A Convo With Dave Foy - WebFlow Over WordPress

okay so i think we are now live by the looks of it it's still got uncrossed uh let's have a look so i think we are live so let's just have a little look see so if you could let me know in the chat section if you can hear us okay so this is myself dave myself dave oh it's starting well myself paul and dave so could you let me know in the chat if you can actually hear us okay if you can then we can just crack on excellent sounds okay dave can everyone here dave charlie can hear us that's all that's good enough for me excellent that's what we like to hear perfect perfect okay excellent stuff so we're going to try a few little bits and pieces out tonight just to make sure that everything works okay and then we're going to crack on excellent thank you very much clear redesign okay so let me just quickly introduce my guest tonight which is mr dave foyer i'm sure all of you are going to know this gentleman he's an absolute powerhouse when it comes to working with wordpress elementor funnels and now with his new venture we're going to take a look at helping people build their own training business helping them out in all the different aspects for building training courses building your confidence and all those kinds of really good things so i'm super super happy tonight to be joined by mr dave foy so i'd love it if you could take a moment to say good evening and i'll let dave just have a few words yeah hello there and um well thank you firstly paul dave whatever your name is for for allowing me onto your live stream i am a big fan um i was hoping tonight we could talk about the usual stuff that we talk about like microphones and cameras and lights and and and monitors and teleprompters and stuff like that which is yeah what we usually end up talking about we do indeed we do but it is an absolute pleasure i remember paul back in probably like late 2018 maybe um i've been watching your your wordpress tutorial videos for ages and i've said this like many many times and not kind of trying to blow a smoke up your ass but you are my absolute favorite wordpress tutorial youtuber bar none and um i remember you contacted me like late 2018 say hey would it be nice two brits doing a bit of sort of a collaboration on something sometime and i was just up to my neck at the time with i don't know some course or other no fear funnels probably i was making and um so i had to say at the time i've not got time just yet but at some point and we've been talking about doing something together like ever since so um tonight's the night tonight is indeed the night and i'm super stoked like i say it's been um it's been great to actually get to know you from not just the tutorials i think that's the nice thing about us we've actually struck up a genuine friendship and i think that's been really really good because i think when you're in this kind of space whether you're creating courses or whether you're creating youtube content or a combination of those things it can be quite a lonely kind of affair you kind of feel like you are very much sat in front of a screen with a light and a camera a microphone a computer keyboard sort of typing stuff up and coming up with ideas and it's kind of really disjointed work environment from what you're probably used to i mean you cover a teaching background i come from a teaching background we're used to being around groups of people and helping and teaching and answering questions so when it's a solitary thing it's a very very different situation to be in so it's just been nice to have a like-minded individual like yourself where we can chuck ideas about tech you know ideas about courses classes just general chit chat about all these kinds of youtube kind of things and for me it's just been an absolute god center to have someone that i can just talk to and just knows exactly where i'm coming from at any given point so yeah it's cool with me exactly and i mean we'll we'll stop the mutual appreciation society soon but yeah you really actually helped me paul and i'm sure that you do this with everybody else as well but you really kind of helped me up my game in terms of video and content delivery and you know all this stuff anybody watching this i hound paul with i don't know he's about 10 messages a day is it something like that at least just like how did you do that and what's that thing that you've got there and how where's that microphone going um you know just just constantly hounding paul about tech uh stuff all the time so um yeah it is it it has been a real pleasure definitely absolutely absolutely so tonight dave what exactly are you going to be talking to us about because i understand you've moved over to webflow uh for your davefoy.co project so yeah i think we're going to kind of have a chat about why you did that why you chose that over wordpress and maybe a couple of examples and answered some questions yeah definitely um it was it came as something as a surprise to me as much as everybody else really to use a different platform to to build a website long long story short i'd um i'd wanted to have a bit of a sort of a sidestep or a bit of a pivot away from specifically teaching people how to use wordpress and elementor to um actually helping techy techy people like you and i and loads of other people that we know helping them to do what i've done you know which is package up their expertise and their skills um into online training it has been an absolute life changer for me and you know without getting without getting too soppy about it the the the impact that i'm i'm able to have on other people's lives is just like it's just it's just it's just what i get out of bed for and um and i think also i've been able to i felt a little bit like i was on some kind of hamster wheel with client work you know in terms of trading my sort of time my hours for money and things like that so i kind of wanted to teach other people to kind of empower and inspire other people to see that the tech skills and the expertise that they've got is something that they can package up um and create a really profitable enjoyable meaningful business teaching people online and it's not just some i haven't got some innate skill i'm not anything special by by any means whatsoever but so i figured i needed a new website for this new venture so and i wanted to make i wanted to kind of put it in my own name um for various reasons and so i thought well i'll i'll create myself a new website and there had been i'm trying to think how to put this there had been this slow burning kind of dissatisfaction with with wordpress and elementor and i'm happy to go into the reasons why but they've been kind of like this slow burning dissatisfaction for various reasons and i thought to myself well i'm not into i'm not into switching tools for the sake of it you know anybody that knows me anybody in my student groups will know i am not the kind of person that is constantly saying look at this new tool look at that new tool you know hey look a squirrel because it's stressful it's it it's there's a high cost to switching tools in terms of well in terms of the time it's going to take you to learn to get proficient in using a new tool there's the cost of that there's also kind of like the sunk cost you know the the the cost of the everything you've learned so far and you know let's face it all the lifetime deals that you've bought and all that kind of thing so i'm not a i'm i'm really really not into switching tools for the sake of it so i am definitely not that kind of person who's telling people constantly you know to to go and look at all the stuff um but i think it was that kind of dissatisfaction and also thinking back to before i use wordpress i used a few different cms systems one of them was called expression engine there's another one called craft as well and they were just so much like so much simpler and dare i say calmer maybe you know karma experience where i could create exactly what the client needed and nothing more and i've just i wanted to kind of return to with with my own site to see if i could kind of get that back again without all the plugins without having to plug this in and that in and get this and get that and set this up so i i i'd heard i'd heard a few people talking about webflow and i'd for over the last couple of years maybe and i'd always just discounted it it's like yeah i'm sure it's great but you know i'm happy um i'm happy using wordpress it's it's great elementor is great i don't need to look at another tool but i just gradually just more and more and more people that i know and respect uh were starting to use it which prompted me to give it a go and so i did and i uh after a few false starts um eventually built the new site with it and just just really really really enjoyed the experience i kind of felt like i got my you know web design mojo back really you know that excitement about development and maintaining the site so it was um it was a good move but it it it certainly prompted quite a few questions you know you're the elemental guy you told me to use elementor what are you doing that kind of thing so yeah oh yeah and i know where you're coming from with that like you see you can very much get pigeonholed into you only do this kind of work you want to use these kinds of tools and there's a kind of bit of a shock i think from people when they see well actually there are other tools out there that might be better for a given job and i think that's the thing that i've said it in past live streams is just because you know wordpress you know it really really well doesn't mean to say that it's the right tool for the job you know webflow has a lot of strengths going for it as do a lot of other tools yeah and i think wordpress is a great platform for if you like the diy and you don't mind the maintenance that comes with it whereas a platform like webflow once you're on there you don't have to think about that it's like having a care plan for your car you know you drive it you use it every day but then if something goes wrong or something needs to be updated or fixed serviced whatever you just let them get on with it and you don't have to think and stress about that kind of thing so i can definitely appreciate why you would have looked at webflow for you know for for projects that you're working on for yourself yeah exactly and there were i mean there were a few things really that that crossed my mind um one of them was i i mean just to say i'm not down on wordpress at all you know i'm not saying don't use these tools all these tools are great and these tools are not because i think with any software in fact not just software i mean literally anything in life you know kitchen knives cars i don't know there are trade-offs there are always trade-offs there is nothing that is the perfect tool um and you know i think wordpress has significant advantages and some significant disadvantages exact same with webflow as well well what i think prompted me to because because there are quite a few i don't know common objections i would say um for using webflow as a platform with its kind of hosted locked in nature yeah um but i started to think well i've always actually i've always been a believer in the best tools for the job so for instance my online course platform that i run all my courses on is thinkific after i'm not again i'm not having to go to anybody who runs an lms on on on wordpress it's absolutely fine but for me personally and you know talking to experienced um educators online i just figured i wanted to use a separate hosted platform with i could just put my content up there and get on with teaching and get on with selling the courses and supporting my students you know none of the maintenance none of the headaches none of the fiddling none of the upgrades none of the plugins none of the you know um so i and that that was a that was just a really really great move the cost is actually