is not our product. Thus, we built it entirely in WebFlow. I built built the original website it in a total of 2.5 days with full responsiveness on all mobile devices. This isn’t the case just for Prepared, but many Pre-seed/Seed/Series A/Series B startups I’ve talked to.

The reason for WebFlow isn’t just the upfront building speed. I’m sure we could have built the website in React in just as much time. The benefits of WebFlow showed themselves as time went on, as we had to make updates, and as the team grew from 4→22.

Initial Benefits:

• Mobile responsiveness in minutes, not hours.
• Their graphics editor is super easy to work with to hyper-customize spacing on difference screen resolutions.
• Deployments handled with staging environment
• Enables rapid development of website and testing on mobile phones
• WebFlow Templates are amazing to kickstart off from (or copy from).
• Dynamic content make easy without having to hardcode or add an API.
• Simple animations made easier

Long Term Benefits

• Marketing teams can use their /?edit feature to add/edit content, swap images and change any text across the entire website (all without touching engineering)
• Any engineer you hire that knows web programing can contribute in hours.
• Once your startup has resources to hire out to do website updates, hiring contractor to take over all marketing site updates is super easy and cheap. They don’t need to be given access to Github, and can just be shared the account to Webflow.

Downsides:

• Can’t make complicated things easily. There is no ability to use frameworks like React. Everything is built in plain js + jquery.
• Only one person editing website at a time (they do support multiple content editors)
• Complex animations made harder (have to embed vanilla javascript)

If anyone would like a recommendation to our amazing WebFlow contractor, please reach-out to me anytime at neal @ prepared 911 (dot) com

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