Why we built our website in webflow
What does Octave do? We design and build websites and applications. They could include online tools, data dashboards, member areas, single page apps with offline capability and all sorts of tricky integration and database stuff. We have a solid platform and system in place for our developers to spin up anything we could dream of. Building websites comes as second nature to us. It’s our bread and butter.
But, when we updated our website a few months back we made a decision to do something we wouldn’t normally do. We built our website in Webflow.
What’s Webflow you ask? Simply put, it’s an in-browser design tool that gives you the ability to design, build, and launch a website. To be clear, it’s not what our developers use when building websites because it limits what we have control of, it makes complex logic hard to integrate in a tidy way, and for larger and more complex websites, the code can get a little unwieldy.
So why did we do it? If we’ve already got something so good going, why Webflow?
We did it for speed, efficiency and for Logan, our Client Director. Due to Webflow’s visual interface, building a website is relatively fast. Once it’s built, anyone in the team, including Logan, can easily add articles and keep it updated with the latest goings on. And finally not having our website on our dev stack frees our developers up to keep their focus on our client work.
At Octave, we often ask ourselves what’s the most efficient use of our time to create the best result? In this case Webflow was our answer.
Because Webflow is easy to update, we are now talking about the work we do and other business related happenings on a much more regular basis.
We also discovered that Webflow is a great way to quickly prototype ideas or complex interactions that are difficult to describe in detail with other prototyping tools. As a designer, it makes my job easy and fun when I have tools that support the clear communication of information and ideas. I’m excited when I can add another tool to the toolbox.
As a side note: alongside the existing set of websites we currently maintain, we now have a handful of simple sites built in Webflow including; Reo Ako, and Matariki.