probably less um overall long term um with with that membership platform my email marketing you know there are just so many things that i'm happy to choose the the right tool for for for the job um which is what made me think it might actually be something worth looking at yeah definitely i mean i think you're gonna have to rebrand your no stress wordpress now and just sell them uh webflow instead you know yeah that's the opening lesson use website there we go are you recording this because that's it done yeah fifty percent that's fine mate yeah good one um i i have to say i mean i'm supposed to be uh teaching people how to make like techie people how to make techie online courses yeah um so at the moment i i've got no desire really to kind of become you know the web flow guy and all that kind of thing and i still think word personality mentor is great i'm still you know happily supporting the students who are uh still still using that i will no doubt use wordpress myself again um so i'm not into kind of like evangelizing telling people sometimes i have had a few not many one or two reactions for people that have been very much scared i don't know it's like this it's like we were saying like this kind of almost tribal thing you know it's like you you you won't make me switch like i'm not trying to i don't care what you use really do you know do a good job with it just do a good job and i honestly if you can build the site quickly in your own way with your own workflow and you know then um with the tools that you're happy with then happy days all around because ultimately it's the site it's the content on it you know of course it is um that that is the key so but yeah okay so my next question for you then dave i want my next request for you is how do you fancy giving us just a quick whistle stop tour of the webflow interface and just some of your initial findings so just take it for the fact that we know nothing about webflow which in my case is pretty pretty much on point um and just show us you know what you liked about it what maybe yeah pitfalls you kind of came across when you started it'd be cool to sort of see your sort of take on the webflow interface and just give a kind of legacy a whistle stop tour of what it is and how it kind of works yeah def definitely yeah so i i won't kind of particularly point at things that i like as such it was just literally just we'll just have a look around yeah so if you can share with my screen marvelous so um when you sign up for webflow you sign up for an account and you get your dashboard here i don't know you can see i'll just bum that up slightly you get a dashboard here with all your projects you can put them in folders and things like that these are all projects in um in development i should say just while i'm i'm here flow's pricing is we'll come on to the to the pricing because i think it is actually incredible value but um the pricing we'll come back to price pricing later but yeah the pricing can be really confusing i've just figured it out myself um so so this is this is my project my site so if i go into what they call the designer the designer is um the the everything happens i'm gonna zoom back out again oh there's my face i'll get rid of him in a minute so what we're looking at at the moment is um it's basically like the the web flow interface for this entire site one of the things i really like about it is that everything is in this ui literally everything for this site is in this interface you know all the pages all the posts all the cms collections all the settings and the styles and and and and the lot so there's one thing that really appeals it's so i found it the workflow to be really really fast um i'll give you a quick a quick tour just to show you around so basically down the left-hand side and i appreciate this is probably going to look a little bit small for people but i'll just zoom in slightly down the left-hand side is all the kind of content um you know stuff that you add to pages symbols which are like like templates like master templates um the navigator for the page so i'm you if you're familiar with with elementor you'll know exactly what this is um you know you can drag things around and i'm not gonna mess around with it too much because it is my it is my live website but um so you know and i can i can click on stuff here and it's going to open it up in the um in in the navigator here and drag things around and i can i can i mean suppose the other thing i love about i have loved about webflow is the just complete and utter flexibility like i i find a lot i mean elementor is an amazing tool and but and it's amazing if they've provided the features and the functionality and the layout and everything that you need if and and if they have then it's great you know you're flying if they haven't it can be utterly frustrating and then obviously what you've got to do at that point is then look to third-party tools or you might have to code some css yourself and and then you get into the issue i find you know getting into the issue with third-party add-ons is that if they've not updated their add-on after elementor i've had a big update and you know the whole thing crashes so um so this is the navigator down here i'm gonna just stick with this left-hand side just for a second before we look at all this and so that's the navigator here is all your pages or should i say your static pages so i've got like various folders here with various like um i'm just doing like a little course at the moment so you know here's here's the course and there's the registration page and the success page and the replay page and the register oh there's you know all of the all of that kind of thing um so now static pages in in webflow are literally just like standalone pages so the pages where it's just a completely standalone design a a bit like with elementor if you use the elementor full width template for example um you build it and that's that's that's what it is so um so all of these are my static pages so far so i've got like a little tools um tools recommendation page and things like that which is basically for the stuff that you've recommended paul thanks my bank account significantly affects my bank account thank you very much so that's the pages so they are just like static pages i'll come on to why i keep emphasizing that in a moment because it trips people up but you'll you'll see in a minute then here you've got cms collections remember again this is all just content right it's all just like pages stuff that you add to your pages cms stuff another what i just found just i don't know quite kind of mind-blowing really with with um webflow is that it's got the it's got the the concept of like custom post types database driven dynamic content um custom fields you know all this kind of acf stuff is all just built into the system and i mean it is an absolute beauty i'm not really using it too much at the moment but you can create literally any kind of like cms collection that you like so that might be blog posts it might be i've got mine for my legal pages very sexy collection there but you know the terms and conditions the privacy policy the cookies so um but you know you might if you've got like a team section on the site or you i don't know you've got like a car dealership or you've got like menus for a restaurant or literally anything even um like for instance if you just had a services section on your website for instance you know with a with a like a listing page and click-throughs to individual uh pages on each service so literally anything where you've got repeated content with a similar template you know it looks similar then just create a cms collection so here for instance um i'll just show you really quickly legal pages i'll tell you what you're probably dying to see what they look like it sounds so exciting here we go right at the bottom legal so you know privacy page cookie policy page disclaimer all the stuff everybody reads the first the first thing they read when they hit the site a really really simple stuff so i just thought well i'll just create a cms collection for those they've all got basically the same layout and i can create a template for them the the flexibility i mean basically you can just create them and plan them and everything as much as whatever you like you know you've got i won't go into all the details but you've got all the like conditional stuff and you've got one-to-one relationships you've got like many-to-many relationships and one-to-many relationships so for instance like my legal pages i'll just click the little settings here and you can just say well you know if you're familiar with custom post types anyway in wordpress you'll probably see you know it's got a name it's got the plural version it's got the singular version and it's got the slug the url slug you can literally just create whatever um custom fields you like i mean there probably are more that you might need but i've not found found any at all so you can basically like create your own editor um with with with any of these so i mean what have i got here i've got it's very simple like the headline on the page the slug the navigation label because i wanted that to be a bit smaller sometimes and and the actual content well that's that's really it so um i'll come i'll i'll come on to how you actually make your cms collection content appear um on the site later on but um you've got an e-commerce section uh facility which well i haven't used and i don't plan to you've got assets now assets is like your image library images you know pdfs documents and things like that um you literally are probably be too much messing around to show you but you literally just drag yeah i can literally just drag stuff from my computer and just bang it in it automatically uploads and i can and it's just got some very simple stuff like adding alt text or you can tell webflow that it's just a decorative image and um i can you can put them into folders into your own custom folders as well and you can kind of there's multiple sites you can bulk um the the good thing about images is which i really like let's just find one so here's an image for instance so um i can just drag an image from here straight onto the page and boom it appears um if i click the little gear icony little thing here i can click on replace image it opens up the assets in the left hand panel for me and i can just like scroll and have a look at my images and go oh actually i wanted that one and then it's just replaced so it's really easy to just you know just just work with images um it's got all the built-in responsiveness um in so in although they retain the original image um in the background that they're compressing them to creating lots of different responsive sizes delivering the appropriately sized compressed image to different size screens and things like that you don't you don't get to have any say in how that happens it just happens in the background i'll just i'm just going to undo that so that it's the it's the correct picture and then there's some settings here but that's basically all the you know the content stuff now if on this page literally basically if i click on i don't know here we go if i click on anything here um then it's going to it's going to scroll to that section and anything that you select here on the right hand side is basically the settings for the thing that you've clicked if that makes sense so whatever you click on here so if i click this section these are all the style settings for that section and the styling controls are exactly the same for every single thing whether it be sections divs headings paragraphs buttons whatever um everything that you anything that you've clicked you get the exact same um styling you've got you've got flexbox you've got css grid and it's just incredibly flexible so for example if i just open this up a little bit um there we go into that container and here's the h1 so you can