The Webflow is great for designers and business owners who want an easy way to build their websites; it’s also a very powerful tool for developers. The combination of Webflow’s Designer and Editor Modes offers developers – a visual editor to quickly layout and design sites, and a code editor to enhance functionality and customization.
Visual designer mode
The webflow developer designer mode features a drag-and-drop visual editor that makes lying out and designing websites incredibly intuitive. Instead of struggling with code, you can drag in elements like text boxes, images, and buttons, and arrange them visually on the page. The Designer makes it simple to create beautiful, responsive website designs with little effort. Flexbox is baked in, so achieving complex multi-column layouts is as easy as dragging a couple of div blocks. The styling options are also very robust, allowing you to tweak colors, fonts, spacing, shadows, and more visually. They are more guessing at CSS values and syntax or always tweaking style sheets to get the right look. With the Designer, you style everything visually and create responsive breakpoints just by dragging and resizing elements.
Code editor
Once you’ve got the core design and layout built out visually in Designer mode, you can add advanced functionality and customization using Webflow’s Code Editor. The Editor gives you direct access to clean, human-readable HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code that Webflow generates in the background as you build sites visually. You are able to understand and edit all of this auto-generated code to add more advanced functionality.
- Add custom CSS and JavaScript libraries like Bootstrap, jQuery, etc. It allows you to tap into the capabilities of popular frameworks.
- Build intricate interactive elements and effects using JavaScript and CSS. You have the full power of coding available.
- Connect to external APIs, databases, and web services to enable dynamic functionality like live content, chatbots, forms, etc.
- Customize any aspect of the site’s code from HTML structure to CSS values. The world is your oyster!
The Editor integrates seamlessly with the Visual Designer, so any changes you make to code automatically reflect visually. You don’t have to constantly switch between code and visual views to see what your code changes look like – everything is synced.
Powerful site hosting and deployment
The benefit of Webflow for developers is its integrated hosting and one-click deployment. When you’re ready to launch your site, you deploy to Webflow’s servers or any external host with a single click. Hosting on Webflow’s servers is incredibly fast and secure, plus it includes free SSL encryption.
Webflow also handles all the heavy lifting of optimizations for you. Your sites are served minified, compressed, and blazing fast. The hosting plans are very affordable for personal and client sites, starting at just $12/month for basic sites. For larger commercial sites, Webflow also offers enterprise-grade hosting and scaling options. Overall, you get seamless hosting and deployment baked right in – huge time savings versus traditional hosting and launch processes.
