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Webflow Lets Designers Create Websites Without Learning to Code

This article is more than 9 years old.

In 2012, brothers Sergie and Vlad Magdalin started Webflow as a way to empower designers to create custom websites without learning how to code. At the time, there were a several website builders available that also required no coding: Squarespace , Weebly, Strikingly, to name a few. The problem with them was that they were template driven, so you would need to choose a pre-built template and add some light customization on top of it. But most designers don't work that way, so the Magdalins created Webflow to offer designers and entrepreneurs alike a lot more flexibility in developing a website while using a familiar Photoshop-like visual interface.

In March 2013, they launched a prototype demo of Webflow that gained traction on Twitter and through the design community. Their success eventually lead to over 30,000 signups and a spot in Silicon Valley's top startup accelerator, YCombinator.

Webflow’s vision is to do the same thing for web design as tools like Blogger and WordPress did for personal publishing. Those tools completely took down technical barriers (previously you had to be a master of HTML and FTP to get your thoughts online) and opened up the world of publishing to orders of a magnitude of more people, and in the process transformed the web. Similarly, web design currently requires designers to be masters of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but the change is inevitable and Webflow plans to lead the charge.

I had a chance to catch up with Vlad Magdalin, co-founder of Webflow, to learn about the origins of Webflow, a new feature they released called Interactions, and what is in store for 2014.

Alexander Taub: Tell me more about how WebFlow's prototype demo took off in the community. Was it organic? Was there anything you saw that started the snowball of sign ups?

Vlad Magdalin: There was one critical lever that we pulled that caused a snowball of sign ups: we posted to Hacker News. The post almost immediately shot up as the top link, and stayed that way for over 12 hours. That drove close to 60K people to look at our demo, and had a significant long tail effect as people shared the link over the next few days (mostly via Twitter). In a nutshell, we were really fortunate to receive such a great reception on Hacker News, which amplified our exposure to the community.

Taub: Why should someone use WebFlow over the other options out there?

Magdalin: Webflow is perfect for designers and entrepreneurs who are looking for really precise control over their websites, but who are not thrilled about writing code. All existing drag-and-drop site builders (like Squarespace, Weebly, and Wix) fall short when it comes to customization or building something from scratch, because they force you to pick one of their pre-defined templates and somehow jam your content to fit their design. Webflow has a bigger learning curve, but it offers much more flexibility - so pretty much any web design can be implemented using our editor. It also makes it dead easy to publish your work on the web, unlike most desktop-based web design apps (like Dreamweaver, Macaw, etc.) which still ask designers to deal with deployment via FTP.

Also, Webflow is built specifically for the new age of responsive web design, so a design created for desktops can easily be molded and tweaked to look great on tablets and mobile phones.

Taub: You just released Website Interactions. How do you expect people to use this?

Magdalin: Our new Interactions feature gives designers the power to create effects and animations using a visual builder, sidestepping the usual requirement to work with JavaScript and jQuery to achieve the same thing. There are many real-world use cases that this new feature enables:

- Fading in a differently-styled navigation bar once the page is scrolled past some threshold

- Applying a subtle animation on page sections and elements to draw a viewer's attention

- Hide/show sidebars and other elements based on click and hover events

With Interactions, designers now have the ability to ditch the text editor for most basic interactions and effects, and moves Webflow closer to being a one-stop solution for web design.

Taub: Once the technical barrier is broken down for website building, what do you think entrepreneurs will accomplish?

Magdalin: I believe that empowering non-programmers to create websites (and web applications) visually will lead to a new renaissance on the web, similar to what we saw over a decade ago when blogging graduated past writing code and manually uploading to an FTP server. Entrepreneurs will be able to create MVPs by themselves in mere hours, instead of having to hire programmers to do it for them. Designers will be able to focus much more of their time on the things that matter (content, presentation, usability) instead of writing code just to get a design to look right. Product managers and marketers will be able to make changes to a live application without waiting for the development team. In a nutshell, we'll be doing much less busy work, and much more work that matters.

As an anecdote, Andrew Mason once told me that he built the entire first version of Groupon .com using an old version of a visual database builder (FileMaker Pro) - a product that was never intended to build multi-billion-dollar web applications. However, because it was purely visual and more approachable than code, Andrew was able to create the entire minimum viable product very quickly, and test it out in the market. Because Webflow is built specifically for the web, it has the potential to give entrepreneurs similar superpowers - so they'll be able to create real solutions that solve real problems, all without involving a team of programmers.

Taub: What does the rest of 2014 look like for WebFlow?

Magdalin: For the rest of 2014, we're focusing all of our attention on moving Webflow past being a static website builder, and into the much more interesting world of dynamic content. That involves working on a completely reimagined content management system, something that we think will change the way most future websites will be created. We're not ready to reveal many details about this project yet, but it's something that has to be seen to be believed.