see here that anything that i'm clicking so for instance here i'm clicking this um this grid that i've created here with stuff inside it so here you can see that i'm you know there's my grid settings and anything anything else um when you when you click on when you add anything onto the webflow page let's say i add a div for instance um in fact let me show you this really quickly if we've got time uh i'm just going to just create a really quick test page oh it already exists down there hang on yeah exit i've already got a test page down here with hopefully not a lot on it all right so um i'll get rid of that so i can add stuff to the page really easily so i don't know i can click on add elements here and we've got various elements i could kind of drag that paragraph in or i could go into the navigator and drag it into place i can just click it and it just appears on the page you can you know basically just stick it wherever you like um i'll just delete that now what the the way the web flow works is a little bit like how css works um and it does pay with webflow to just understand a little bit about how html and css works uh webflows university if you just just look at sometimes just google the webflow university their like little training videos on the features are fantastic um and the guy is utterly hilarious so the idea is is that whenever you add anything to the page then as soon as you start styling it here so i don't know whether you can actually i was going to just get rid of that button and it's all a bit it's all a bit zoomed in because i've made this i've made my screen bigger for for this stream so people can see what's going on but let's say if i go into the nav actually i don't even need to do that right i can actually like with elementor you know you've got the finder so i can command e uh i can just type oh no hang on button enter so you're just going to just pop a button in there for me now and you've got all kinds of different link settings here for buttons so while the button here is selected at the moment it doesn't have a class right so a class is like a name that you give for a particular you know set of styles um so whenever if if i start now tweaking i don't know the typography or the background color or the padding or anything else webflow is going to give it a name it's going to just create one in fact let's just try it so if i say i'm going to just get rid of that so here here's the the default button i don't know let's say i say a hundred percent width right but now that i've added any style to it webflow is going to give it a name now this is just an auto automatically generated name um it happens to make sense it's a button which is great so the idea is is that you should really rename them to something that you understand now i've actually kind of come up with my own naming system which i think is just like logical but it doesn't matter you could literally call it you know ham sandwich as long as you know what it means so i could just call it i could just rename that to my button so the idea is i make all my changes and then on any other button on the site so let's i'll just show you really quickly so let's just change this color here by the way it's got like global color palette here that you can change i'll change this to my like to my accent color and i'll um i'll change the actual primary color to that as well so it's a bit easier to see and let's click back on the button again so i've selected the button so if now i'll just do it here because it's just it's just easier if i add another button by default it's not got any styling if i now uh give i say okay i've selected that button and i actually want it to have the styles of my button you know the the class name that i just gave this this yellow one so if i just start typing my um it instantly kind of brings up like classes that exist already in webflow that i've already created previously and that then adds that we need to mess around with in fact if i just add say some i don't know a little bit about margin 20 pixels will do so that adds about 20 pixels margin to both of them so what this does which again i found really like freeing i suppose is that global styles are set at the point that you are working on the thing so you don't have to think ah i want to change my button style so now i've got to go back up here i've got to go to another menu i've got to find the button settings you just change it there as long as when you've got it that your class is selected then you're you're fine so let's remove that i'll just remove that button there so i've actually come up with like a whole set i've come up with like a style guide so if i say um i mean forgive my kind of quirky naming system but i'll start if it's a component i started with a c i don't know i think i read about it once and it seemed like a really clever idea so if i add c button that's my button style done now if i want to if i want to retain the basic button styling which if you can see down here is all kinds of um paddings and margins and um font weights and colors and alignments and accent backgrounds and all that kind of thing that is basically almost if you think of it as like a preset if i type if i give that button that class name then um all that kind of preset styles just just just appear but it's webflow's also got the concept of what it calls combo classes as well so you can create like modifiers i suppose is a good word for it or variance so i've created like loads of them um you can see them here actually webflow knows it's like i know what you're going to do because you've used these before so i could say i want the basic button styling but i want this button to have my primary color um background and it looks a bit looks a bit crap because it's on the same color background so i'll get rid of that little modifier but what about i don't know is button full width there you go so what that has done is it's retained the button style which is like the the global thing for buttons but it's added on this like extra little bit and you can see in orange um the stuff that is coming in from kind of like from higher up in the in the tree this is why it's useful to know a little bit about css you can see here in these selectors it's actually showing me all of the styles are ultimately coming from the body tag so if you need to go back and edit just the button styles or you need to go back and actually i want to edit all links or whatever it is then you can you can come down to that so um i suppose just just one one thing before i come back to you i think the thing that i've really enjoyed the most is um css grid so i've just really enjoyed this isn't actually a very good example but um let's find a better example so um i've used this grid like just a simple grid let's find it in the navigator ah here we go i don't know where you can see that there but um the the ability to use css grid to lay stuff out is just i don't know it's just been it's just been an absolute game changer for me really um the fact that you can just drop a couple of dibs on on the on the into the onto the page which is basically like you know on gives other columns you can then say right on a parent div i'm not going to go into all the details because we'll be here all night but um on the parent div that's containing those two two columns side by side there's a there's a parent wrapping all of them is it's a doddle to create them i can just say make this css grid it'll automatically make the grid it'll then i can edit that grid and i can change the you know sort of proportional sizes you don't have to worry about percentages you don't have to worry about padding um it just automatically kind of figures it out for you and you can do so i've got tablet i've got um mobile um mobile uh what's it called landscape that's the word a mobile portrait as well and so you can just basically just just like tweak and stretch and span columns across multiple columns um all on just like for for different for different screen sizes um and just to say as well before we come back to your poll hopefully it's still there is um i've just found the responsiveness like a lot lot like i don't know more reliable and easier in webflow than it is in elementor partly because you get this um mobile landscape and i don't know what you can see but you've got this like ruler at the bottom of the screen and it will tell you at certain points which devices um relate to that screen size so that's saying this is currently the ipad pro 9.7 inch and the ipad air and 2 and everything else and that actually carries over to the preview so here's the preview up at the top top left you click the preview it's just an instant preview um but you can on the preview you know you can literally just sort of drag that around and it'll tell you where you are and you can also create um your own breakpoints so you can add larger breakpoints so bigger screen and an even bigger screen and an even bigger screen but you can also add breakpoints um custom break points in between these as well if you want to have yet another smaller screen configuration i suppose so yeah i think if you're coming from elementor let's be honest about it let's uh come back a second how about you screen you know you know break points one of those things that so many people talk about you know there's so many people are asking for those things so when you kind of move over and you use another tool an alternative tool that has the easy ability to not only use more than the limited three that we currently have when using a tool like elementor but the fact that you can very easily drop in as many as you want especially if you've got you know you created a site for a client and and they wanted to operate on a very specific type of device and look good on that then you can target that device so much easier and you know to me webflow is one of those things that i think you do need to have a bit more of an understanding in very much the same way i think as oxygen you need to have that foundational understanding of css specificity the css hierarchy how you know you look at those things in the same way that html works in the same way you think it all starts off with a hierarchy and if you look it lost these different builders and i noticed it in webflow just now down the bottom it'll show you the hierarchy of where you are inside your design right now yeah yeah so i can i can definitely see why it's a more designer-centric um tool in much the same way i think that's why oxygen is kind of resonating with certain types of people especially they come from more of a development background as opposed to they just want something they can use to design in a very drag-and-drop way which is what tools like elementor and brizzy and those kinds of tools give you but there's limitations that come with that and then you've got to start looking at hacks to get around those limitations with a tool like webflow it's kind of built the opposite way you know it's it's less about that dragon dropping everything into place and you've got that very simplistic way of working but it gives you so much more flexibility to what you can do then with the tool like webflow yeah and it comes back to what we were talking about before which is trade-offs um so somebody might say the the limitation of elementor i mean let's just rewind a moment actually five years ago um a tour like elementor would have blown everybody's minds you know if i could have gone back like five years or ten years when i was hand coding websites and somebody would have said there is going to be basically the photoshop for web design i mean my designer mates who couldn't code were just absolutely it blew their minds and so you know those those tools are amazing but i think anybody who you know if somebody heard me saying oh elementor's full of limitations one sense yeah because you are kind of stuck with what they give you but let's face it what they give you is