Blogging with Webflow
I decided to use Webflow for our development blog. I’d never used it before, but I had done some research comparing it to Wordpress for building and maintaining standard marketing & content sites.
It’s mostly been a very positive experience. Compared to Wordpress, there was zero setup required before I could start making pages, and I could essentially design each page any way that I wanted.
I did stumble a bit, so I wanted to share what I learned.
Webflow University is great.
Webflow offers hours of free video courses, and I would strongly recommend watching them. They are chock full of useful explanations and tips, and they are quick and often humorous. The videos are broken up into specific sections, but everyone should start with the Webflow 101 crash course.
Browse the courses at Webflow University.
Blogging? Use the Webflow CMS.
I debated whether I wanted to use the CMS for these posts, because it limits what you can do with the page layout. But there are too many benefits to it. One you create a CMS “collection”, Webflow automatically creates a template page for that collection – which you can customize however you want – and the data from each post will be plugged in on that post’s route. If you didn’t use the CMS, you’d have to manually manage each blog post as an individual page layout. Gross.
I ended up simply creating a “posts” collection and an “authors” collection, and linking them together.
Blogging? Write your posts in a word processor first.
Yeah, I just told you how great the CMS is... But here’s the thing. The “rich text editor”, where you will enter your post content, works best when you paste preformatted content into it. It’ll even handle headers, inline images, and the like. Writing the post inside the Webflow CMS is much more painful than using a word processor and copying the content over when you’re ready to publish.
(If you were wondering, I’m currently writing this post in Google Docs.)
Hacks not included.
Even though writing content in Webflow is easy and fast, it’s not perfect. Sometimes you just need to make a little tweak and the GUI just can’t meet your needs. However, there is a community of people sharing smart hacks and workarounds every day. Like most developers, I’m not a huge fan of hacks, but for something like a simple dev blog, I just need a quick solution..
So, how is it going?
Overall I’m satisfied with Webflow so far. It takes some getting used to, but it definitely aligns with our objectives of getting a decent content site up and running quickly so we can begin to create a dialogue with our users.