How many times have you dreamt about making your website? Not hiring a professional but doing it on your own? Why didn’t you? Something must have dissuaded you, something technical, and our bet is your lack of coding skills.
Well, with the help of Webflow, this is no longer an obstacle. This web development platform allows you to create a sleek and responsive website without writing a single line of code. In other words, this drag-and-drop editor handles all the coding behind the scenes.
Once you master Webflow, no one can tell the difference between a WordPress site and a Webflow site. Still, how does one go about mastering Webflow design? Here are six tips that may provide you with an answer.
1. Think about the identity of the site
The purpose of the site is the most important thing about it. So, the design needs to reflect the niche from the landing page.
This is why, for most organizations, a logo is usually not too complex and represents the image related to the respective industry. For instance, if it’s an educational institution, it has a book as the focal point, while a sports organization may have a ball, a boxing glove, etc.
The overall design should represent this same sentiment. Sure, you want the design to be unique, but you don’t want it to be too avant-garde that it’s hard for first-time visitors to figure out what you do.
People generally lack the patience to stick around and interpret your artistic vision. This is one of the reasons why minimalism is such a great idea when designing a site. Minimalism, however, doesn’t mean flavorless or devoid of identity.
Company colors are usually something that you can incorporate regardless of the industry.
The same goes for high functionality and incorporation of CTA. If you’re an e-commerce business, your CTA will be titled “BUY NOW,” On a news site, it will say “READ MORE.” The essence is still the same.
Remember that the way you organize your site also affects your identity. Sleek customer experience, well-structured architecture, and intuitive navigation say a lot about your corporate efficiency.
If the entire interaction seems easy to handle and flows naturally, the users will make the same impression of your entire organization. This results in higher trust levels and, by extension, higher conversion rates.
2. Follow tips from professionals
There are a lot of professional workflow agencies, and if you want to become the best Webflow development company, you need to borrow a tip or two from their playbook. There are so many tips that you should follow, like:
The key thing to remember is that even if you’re working alone, you can always establish collaborations and partnerships to help you grow.
3. Focus on the quality of visuals
Webflow lets you focus on the website design's creative side and completely ignore coding and other technical factors. This means you’ll be able to pick the right visuals for the site.
First of all, high-quality images will make your site slower to load. This is a huge problem. About 25% of your audience will leave immediately if the site fails to load within the first four seconds.
Even those who stay will have a more negative customer experience, which will put a mark on their experience with your brand as a whole. The key to advanced visuals lies in optimizing images for the web without lowering the quality. There are two ways to do so.
First, you should choose the right image format. JPEG and PNG are generally considered safe bets. Most importantly, you must find a suitable image compression/optimization tool.
Next, you should pick a less resource-heavy video format. Adding videos to your landing pages boosts your conversions and slows you down. Why not use 3D animation or GIFs instead?
This way, you can achieve a similar effect without going too much above and beyond to change things. Most importantly, your images, animations, videos, and GIFS match the broader context.
This means you must be a skilled photographer, know one, or have a particular talent for choosing the right ones. Ideally, you would ask your clients to provide the images or take screenshots of the platforms (or product images).
In some industries, visuals are more important than in other fields. In e-commerce, photos are used to portray your selling products. They may also contain persuasive instances of social proof.
4. Stay consistent
The visual brand is one thing in the eyes of web designers and something entirely different in the eyes of the user. As a user, you’re subconsciously (passively) soaking in the design.
This means that when something’s off, a user knows it, even though they can’t exactly pinpoint what it is. This is why it’s so important that you exercise consistency.
What does this mean? You need to develop some visual principles and always stick to them. For instance, you always want to use the same typography. You also want to stick to the same color palette at all times.
When choosing this typography and deciding how much whitespace to use, you should also consider mobile users. Not all fonts are as readable on all devices; always pick fonts that favor mobile users. In terms of fonts, computer users are already good to go.
You would be surprised to learn that some website developers make the mistake of changing the layout of their pages.
You get your audience accustomed to one setup and expect them to immediately switch to the next. Moreover, you expect them not to get frustrated when things aren’t where they want them to be.
5. Work on the SEO
One of the biggest factors for you to focus on is the SEO. To understand the SEO, you need to understand all the ranking metrics.
You can start by improving your landing pages. Bounce rate is a huge problem, and if people leave immediately upon reaching your landing page, you’re in serious trouble. On the other hand, great SEO design will make people stay for longer.
Great site architecture determines how Google crawlers see your site. With a great site architecture, they’ll index you much sooner than expected, which is a boost.
With great on-site SEO (through metadata and other design-related factors), you’ll be ranked better and get better traffic.
For all these reasons, a Webflow designer needs to start thinking about SEO as early as possible. Auditing a website and reintroducing all the factors that were supposed to be there from the beginning can be incredibly difficult. So, why not do everything right from the get-go?
6. Think about the collaboration
The key thing to understand is that there’s never one person working on a web design workflow. The platform is ideal for working with team members. Utilizing this platform can make a huge difference in major projects or scenarios in which a team collaborates.
Another thing you can do in Webflow is create an approval process. This means that everyone makes suggestions for their changes; you review them and accept the most suitable ones.
This also allows for advanced multi-channel work since Webflow allows integration across different platforms (websites, digital assets, mobile applications, etc.).
On workflow, you can create a library of pre-made components. This makes brainstorming a lot easier because everyone can quickly check what the integration of these components would look like. Trial and error become simpler to handle, and there’s no drawback whatsoever.
Brainstorming is supposed to be quick, and if you have an unnecessary technical complication, it will kill the process. So, with the workflow provided by Webflow, it should be a minor inconvenience.
Wrap up
In the end, the technical aspect of mastering Webflow requires a different type of commitment. The key thing you should understand is that the general sentiment is more important. Technical skills can be learned, but an efficient web design workflow needs to be understood.
As a Webflow developer, you focus on an end project and the best way to get there.
This requires you to understand what your users want, the brand’s needs, and how to pack all of this so that it fulfills all the SEO requirements. This is far from easy, but it’s what being a Webflow designer is all about.