pretty solid like for almost all occasions well let's just be honest about it no matter what tool you use unless you are physically coding it yourself and even then you know if you're using frameworks and things you still have limitations everything has limitation yes you can get around some of those limitations by combining and hacking and all these kinds of things but part of design by its very nature whether that's print design graphic design you know sort of web design it's finding ways to embrace those limitations work with those limitations and still create exceptional end results and i don't think whatever tool you use you will ever be in a sort of a scenario where that's not the case you know i think a tool like elementor kind of sits in between it bridges that gap between the coders and the print designers you know when they're working within design and things it gives you a lot of the flexibility those kinds of tools give you and it kind of puts that person in the middle so they don't need to understand the code they just need to know how to make it look like they design in sketch or figma or you know any of those kinds of tools how that looks and i think that's kind of where to like elementor and page builders in general kind of tend to sit you know they branch out in other little directions and give you more power in this way and that way but ultimately that's kind of what they are they're a sort of like a bridge between the not the code and the graphic design aspect of it yeah i i got into page builders because um all the you know my marketing um business partner marketing focus business partner at the time and some designer friends of mine at the time were desperate to just create like campaigns landing pages really quickly and test them out really quickly and so they'd ask me the developer right dave can you you know design as a page and develop it and i'd i'd look through my calendar you know like well i can fit you in in two weeks on tuesday and it was just absolutely maddening for them so for them like well first actually tools like you know aveda divi um with other things and then ultimately um elementor was just absolutely like game changing for them because they didn't have to wait for me to to to pull my finger out so and this i mean the thing with webflow as well is that although there are lots and lots and lots of benefits and gone all night really but you can you can make an absolutely colossal mess um you can you can just start styling stuff and adding stuff and messing about stuff and then find that if you've not had your eye on the classes that it's creating all the you know just doubted there's all sorts of things you've just got not got your eye on it and don't quite understand just like what the concepts are um you can end up in a mess and it's why i actually took three attempts like literally three separate attempts and every time i'd have a go and i just think oh you know it's too hard and even the third attempt actually was had sub attempts within it because i i got my head around it but then got so far building a couple of pages and thought oh there was there's a more efficient way of doing this you know i could have created one class here rather than 10. start again you know so um and i'll say that that's the trade-offs yeah but the thing is that's a good learning experience because once you kind of get into that mindset it's the same as when you look at things like like after effects completely different thing but you have to work logically with after effects you have to you know you have to look at this is the result that i want and now i need to reverse engineer that to make sure that i get that in the most efficient way and you know when you're used to working with css classes and code and all those kinds of things it becomes like second nature but you still have to go through the apprenticeship phase to get to the point where it does become second nature and like you say it's a little less forgiving than a tool like elementor or brizzy or you know anything like that where you can't just literally delete that block and start again and it's like a fresh slate but it's a small chunk this could have much more far-reaching effects because you have done something right back at the beginning that has that sort of snowball effect that gets at the end and then you realize that damn yeah yeah what one thing that i i kind of hit upon quite early on because again i just saw somebody else doing it and thought i'm having that um was was this concept of sort of style guides uh yeah i don't think you wouldn't mind just briefly sharing my uh showing my screen share again just really quickly so i got this this concept of i've got a folder here called utility because it sounds really really fancy and smart it's basically just some pages like a basic template page that i use as a starting point for all pages and um but i've got this style guide template here which i kind of stole from someone and then just kind of doctored um but it's got like examples of you know the the fonts and all the colors and the headings and some basically alternative kinds of headings that um that i that i created and i'll zoom back out again and each one of those each one of these on the page is literally if you click on it it's got i don't know you can see but in the top right hand corner i've given it a style uh name and so any anything on the site that i'd decide i want it to be heading display one i just give it a class name of heading display one and boom it's it's that it's that size so um i had you know various examples of paragraphs and small paragraphs and big paragraphs and different kinds of buttons and all that sort of stuff so and lots of little helpers you know give it no margin or give it loads of margin just things i can just throw on but the beauty i suppose of this as long as as long as you are organized is that you can you can create these kind of libraries that then you can just use on every project so you know you can every time i know i've got into it now if i need a small paragraph i'll just bang his size small a class on it boom and it's done but it's the sort of thing basically just trying to just emphasize the point that this is the kind of stuff you have to do yourself and organize yourself and you know create one of these pages yourself um but but you know for probably or ultimately things like ui elements and all that kind of thing you know you just just create those and just create your own library and use them on every project so yeah some stuff awesome uh we've got andy sawyer saying really likes the style guide is any chance you could share that with uh with him or with everybody in the stream when you get a chance hi andy um yeah i suppose i could no problem what i'm what i'm putting together at the moment um is like a a web flow separate little project that's got um just some standard stuff in it that people could import into their own webflow accounts okay and then you can go in and literally just grab you can copy and paste between projects like really easily so and to be able to use those so yeah i'd be really happy to share it i am actually still constantly tweaking it you know adding stuff to it i don't think you ever change though i think that's something that as your knowledge as your kind of skills develop and as your projects develop you know your branding your styling those kind of things to have something like that style guide that you can quickly flick back to reference it tweak it a little bit and then it's boom it's all set up and you're good to go kind of thing i think that's something that's definitely going to be you know important and it's something that's slightly different that i've done a very similar kind of thing um to deal with the sort of style kits inside elementor i made it sort of like a free json download because it's so much easier to have one page that has all those things that you can globally style and then you can quickly assign that to those you can see it an immediate effect you know the font size is the relationship with the the headings one through six all that that just makes the whole process a lot easier so i'd recommend anybody that's doing this to have even just a simple template file that is just the key elements for that site and then style those on the same page and then save those as a style kit or however you kind of do it inside webflow that's easily referenceable yeah i mean you and i are both like big fans of style kits i don't know whether this is a pro style kits pro feature but i noticed that john frascos has started actually um with each of the style kits template packs including style guide template within there with everything set on it so and it's a it's i'm a massive fan of john's anyway but he's um yeah i thought that was really good really clever genuinely nice guy as well so next question then dave let me just let me pull my list of questions up we've kind of covered i think what you enjoyed about using webflow so they're going to go on to head scratchers so what kind of confused you about webflow and how did you kind of overcome the was it kind of trial and error you know or was it you know maybe look at it in a logical kind of fashion knowing you're kind of a coding background so you approach it in a slightly different way yeah well i think what i started to do probably like attempt number one to use webflow um i made the mistake of like trying to directly map one-to-one like the word the wordpress way of doing it and then trying to map that onto onto webflow so like for instance one of the things like fairly early on was thinking hang on a minute like in um in wordpress and elementor i can create page single page templates uh which then will be used by all all my sort of single pages or pages with a certain tag you know however you want to do it i know single post templates is great but didn't seem to have that concept until i thought no actually in wordpress a page is a post type isn't it you know a post is a post type um so then i thought oh well it's just the same it's just a cms collection so if i want lots of pages that have all got the same design and i just literally just fill in the content there you go there was um i'm just trying to think on that on that same note there was this concept of you know like an elementor you can have multiple uh post layouts or you know so you might have some blog posts which use one layout but other blog posts like in a certain category or with a certain tag would have a different layout now in webflow when you create a new cms collection um in your pages section they give you a single like blank canvas for you to build your template for that for for the you know for the for the for the individual um single post pages for that and you do literally what whatever you like um it's the flexibility is amazing so what you have to do if you want the option to have multiple layouts is basically the way the way i've done it again i've nicked this from somebody else is created like any parts of the layout that were like layout a and then another part of the layout might be layout b there might be stuff that is is common to both layouts but so you know you just put everything on the page i would wrap everything that is layout a in a particular div wrapper um and anything that's in layout b in another div wrapper and you know call give them a class of layout a and layout b and then you've got conditionals so like say for my posts i could add a custom field and that custom field might be like a drop down or a switcher or tick box or something that says is this post layout a or layout b and so in the conditionals in the template and basically say if it's layout a show the layout a div and hide the layout b and vice versa so um i got around that one which was which is nice actually just having it all in one place um it's really good the other one was where are all the widgets i want widgets for you know icon