
Webflow (YC S13) Lets You Design Responsive Websites Visually, Publish Instantly - callmevlad
http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/05/webflow-lets-you-design-responsive-websites-visually-publish-instantly-when-youre-done/
======
callmevlad
(Co-founder here.)

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.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499)

~~~
ebahnx
Congrats to Vlad and team! I haven't been this excited about a startup in a
long time. Webflow has re-invented responsive web design.

~~~
tadmilbourn
Totally agree with ebahnx. I've got rudimentary HTML/CSS knowledge that I
picked up in high school, but it was enough to know my way around Webflow.
Built a responsive site (which I don't have anywhere close to the skills to do
myself) in about 4 hours.

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Dystopian
I'm a designer and developer - love the idea of both WebFlow and Macaw are up
to.

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.

~~~
callmevlad
Completely understand your concern. However, a couple of points to clarify:

\- 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.

~~~
clarkevans
I don't think your post addressed Dystopian's question: as I understand, your
organization keeps not only your compiler proprietary but even the source code
(preferred data structures for making changes) for your clients' websites
(their flows, templates, etc.).

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".

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yesimahuman
> There aren’t many competitors for a service like this

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.

~~~
callmevlad
Hey Max, you're totally right. Responsive Web Design is exploding, and it's
great to see so much action in this space.

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nchuhoai
I loved what you were showing a while ago a lot, but I have my issues with the
current iteration:

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.

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ereckers
This isn't your father's PageMill.

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.

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ececconi
I was considering using Jetstrap for a new project that I'm going to do after
I finish up the Startup Engineering course by Coursera. I'm interested in
using this instead afterwards.

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.

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joeblau
I love the design and the concept of the site as well as others in this space
like jetstrap, easel, and divshot. To be honest, I've tried a few of these
offerings and as a web developer this is not what I want, I'm looking for two
things:

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...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=PUv66718DII&t=153)

[2] - [http://livecoding.io/](http://livecoding.io/)

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woah
1\. Any static site generator with livereload. Try Docpad or Middleman.

~~~
joeblau
Wow! Thanks for the livereload link, I'm definitely going to implement this. I
know people have been complaining about HN lately but it's contributors like
you who continue to enlighten me with new tools that I love about this
community.

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swalsh
At first I was like, this is cool... but there's not a whole lot of new value
here that makes changing how I work worth it. Then it allowed me to switch
between mobile platforms, and desktop, and I was like "oh, hey i would use
that"

So nice work. The core still needs some work but there's a lot of potential.

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gbrits
I'd use this for prototyping mostly. What would really rock (no single tool
exists that does this afaik) is to be able to do color-experiments and see
changes reflected immediately.

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 :)

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elclanrs
I see the potential of these kind of applications, it's a killer product for
their target audience. But I can't see how this would fit in my WordPress
workflow to be honest.

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.

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nodefortytwo
What I really want to see out of one of these apps is a way to support
partials within other pages. It would be awesome to design my whole SPA within
a tool like this and then export it in a uniformed way which I could then tie
into angular, ember, a cms or whatever workflow I am using.

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.

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pbhjpbhj
The pricing for extra domains seems weird to me - it's more for the extra ones
($19) than for the original 3 (49/3 ~= $16).

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outericky
I hear their home page was built using their own product. So that says
something right there. Looking forward to trying it.

~~~
coherentpony
> ©2013 Webflow, Inc. This page was built in Webflow (duh).

Yep.

~~~
thesergie
Sure was! Click on the "Play with Demo" button at the top of the page and
you'll be able to edit the Webflow homepage in Webflow.

~~~
coherentpony
I know :) I've been part of their beta programme. I love this product. It's
exactly what I need to design a quick website without needing to: a) learn
html and css; and b) deal with another human being.

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uxabhishek
Well designed and very powerful product for my use case. Had to throw a
responsive landing page quickly and Webflow made the job so much easier. I
kept iterating on my page design using your tool (I was going off a really
rough mock) and kept losing my iterations :) but in the end it worked out
quite well.

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goronbjorn
How does this compare to Macaw: [http://macaw.co/](http://macaw.co/)

~~~
callmevlad
We love Macaw, and the early preview looks amazing! Can't wait to play with
the final version. That said, it looks like it is much more similar to Adobe
Edge Reflow, but with a more intuitive interface.

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.

~~~
woah
Your product is really awesome, but it sounds like you are going down a bad
path. Playing around with it, I love how it is a good replacement for
photoshop, built with the web in mind (classes are crucial so that I don't
have to go and change every element every time I make a small change). Haven't
used it on a real project yet, but I am planning to. At that point I will
probably export out the design and then finish it in code.

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.

~~~
callmevlad
Great point. "Down the line" is quite relative, by the way. Right now, we are
very fanatical about improving our designer interface, and we'll see where
things go from there.

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asnyder
This looks good, though am curious as to how this compares to Adobe Edge
Reflow?
[http://html.adobe.com/edge/reflow/](http://html.adobe.com/edge/reflow/)

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dhruvbhatia
Congrats on the launch guys- looks like a solid product! Can you discuss the
tech stack you used for those of is that are curious?

~~~
brryant
Certainly: a node + mongo stack, and the designer was built using knockout.js

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michaeltsai
Congratulations to Vlad and the team. They are very friendly and dedicated,
and I look forward to their success

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gt5050
Firefox (19.0.2) shows this error on the demo page

"This browser does not have native cryptography support :("

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joshbaptiste
hmm.. I get "Your browser is too small. Please resize your window to fit this
media query." in the demo Chrome 29/Opera 12.14

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WhitneyLand
Just zoom out in your browser - Ctrl minus on Windows or Command minus on
Mac...

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relaxitup
On the free plan you can only have 3 projects/websites. Is that at a time or
in total ever?

~~~
callmevlad
At a time :)

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relaxitup
Cool, so essentially your free tier rocks.. Will have to try it out.

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WasimBhai
Vlad, Webflow says my browser screen is too small. I am using Firefox 22.0.

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pbreit
Chrome recommended. Widen your browser window and the message should go away.

~~~
PommeDeTerre
Isn't the whole point of "responsive web design" to provide a good experience
across a wide range of browsers and devices, without the user having to do
anything special?

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.

~~~
tzury
Well, the output is responsive indeed.

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.

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smrtinsert
Drag and drop builders have been here since day 1. Good luck to the team, they
will need it. Personally I think there's more value in strong forms like
tumblr, wordpress, twitter. No one _really_ likes options.

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josephpmay
This could be great for teaching how CSS works.

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dpweb
Congrats.. That is one nice looking webapp.

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bostonvaulter2
Can this be easily exported to Wordpress?

