Webflow

Most businesses today need to have an online presence. Limited resources and small teams can make it difficult for small businesses to build great websites while staying focused on their core business. Through its low-code platform, Webflow alleviates these constraints by making website creation accessible to everyone.

Webflow is an all-in-one tool built for quick iteration and website building. The tool is built to reflect changes immediately, with a designer interface enabling you to easily bring to life and regularly update a website.

The platform offers a wide variety of templates tailored for various use cases (e.g., landing pages, e-commerce, dynamic sites). When looking to build your online presence quickly as a small business owner, choosing one of these templates can be an effective way to increase your visibility at a relatively low time and cost investment.

Building Attractive Sites without Code

Webflow offers the ability to build rich interactions for customers visiting your site. If your team doesn't have a member who can code or budget capacity for outsourcing, you can learn from tutorials on Webflow University. Building your site yourself may be more time consuming, but it could be a good option for those interested in developing these skills. You may also consider hiring a Webflow expert to build a website for your business at a reasonable rate, and then handle basic ongoing maintenance on your own.

Webflow offers the ability to create complex designs as well as implement a powerful CMS (Content Management System), streamlining the addition, editing, and delivery of all content. One key feature of Webflow is that designs and templates are responsive (e.g., adaptable on any device) out of the box. 

Importantly, Webflow offers accessibility controls to allow for building sites that can be easily used by audiences with disabilities. These functionalities allow people using assistive technologies (e.g., screen readers, speech recognition software) to fully interact with Webflow sites.

For small businesses, focusing on inclusivity and accessibility from the first iteration of your website is both a time saver and a way to build trust with potential customers visiting your site.

Hosting, Scalability & Security

Small companies may sometimes choose to host websites themselves. However, self-hosting is only a realistic solution if you have dedicated experts to manage said hosting. It can be challenging and time consuming to configure, update, and automate the hosting of a website. Self-hosting also implies purchasing and configuring domains, which requires a certain level of infrastructure knowledge.

For most small businesses, it is better to rely on the hosting solutions provided by the website building tool used. Webflow offers the ability to host and deliver the website within its tooling. This hosting will scale automatically as your company grows. Webflow also provides a worldwide CDN (Content Delivery Network) to ensure worldwide site reachability.

Security is an integral part of building a professional website. Webflow delivers secure sites within their hosting plan by default, allowing you to focus only on design and content. Sensitive information and processes (e.g., payments) are seamlessly integrated with Webflow through third party services.

• E-commerce: While e-commerce is achievable with Webflow, its solution may feel limited compared to other leaders in the low-code website builder space. Webflow has some limitations in terms of payment and shipping as compared to more specialized platforms like Shopify. Shopify supports a wider array of payment options and third-party integrations and is more customizable, making it a better fit for building an advanced online shopping experience. If your business is centered on e-commerce, it may be preferable to choose an alternative to Webflow.
• Need for deep customization: If you have developers in your team and the desire to implement custom code on your site, it may be better to invest in building from scratch. As a low-code platform, Webflow may feel limiting to more technically advanced teams. While Webflow offers the ability to integrate their API for content delivery from any source, it can be challenging to embed custom code within the site. If building your website from scratch, you can customize any desired features, integrations, complex workflows, and user experience. In this case, you may also benefit from end-to-end ownership of the hosting solution for the site, keeping your customers' data on your servers.
• Budget constraints: For sites more complex than simple landing pages, a Webflow subscription will tend to cost more than other options. If you plan to include e-commerce functionalities, the corresponding pricing may reach a few hundred dollars per month, which may be a significant cost for smaller businesses.

Hiring Experts

It is worthwhile to look into hiring Webflow experts, as they are widely available for freelance work. Experts can set up your business' site in a short turnaround time at a fraction of the price of hiring developers to build a custom site. Experts' pricing may include maintenance for small changes and content updates.

Creating a site using Webflow

• To start using Webflow, head to https://webflow.com and enter an email address for your account. Next, answer a few questions regarding what your business wants to achieve with Webflow.
• You will then be asked about the type of website you would like to build. You can browse the many available templates to select one which most closely resembles what you're looking to build. 
• Once you have chosen a template you will be redirected to the design tool, where you can customize the template to fit your business needs. You can click directly on elements you would like to change and edit text or images directly in the editor.
• To publish the site, press the `Publish` button at the top-right of the page. You can define which domain the site should be published to. Please note that changing the default domain will incur extra costs, so it is important to confirm your configuration before continuing. Once published, your site will be available at the chosen URL.

• CMS Import: It is sometimes necessary to import content from a previous site. In this case, you need to be able to export the content from your previous website in a standard format. Webflow offers a way to import content through CSV files and populate your CMS with the content. This method enables you to track the history of all your content and seamlessly transition your site to a new platform.
• WordPress: WordPress is one of most popular alternative low-code website builders. By installing the Webflow App in WordPress, you can automatically generate CSV files to migrate content from your previous WordPress site onto your newly created Webflow site. The produced files will be compatible and ready for import in the Webflow CMS.

• Design: Figma is one of the standard tools for creating and collaborating on website designs. Webflow supports the integration of Figma designs into their platform. Using the Figma to Webflow plugin, you can sync designs directly into Webflow to be seamlessly delivered to users.
• Content: Webflow handles a native integration that lets you embed styles from CRM tools such as Hubspot into Webflow or map your Webflow forms to your Hubspot backend.
• Analytics: Webflow offers a Google Analytics integration. By setting up this integration, you can track insightful information about user behavior. Google Analytics provides powerful metrics such as user and page view counts, traffic locations, and session duration.

For many other use cases, Webflow offers a Marketplace containing a wide variety of applications made by the community. Given the scale of the platform, it is likely that other businesses using Webflow have similar needs to you, and you may be able to find suitable applications in the marketplace.

Although Webflow offers many direct integrations in their Webflow Marketplace, there may be some third party services you wish to integrate with which are not offered. In this case, you can leverage Webflow's extensive set of APIs to manually build custom integrations with other applications and systems. To learn more, please see Webflow's developer documentation here.