lists and accordions and all kinds of different layouts and functionality and although in the ad elements panel you there are a load of different elements that you can add and there are some predetermined layouts and some functionality as well like sliders and maps and light boxes and a few things there's nowhere near the pre-built functionality that you get with elementor and the the thing is is that you just build it yourself and it's just so easy to build it yourself that you you realize that you didn't really given the tools i find anyway i didn't need a post widget with the you know the uh different layout options to put the read more link there and show the featured image or not and all that kind of thing or icon lists you know they're just just such a doddle to to figure out anyway and i suppose if you need them you create them and then save them in a library and a page you know so like a ui kit library or something and then you can use them again and again um yeah that was sorry that's what i was going to ask is there's like a globalized library is it you can create a global library you can access in any project or they know globalized but only within a project yeah so what the way that i've done it so far because i've basically got like one site actually i've got two because i'm building a site for my wife as well at the moment um except i've got no time to do it so she's never she's never gonna get it built but don't tell her but um what was i gonna say yeah um so what i've started doing is like creating just pages which you've got like the style guide certain ui elements just all all on the page but what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to transfer those literally copy and paste them into just a new like unpublished webflow project which will just house all of that stuff so if i ever wanted to use them in a in another project i can literally switch to it copy paste into the new project that brings over all of the content the html the associated styles even images if you want there is webflow actually have like the webflow showcase which has got loads of cloneable full sites so you can actually clone them they've got templates like um library as well some are free some are paid and you can clone those into your own webflow account and again you know go into them edit them as if it's your own site grab bits copy and paste it's actually how i learned how to do a few things and just looking at other people's sites and going how did you do that hmm and then looking at it yeah yeah we're just reverse engineering so there's all that stuff um all the head scratchers is like having to be more organized you know having to kind of think up front like am i gonna i'm gonna make this paragraph bigger now than the standard am i going to want to ever do that again yes probably create a style you know so just just having to be kind of organized about it with great power comes great responsibility exactly there are no global style settings so there's no way that you can go to i said this earlier there's no way you can go to which is like here is the list of all your global styles for this site and you edit the global styles at the point that they are on the page okay and it updates all the other ones on the site that got the same class name um i had to learn a bit about css grid and flexbox which are both absolutely like amazing so i landed on using css grid for my main column layouts and then using flexbox for what i call like micro layouts okay you know if i want to kind of lay elements out within a column sort of vertically or horizontally or in some sort of fancy way yeah two more things really quickly one is there's there's no theme which is a bit weird so there's just no concept of a theme at all um which in a sense like you can't switch themes you know like in the old days you could have all your wordpress content and you could switch themes and it would basically be the same content but just a different design yeah i suppose with elementor and was creating stuff in elementor we kind of lost that anyway because we have yeah so it doesn't really matter but you don't have that in webflow there's no if you buy if you buy a template pack or get a free one because loads of free ones as well and those template packs come with examples of loads of different landing pages about pages home pages blocks of different kinds of sections and ui elements and all that kind of thing what you what you're actually buying is basically you you then i'm trying to get get this right in your in your webflow account dashboard you basically just create another webflow site which is a you literally click a button it's done instant um i wish i had time to show you all this stuff but it is really it's like instantly you've got a new site um it gives you the option to say do you want to use one of your existing templates that we know that you've you've got you know paid or free as the starting point and it's basically just it's not a theme it just loads up all those pages in your page in your page library and you can just use them and copy them and mess with them and and do what you like and the final one which drove me insane but again once i realized i thought it's just a wordpress thing is i'd created some a load of blog posts and added them into the site like into the cms collection just in any old random order and then i thought and then and then i saw dragged on the little cms collection i don't know what you call it widget or something onto the page got a lovely post layout but they were in the order that i'd added then the publish date i thought well i want i want to change the publish date that would that'll be the best way of kind of putting them in chronological order i'll go and change the publish date you go into the cms collection you go and look at your post and you can't change it i'm like hey where yeah i've actually thought this is a this is it this is a deal breaker like forget it um and then i realized no if you if you kind of understand like how database how databases work the database has got the publish date the date that you added it but there is just literally nothing stopping you from adding a publish date field yeah because there's a custom field for date you know so just add a add a feel for published date you can cut you can put that then whatever you like every single post you just pick the publish date job done and then in the template you know the listing template um it'll say there's a setting for what order and you just say sort by the publish date custom field and there you go for you it's always well it is a case of of rethinking what you kind of used if you're coming from a wordpress background like you say we used to we we were used to themes and that's kind of been superseded a lot by page builders because yeah we rely on especially elementor we rely on it a lot less than we ever used to and because i mean if you ever came from a page builder like visual composer you'd know that even then when you were using a theme if you changed to a different theme you wouldn't have a seamless transition because it used loads and loads of little short codes and classes that would just make your life absolute hell so your content was basically useless to you so you know it is changing the thought process not just the designing but also the terminology and i think that's where confusion comes in is because when you go from wordpress which has you know taxonomies and tags and header templates and all those kinds of things when you go to something that doesn't have the same terminology or maybe the same structure it is confusing i know where i've looked at webflow it's like you do go in there with these preconceived notions and terminology from the years you've spent with tools like elementor and wordpress and all those kinds of things so it is a shift in understanding is the first thing i think that's probably what sort of confuses so many people to start off with is that having to shift your mindset from the elemental terminology and structure to something completely new and that can be quite scary yeah and i think a lot of the way that wordpress works is based on the fact that it started as a blogging platform yeah as a superb blogging platform i think i discovered it because i wanted to create a personal blog and it was so easy um because it's got posts it's got pages a media library all the all the fields that you get by default are all based on the requirements of blogging uh tagging categorizing is is all from there and of course we've we've developed and pulled wordpress beyond what it was ever expected to do but i think that's why we've got all that terminology and you just get used to it you know it's i mean it's weird but i suppose i like loads of stuff in webflow is weird as well you know it's yeah i think web development's weird if you think about it it's um i think it's a miracle sometimes you can get stuff on a page so let's not talk about tables is it let's not talk about tables i i built one website using tables for layout and that was it and then yeah one that was hard work try trying to get nested tables and nested nested nested tables to try to get to do anything yeah well i i i actually just really quickly um going way way way back and i was leaving my teaching job because i just i just had enough of the british education system basically and i decided i was going to be a web designer because i'd already done a lot of dabbling with with web design and i loved it so um my dad had died and left me a little bit of money not much at the time so i invested it in a in a course a web design course um and it was expensive and i had already been learning about like web standards so it was getting away from this whole concept of using tables data tables for layout and instead using this css thing to create columns and styles and stuff as well so i just kind of like learnt that from the beginning because i just happened to be lucky enough to be around at that time and um so every time we had an assignment on this course there was some remote stuff and there was some in person you had to actually go down like it was it was it was in dudley actually um in birmingham and you had to go down and just like submit these assignments and i failed every single one even though the sites looked great everything was great they just worked in all devices but they were like i don't know what you're doing but uh this isn't right and i just they just failed me on every single thing right and there's a motto for life if you if you fail at classes chances are you're gonna be successful at life yeah exactly yeah exactly i never got a refund yeah what's my next question um okay let's say where webflow has issues and you you'd like to take a look at fixing them what's not perfect what do you think could be improved upon with webflow based upon the experience you've had now with your first couple of trials and then actually creating the site and now not just creating the site but also maintaining it adding new content to it so you're kind of living with webflow a little bit more now than maybe just building a site and handing it off yeah there's a few things actually one is um i wish when you there is there is a panel that will show you all the styles that you've created that was like literally just like a big long list of all the styles that you've been creating as you've been working and you can go down that list of styles and you can rename them actually in that list so you don't have to go and find them on the site you've got a list of them and it will tell you also which page is on the site you've used those styles as well which is great so you know you remind you ah that's for the home page and whatever that's really good but there's no um organization to it whatsoever there's no searching there's no filtering if i think to myself i'm sure i created like this class about such and such a thing i don't know i might even want to