Comment by ryanSrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanSrich | Hacker News Reader

Interesting UX.

Certainly more complex sites would need more complex controls. I have a love hate relationship with Webflow. On one hand I'm much faster coding HTML and CSS by hand, but Webflow handles the things I don't want to handle. Stuff like collections, pagination, forms, etc. Can I build all of those things? Sure, but it's a waste of my time if I can click a button and get a form up that sends me an email in less than 30 seconds.

There are so many things that Webflow does not do though. Stuff like excluding pages from an autogenerated sitemap (no idea how this isn't a feature), sending a follow up email when someone submits a form (I need to use Zapier to do this), gaited content that's user specific (something like memberstack, but better), more control over managing large numbers of pages. Like if I want to add a word to every page title instance of every page, I have to go into every single page's settings and update it. For a site with 100+ pages it's not feasible. I could list a dozen other missing features.

So do you see Typedream competing with Webflow, and getting into more complex controls, and even building some of the integrations you have listed as native features (which I'd personally love so I don't have to have 1000 subscriptions just to run a marketing site), or is the vision to stay simple, and target other use cases?

Interesting question, to be honest we're still navigating this. Our goal is to stay simple, while reaching feature parity with other website builders.

We want to take a different UX approach to most of the features necessary for website building, to make sure beginners can make a functional website with almost no learning curve. Of course, that's a huge challenge :D.

And yes, we do plan on building the frequently-used integrations as native features. Our plan for the near future is to build a native CMS, forms, gated content like Memberstack, some simple animation, and email newsletter. We're sort of taking inspiration from Ghost & Notion on UX, and SquareSpace/Webflow/etc for features.

However, we probably are not competing directly with Webflow, as our target users are quite different. Webflow seems to target designers that require complete control over every pixel. While for us, we focus more on builders/founders that want to get something out fast while keeping sites looking pretty & modern by providing design defaults.

>Like if I want to add a word to every page title instance of every page

This is interesting. what is the usecase here ? what other similar kinds of stuff do u need to do ?

Well an easy use case is a name change, or even a convention change. Let's say I have 100 pages that have titles like this:

<COMPANY NAME> | <PAGE NAME> | <CONTENT>

Well, Webflow doesn't give me the ability to:

1. Change any of those variables (they're hardcoded text). The only templates you can use here are for collection items (ex: using the name of a blog post in the title). It doesn't give you any options for basic pages.

2. I can't change their order or anything about them at a higher level than on a per page basis.

3. And let's say for some dumb reason, 6 months down the line Google penalizes me for using "|" in the title, and now the convention is "-", I have to go into literally every single page and update it one by one.

Ah really interesting, we haven't thought of this. We are building a CMS feature right now so probably similar to your first point, it could be possible by changing the CMS template.

Have you had any solution that allows you to do this with other website builders?

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