delete it or something like that and it's it's it's a real night out it's something that i wish that they that they would fix definitely um there is also this this one actually if if it wasn't so good this might actually be a bit of a deal breaker as well i've got used to it now but you can't have an index page in a folder so it might be helpful if you just share if you won't mind just showing my screen again paul just really briefly so if i'm just going to go into my pages list here all right and let's say i've got um landing pages right so i've got a folder called i'm going to zoom in a bit i've got a folder here called landing pages and i've actually given that a slug of l just because it's just shorter than having landing in the uh in the url so my site will be day five dot co slash l slash now actually maybe this isn't such a good example but let's say this one so i've actually got another subfolder within that called five things because it's a it's an opt-in that i've got about five things you need to consider before you create an online course so you can see here that the um hopefully you can see it's probably a bit small but so so the url structure is l so that's the landing pages folder and then five things which is great now what i would like is the next so if somebody lands on the landing page so the main landing page for these five things in fact let me just really quickly show you so that this makes sense uh here we go this is it so well you can see up there on the url it's l slash five things so that's the folder and then landing is the name of the page there now i would actually like to get rid of that because in my previous web development um years that would be basically like an index file so if there was if there was a file or a page within a folder called index then basically all web servers on the planet will just go ah the index page is the page to show if all you get is the folder name so that's what i would like but if i hit that well this is not the page you're looking for yeah um which is a bit i don't know it's just a bit weird i've tried creating a page within this folder called this is a page landing um so if i i've tried creating a page called index that doesn't work apparently it used to work back in 2018 something like that but then they removed the feature for some reason and uh i don't know why it's not a massive issue i don't particularly use folders too much anyway but i just think that is a bit um a bit a bit odd there also the things like again which is a bit weird i've only got a test post in here but there are no post revisions um so i haven't got a ignore this i'm just playing with it at the moment it's all it's all a bit this is an example by the way i've got color version so whether i want this particular layout to have my blue hero header or the yellow hero header and it'll switch accordingly but yeah there's just there's just no revisions there are backups uh what um wordpress webflow takes automatic backups i think every 20 automatic saves it makes in your browser it creates an automatic backup restore point on the server and you can create manual ones as well but of course that's you know using a sledgehammer to crack a note if you just want to just flick back to a previous version of a blog post so absolutely yeah yeah so that's that's a a bit odd there's no bulk editing of pages either there's bulk editing of um of images so i can come here and i can say i don't know select all or unselect some of these and i can do different things with them um so i can kind of bulk edit images to an extent but uh pages i can't select that one and that one and that one and do things with them i've got to you know i've wanted to duplicate some a set of them all at once i wanted to delete a whole set at once i'd have to individually go into the settings for each page which i mean the settings are great you know you set the slug you can set password protection you've got all your seo settings title tag and meta description and open graph and all kinds of things and custom code that you can put in for each individual page but um yeah there's no none of that bulk editing and the other sort of final thing i suppose is there isn't a concept of short codes at all so i'll give you an example really quickly so like let's say on my tools page i i'm always trying to get people's email addresses really just so that i can spam them to death and so what i like to have is these little call to action boxes just every so often there's one there'll be another one soon there always is there there's another one there there's probably another two or three um now when i'm creating a static page i can basically like create this little section here i can set all the settings that i want on it and then save it as a symbol so these are symbols these are you might call them templates in elementor you know like you save a template and you can reuse it again and again and again um and by default it's a master copy so if i edit this here it will it will update all instances of that um just sorry i keep getting distracted just to say as well you can um unlink the instance if you want to detach it completely but you can also for any of these symbols set individual elements to be editable but not others so you know like if you've got a tutorial card um design you know for it for a tutorial and you want to use that design and you want it to be maintained across the entire site but obviously each tutor um each testimonial has got its own photo person's name the actual testimonial and so as you're designing you can click come into this panel on the side i won't find an example because it'll be too long but and it just gives you fields to fill in to change the the person's you know anyway so i can add these symbols to this page which is kind of like a short code you know i just like putting a shortcode and it just pulls in that template that is brilliant there's no such concept in the cms at all so if i'm creating blog posts and at some point in my thing there i go right actually at that point there um you get stuff that you can add in at that point here i want to add in uh a symbol or you do get um embed code you can pop in any html css iframes javascript whatever you like um in there and you know drag it around and stuff but there's just no sense of like being able to to do that i found some workarounds which are absolutely fine but um i must say it was a it was a it was a bit of a weird one that is that is probably about it though they're like really the only things that kind of i wish that they'd i wish that they'd kind of sought out i mean i mean i'm not sure how old web flow is but i mean it is one of those platforms that is constantly developing you know they are pushing out new updates new features so i can imagine where it is now if enough people are interested in those kinds of features they will be added they will expand those kinds of things you know it is still a fairly immature platform when you consider when you look at tools like you know wordpress that have been around for probably well over a decade kind of thing you know so 17 years actually i think yeah it's still pretty early and it's in its life cycle so i think it's pretty still got plenty of scope to expand and develop you know over the years and maybe they will bring the short codes in you know again going back to that terminology where you talk about symbols symbols to me doesn't make a lot of sense you know global layouts global templates things like that which is kind of very similar to what it does inside a tool like elementor where you can't unlink them or you can keep them as linked and they they retain you know you edit one and they all change those kinds of things so again like i say it is just changing your terminology what you're used to to do a very similar kind of function um yeah yeah it is that's it i think what i think the web flow development team um have a policy of being really careful of not kind of bowing to every single customer request because we know what that ends up like you know it's just an absolute mess and it's one of the reasons why i think i've always personally gravitated towards tools that actually don't allow you to fiddle too much and the developers or the programmers or the designers or whoever have carefully thought of the trade-offs you know what trade-offs are we happy to to to have um and are we going to kind of ruin this platform by adding in the ability to do all these things that people are asking so yeah but i i it's one of the things that i actually like it's the reason i've i've pretty much always used basecamp as my project management system there's a list a mile long in base camp of stuff that it doesn't do you know imagine here and i quite like that you know i quite i quite like that definitely awesome stuff right what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna get a couple of comments from the chat and i'm gonna throw those at you now dave so you have to be put on the spot we're gonna give you a little countdown timer and a spotlight over the top of you just so you feel the pressure um so if anybody's got any comments any questions for dave with regards to webflow and all those kinds of things we talked about tonight drop those in the chat section below we're going to start off with this one so i'm hoping you can see these let me know dave can you see these okay no i can see those fine yeah yeah awesome so is the style guy inspiration from hubspot uh no it's not actually um i i i don't know what that is i got this from uh the basis of it actually from webflow themselves um they just have a template that they created i think and i i just took that and then just doctored it for my own uses repurpose was already there yeah yeah awesome well charlie's asking a quick question as well so saying have you ever done a gt metrics comparing a sort of a similar kind of layout between not so much oxygen because i know you don't use that but like elementor on webflow you kind of done anything comparison to see is it much better is it quicker well i can't say that i've done an uh like a scientifically um accurate comparison because that would mean i would have to create two separate two identical websites on both platforms with the same content the same images and uh i ain't got time for that so you've got just half an hour now dave yeah hang on i'll just crank something out for you but um but i will say and i had a lot of comments when i made my new site live how fast it was you know i mean it's web flow is fast in the back end it's super i mean like boom everything just just changed something it's done but also on the front end as well they're using aws hosting which i think we can all agree is you know top-notch um fastly i think is the cdn that they're using and they're just doing all kinds of compression and all kinds of optimus optimization on the back end but having said that i've not had any caching issues whatsoever you know like when you make a change and the live site hasn't updated oh yeah definitely not none of that at all so i was watching something the other day and i'm pretty sure it was web flow and they were sort of showing um it might have even been your content i can't remember but it's like um sort of a typical simple page you know in webflow and then just sort of showed the code which is automatically compressed and you know it minified basically and fair play it was literally like a screen and a half to the entire site now you and i probably know and pretty much in the chat you look at the code for wordpress with a blank page you know especially if you've got a page be like elementor or something and just a theme installed that's already about six pages long of calling i've gotten us how many scripts and so on so from the get-go it's already on a pretty sort of strong base because it is just much more streamlined code wise and they don't have to have they're not putting a page builder on top of a theme on top of wordpress on top of a pile of plugins all those things just just installing them just adds weight you know no matter how much you minify yes you can get fast load insights but most of the time that's because you have to be on a really high quality server to start off with so all those things mount up cost wise which kind of goes back to what you said right back at the beginning of this is that the pricing of webflow can kind of be a bit of a that's expensive kind of a attitude from people but when you kind of take your lifetime deals or your annual subscriptions and all the different things in your hosting and your ssl certificates and all those kinds of things when you kind of take a look at how much that actually costs you to run a site and the time and the time yeah i think a lot of people will probably be surprised at the actual cost not the perceived cost which could be very very different so would you kind of say that's kind of where you were coming from yeah yeah definitely yeah um the the fact that you literally like click a button you've got a new webflow site you click another button you've got a new web flow site and and a bill i didn't get a chance to show you but a built-in dev server staging server and a live server that you can you know selectively decide to publish to or not or remove um and yeah just to have the there's i made a list the other day of all the plugins that i don't need on this site you know there's all kinds of different things page builders and seo plugins and page speed plugins and all kinds of things um i think it's if you're hosting a site like on a custom domain i think it's like 20 bucks a month if you um something like that anyway if you pay monthly and i mean that is like the price for kinster who are an amazing wordpress host like super fast super secure and all that kind of thing amazing support um but that's just the price for the that's just the price for the for the hosting yeah you know like as you say factor in everything else as well but yeah i've just backed the original question i've just found it like super super fast um i've not really had to do had to do anything to manually at all to to make that happen i mean the other thing we've got to kind of consider as well is the fact that you can use webflow for no cost at all you want to learn webflow set up a webflow account and you can do pretty much there's a couple of limitations but you can pretty much get comfortable with the platform build your entire site before you even need to think about spending a single penny dollar dime whatever you're actually putting the site live so you know developing sites for clients you don't have to charge them or you're not sort of taking that out of your development type especially you've got a client that takes a long time to get the ball rolling you know you can develop you can build you can do all those things it doesn't cost you a single penny you know yeah people might not necessarily know that or be kind of like thinking sort of going down that route of trade of thought yeah the the web flow pricing actually is probably worth i know we're probably running a bit over time but it's probably worth just explaining like the brief version because um it's not clear i'm not going to defend them it really isn't clear honestly i think it's just it's weird how it's how it's done but um anyway if you go to the pricing page it says that there are site plans and account plans and it basically says there are two plans and that makes you think oh i need to pick one do i need a site plan or do i need an account plan the way it works is is that to use webflow you need an account plan right that's that is like one monthly fee for all your websites and it's like 16 bucks a month or something like that there is a free account plan but you get a maximum of two projects with that if you want if you want to have in development unhosted webflow call it it basically means you've not got your own domain connected to it you've got a webflow domain and you can publish that you can show people that people can come and you know you can actually host your website unhosted yeah on webflow as long as you don't mind not having your own custom domain and you can just you know some people do do that um so i think that's like the light account plan is 16 bucks a month and you get up to 10 unhosted projects 10 projects just in development and then i think the there's a pro which is unlimited then if you want to make there are there are some limitations with the unhosted as well there's a limit to the number of cms items like posts and things you can have as well but it's plenty enough to get a site like ready you know more than enough and then at the point that you wanted let's so let's say one of those sites let's say i've got 10 i've got the 10 plan limit and i've got 10 on hosted sites i've maxed out my account plan like the light one i think that is right if now one of those is ready to go live and we've got a custom domain and we want to hook it up you then need to buy a site plan which is like hosting for that particular site and that is like 16 bucks a month or 20 bucks a month or something or something like that which is the hosting by the way you can actually transfer that to a client and have the client pay webflow will build the client for you and we'll add your markup that you choose onto that as well so you don't actually have to pay your clients paying the bill anyway um now what happens with the site plan is it increases multiple times like you get thousands of cms items and i don't know um but that all they took it was yesterday that i figured out how this works when you buy a site plan for one of your sites it now frees up that slot in your account so now you've got nine websites and a spare slot for another one yeah that makes sense it does it does that's how the pricing works but maybe they need to get you on the sales page to explain it to people yeah just explaining just like simple normal language english or something you know would be would be good just did they have the details on there and actually when you know what it is and you go back and read it you think oh actually that does make sense but most i've had several more that i can't cut out how many people have said to me have you figured out the pricing yet like no i haven't i think i've got it now fingers crossed they'll change it tomorrow now it'll be completely different yeah yeah so this is a question for you now then dave so let me just pull this up on the screen so when would you recommend one option over the other so when would you say wordpress is a better choice to webflow or would you just basically say these days that actually you think webflow is the better option i must say i know this probably is a bit controversial but i actually for a lot of people would recommend using webflow um if they haven't invested a ton of like time or you know just invested a lot of energy into using wordpress so like i certainly wouldn't say to somebody don't use wordpress it's a terrible platform you want to put all your eggs in the webflow basket because that's just not the case you know if you're trucking along with wordpress and doing really well carry on using it because it's great i've kind of got like the luxury i had the luxury i suppose of having just a bit of time just to mess around with it i haven't actually got any clients you know um so i i had the luxury of just trying it and messing about and having a learning curve and it was fine for me to take a few weeks or even a couple of months to to figure it out so but i think if you're maybe you know getting a bit tired of the constant needy child nagging of plug-in updates and plug-in update conflicts and plugins updating and breaking your sites and having to worry about configuring stuff and hosting and security and all that kind of thing then i would say it's actually worth giving it a go um i'm not sure it probably does appeal to a certain kind of person or not but i would say i can't really think of a website that i would want to build with any sort of functionality what it can't do i i should say i mean there are actually third party like membership plugins there's a if you just search webflow membership integrations webflow i've got a page with all kinds of them so that's great but like if you wanted to build an online course platform yeah it's not going to do it you know you've not got the you've not got the lifter or learn dash or anything like that that the wordpress has got but it's not really intended for that you know it's it's not going to be for that anyway yeah yeah wordpress is database architecture struggles massively with the complex uh database structure and relationships of those kind of sites anyway so i would use a platform that is dedicated to it and i'm with you on that one absolutely because i'm looking at um to releasing my first course next year and yes yes um but i've kind of looked at the self-hosted you know like you said learn dash lifter lms 2 lms all those kind of things and not to take anything away from them but again it kind of goes back to that you have to have a pretty hefty dedicated platform as well as video hosting security all those kinds of different things that when you start off looking at oh okay i buy the software and it's going to cost me 200 200 pounds a year and then my hosting is going to cost me 10 pounds a month you know for cloud basic cloud hosting well that's fine if you've got 10 or 15 people on there yeah but then when you scale which ultimately is what you want to do you're going to look at what's your concurrent users you know how many people are actually going to be taking this course at the same time and then you might have to scale your cloud hosting or you know your vpn at the vps sorry to say um yeah accordingly and that can then very quickly get very expensive you know yeah i've had long long chats with a prominent online course um training company in the wordpress space actually um many many times and they're kind of wordpress based and they actually can't they've had to tweak uh learn dash and all the other kind of tools that they've had to kind of put together they actually can't update them anymore because they've had to customize them so much just in order to be able to have those kind of you know concurrent users um their hosting bill is astronomical you know because of it and that's one of the reasons why i thought i ain't having that i'm just going to just use a platform that's going to do all of that for me thank you very much exactly i think you've just got to look at logic and going back to what we're just talking about now i mean wordpress 5.6 has now rolled out today and you can already see in the different forums the different facebook groups on that there's already that sense of impending doom in some people because after 5.5 and elemental three coming at the same time and all the problems that different people had for whatever reasons that's put the kind of fear into people that update into a major revision like this is something that is hard going plus the fact if you've got 100 clients all around on wordpress you can't honestly realistically create a hundred staging sites to test that combination of website out not without losing a load of money you know it's going to take that's going to take you weeks to do realistically as a as a one or two man brand you know so this is a a real benefit to using the tool like webflow or an nms packet uh platform you don't have to worry about those things you can take a little bit of a cut off the top you know webflow makes that super easy and you don't have to worry about security updates all those kinds of different things which you do realistically have to do with a platform like wordpress yeah yeah yeah obviously the plug-in architecture of wordpress is also its greatest strength yeah we go back to trade-offs again he just keeps going back up you know that is the reason why wordpress is so ubiquitous it's why it powers up 300 of the internet or whatever the stat is you know because you can extend it and and and make it do literally whatever you like so but you know with that then there is the trade-off and the trade-off is the maintenance and the updates and the clashes with other plug-ins and um you know some dodgy developers who i don't know probably don't test things properly before they make those updates and things like that so yeah exactly but we'll take two more questions and i think we'll wrap it up then because i'm conscious of keeping you uh all evening dave so we're going to do is ask this one from mr fairy cake and this is just basically but do you have to pay for hosting separately with regards to webflow no no no no that's it so you pay for a site plan for the site if you want to hook up your custom domain and that's your hosting all all done so they host it for you which for me is like brilliant fantastic uh because i can just get on with running my business yeah i mean that's the thing is as a busy business owner that's you want to concentrate on creating content creating courses you know outlining what you're going to do building your business spend time on your business not stuck in there faffing about making sure your website doesn't go down or your course is going offline because there's 20 people on there or something so i think all those things you know there's a quality of life that often goes unnoticed when you kind of like you get down deep in the trenches as it were and i think you know sometimes it's just nice to have something that just works that you just don't have to faff about with yeah that it was one of the things that i grew a bit tired of really i think there's all sorts of stuff but it was the kind of anxiety of thinking oh no i've not looked at my website for a while yeah i don't look you know i've gone back to my own design build website i actually upgraded to elementor three only the other day actually because i just couldn't be bothered with the whole thing um i've upgrade i've updated on several other sites and test sites and things and and played with it extensively but and uh i noticed that there was some enormous i know that they changed the code um so i'm not i'm not having a go at elementor but i know that they changed the structure but you know suddenly pre all of this three the version three stuff you know just kind of go back and something's just gone my entire blog section went just disappeared like a few months ago and styling just disappeared and just just gone it's like oh my god it's because such a thing updated and it now conflicts with something else and it's just something i could kind of just do without really exactly plus the fact now that with wordpress 5.5 they put in there the automatic updates which for me is something that should be globally disabled to start off with and you opt in you know it's like that's just come on it's wordpress if wordpress developers don't know that there's tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of plugins and themes and god knows what out there that can cause incompatibility and instability issues don't put something in it that's gonna make that ten times worse for people like you know people freelancing web designers you know agencies whatever it's like come on you're just making life more difficult it's like putting a pile of tax on the road in front of your car and then driving down it and wondering why oh i got a puncher well what do you know okay so one more question uh let's have a little look uh let's have a little look what i'm gonna do i'm gonna i'm gonna put richard up because richard was a little bit late coming in but he's gonna get the last question tonight so richard's asking perhaps you cover this but what about comparing webflow to a platform like brizzy cloud well i have to say i've not used breezy cloud but i have heard like brilliant things what i what i i've gleaned about it and tell me if i'm wrong is that it's kind of quite landing page focused would you say that breezy cloud is a really dedicated full for the full package to to you know develop like fully functional websites i'm not sure yes if you want to keep it to a traditional static website then yes you can do all the things you want to do in there they are rolling out at some point um the blog integration so you'll have like a blog module which would be very akin i would have thought to the cms module in webflow yeah they have talked about some form of e-commerce obviously they can't integrate woocommerce because brizzy cloud is not wordpress based so of course i would say to sort of semi-answer the question alongside you dave for richard is i think brizzy cloud is a little bit further back down the road from a tool like webflow which is probably a little bit ahead of it in development because it has more of those dynamic features built into it even though they're still pretty streamlined or limited in what you can do with them to an extent to the scope of them i would say you still you still have those in there so you could use it as a blog you could use it as a resource you could use it where you want content management or you want to give the client the access to add their own content without having to touch the design aspect of it so i would say there's some similarities with a tool like brizzy cloud but also enough sort of like differences to to make them sort of like chalk and cheese as it were yeah i i mean from what i know of it um it strikes me that that breezy cloud is just for a different purpose and a different audience and a different need um i know that to start with actually the the the thought that you could have a really simple cloud-based tool where you could just create landing pages really quickly and just create stuff um there's there's an enormous amount of value with that the the tool that you were testing and and teaching the other day you know swipe pages is a is a similar thing as well it's for a specific um specific thing and i think webflow is a much more kind of in-depth full professional you know website building framework and platform um yeah yeah like i said i think you write on that one that you know webflow has a bigger uh tool set to it brizzy cloud breezy brzee whichever we want to talk about yeah i don't know no i think what brizzy has going for the brizzy cloud is take the hosting site away from it i like the the synergistic link between you can build your site on the brizy server the cloud servers you can hold you can host it somewhere else but you can have that link between the two so you could still go back to your cloud account update the and push those changes to your own server that's something i think is really quite cool quite innovative from from what they're doing over there but i think you know when they bring out the cms options i think it will then go up another step and get closer to the type of thing that you're doing with a tool like webflow yeah just just to say with webflow i know a few people that do some fancy stuff actually connecting between webflow and wordpress so um i don't know whether you know adam lacy uh who does uh split hero there's the wordpress split split testing tool um adam is a is a great developer and he actually uses because he loves webflow so much he's a he's a you know he's a hardcore wordpress developer really so what he does is he he uses webflow as his builder so he actually builds his pages his templates you know basically just just uses it as a page builder and then he uses a service called you desley u-d-e-l-s-e-y i think it's i think it is you desley i think it's just udezly.com right um and it provides connectors between web um like webflow and shopify wordpress ghost like jam stack as well these kind of new fangled light headless cms and so what he does he uses you desley and he connects to he creates basically it packages up his webflow site as a as a custom wordpress theme so he doesn't need a page builder doesn't need all like a whole host of other plugins and it provides this like nifty little uh static page editor like bar at the bottom of the wordpress of his wordpress site so clients can actually go in and like literally just like edit you know on the screen on on the page and change stuff the stuff that he's allowed to be changed the client still has to log into wordpress to edit like posts you know blog posts and custom posts and things like that but so he's been using he's been using that um and it's it's he just absolutely was telling me about it the other day he was very excited so there is there is there is a way to kind of use both of them to use the strengths of of both yeah i think i think the webflow community is definitely growing and probably finding other ways of combining various different tools together to create a sort of hybrid approach to creating your content creating a site so i think i think it's a kind of exciting time at the moment to see what's going on and how you can start to utilize those tools to create something that works for you i think it's a really exciting time and i think tools like webflow are absolutely needed to give the industry a kick up the butt because i think that's the reason why you've got tools like editor x coming out where that's the next level of your wix kind of thing gone away from the the very simplistic to something that's incredibly powerful i mean if you tried it but editor x is that's a bit of a beast of a platform yeah i gave it a go actually i got in on the beta test when it came out and i tried it and for about i don't know 20 minutes and i thought this is blowing my tiny mind yeah not the most straightforward and easiest thing to do okay no so i want to say thank you very much dave so i'm going to just hand it over to you now so you can just tell anybody exactly where they can find out more information about yourself and the kind of things that you're doing now with dayfi.com yeah brilliant okay yeah so you can find me at devfoy.com which is a new site i built it in this platform called webflow i don't know if you've ever heard of it and the focus of that i've i've wanted a long story short i love teaching people tech you know teaching people wordpress and elementor and things like that i absolutely love it but i've also had this burning desire to inspire people who have got tech knowledge to teach i mean there's just so many benefits that i've had in my own life and um it's something that i ca i believe i can teach other people to do most definitely so i started this new site which is basically um i've only just got going but my aim is to uh just you know i'm gonna be creating like youtube content and some some free stuff and some paid stuff as well to help people who have got tech expertise tech skills who um probably haven't maybe thought that they could they could teach online and enjoy all the benefits of that kind of business and lifestyle um for me to show them exactly how to do it so that's that's where you can that's where you can find me awesome stuff thank you very much dave so i just want to wrap things up now and say thank you very much dave for joining me tonight for in part in your experience of webflow hope everybody's enjoyed this and uh if you comment if you missed the live stream drop your comments into the comment below the video for the replay and i shall see you tomorrow evening for another lockdown live a little bit of an impromptu one we can talk about a few things that are kind of going on in the community at the moment with elementor and wordpress but that's it from me tonight thank you very much for everybody joining us and thank you very much dave awesome bye

Channel: WPTuts

Views: 3,231

Keywords: WPTuts, dave foy, dave foy elementor, wordpress vs webflow, webflow vs wordpress, dave foy wordpress, dave foy courses

Id: hX1uSg2UWdg

Length: 103min 19sec (6199 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020