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The Factory Floor is hosted by the three co-founders of Conversion Factory, the marketing agency at the forefront of SaaS growth, marketing, and tech trends. Episodes are released on Twitter one day early, @coreyhainesco.
Every other week Corey, Zach, and Nick break down what’s working right now in SaaS marketing, share real-world lessons from the field, and give you the strategies you need to outpace the competition.
You can also find us on YouTube, X, and everywhere you listen to podcasts!
Don't fall behind. Subscribe. Like. Drop a comment. Or not. The ball is in your court.
Nick Loudon (00:00)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the factory floor. Today I'm joined by guess who? Same people I'm joined by every week or two weeks, however long we wait before we post these. We have Corey here and Zach here, and we are gonna be talking about something that is near and dear to me in particular. We're talking about ⁓ website building tools, specifically Webflow and Framer.
Corey Haines (00:08)
Surprise.
Nick Loudon (00:27)
and some honorable mentions for ⁓ custom coded sites. So we're talking about website platforms and more specifically, which one you should choose for your SaaS startup or for any really other types of businesses too. We'll kind of talk about the whole gamut of everything. And we will probably argue a little bit about what thing is best, which is ideal, because it's fun to argue with people. ⁓
but we will go from there. Does that sound good to you guys?
Okay, Corey, which platform do we use the most? That's right. Okay, so disclaimer is we use Webflow, we recommend Webflow to our clients. ⁓ The reason we do is backed by a bunch of things that we'll talk about, but ⁓ we wanna be fairly objective here. Does that sound good to you guys? Like I wanna give every...
Corey Haines (01:07)
Webflow.
Nick Loudon (01:25)
option a fair shot like when does it actually make sense to not use Webflow and to use Framer or when does it make sense to use neither and custom code everything I want to be like fair to that and I don't want to just be like well we like this one best so just pick that one but there's a little bit in there
Corey Haines (01:39)
Yeah, so long as we all agree that
there's no good reason to use WordPress.
Nick Loudon (01:44)
Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty sure that all of humanity is coming to that to that realization
Zstvns (01:45)
Yeah, we can all agree on that.
And
we can add a couple other in there too. Specifically, if you are a software brand, you should not use WordPress or Wix or Squarespace or Weebly or really any of the tools other than the three that we are going to mention to build your marketing website.
Nick Loudon (02:11)
Yeah, sounds good. Okay, so ⁓ there's a bunch of stuff to talk about with this. Corey, you said that you're gonna advocate on some level for custom coded sites. So before we kind of get to like the meat and potatoes of like, do we like Framer or do we like Webflow and what are the differences? Why was that your first thought when we were like talking about, we're gonna do Webflow versus Framer? Why were you like, I'm gonna talk about custom coded sites. That's what I wanna talk about.
Corey Haines (02:38)
Well, because a lot of clients are switching off of custom coded sites or they have reasons why they wanna stay with their custom coded site. And so I feel like it's only fair to add to this discussion of like, where are people coming from or what are they currently on right now? And how do you know when to like stay on that? Or if you're just building a site for the first time, ⁓ you know, knowing what you're getting yourself into if you do choose that route.
Nick Loudon (03:09)
Okay.
Zstvns (03:09)
Okay,
yeah. Well, why don't we, I feel like that's gonna be a fairly limited number of reasons why someone would pick that. So maybe let's, or do you say otherwise? Will there be?
Nick Loudon (03:24)
Yeah, dude,
argue it.
Corey Haines (03:25)
I
have some reasons, yeah. And yeah, I feel like there's no secret for us. ⁓ well, starting with some of the pros, we were, for one, I think this conversation's interesting, because we were just coming back from Valiocon here in San Diego, hosted by Drew Wilson, which is awesome. And a lot of the discussion has been around AI, AI design, ⁓ the future of kind of like the web and how...
Nick Loudon (03:27)
Let me hear him.
Corey Haines (03:55)
web pages, websites are built and generated. ⁓ And so we were talking about, okay, well, what do people use? They use Webflow, they use Framer, they have custom coded sites, what is it? And in particular, I'll talk about some of the cons here in a second, but I thought it was interesting because, know, Drew with his startup opacity is trying to make it easier to design and.
create a shortcut to turn designs into code, which would make custom coded sites a lot easier to build and to design ⁓ versus having to basically eyeball it every single time like you do have to today. ⁓ Even though there's things where you can get some cues about design choices and in Figma, you more or less still have to eyeball it because not everything translates one to one. ⁓
But yeah, some of the pros, feel like one of the big ones is ⁓ just gonna be if you do have any kind of interplay between your marketing site and your product where you need product-like functionality in your website, that's gonna be impossible to do within a third-party platform like Webflow or Framer. So if you want a lot of product interactivity,
or if you're pulling in a lot of data from your product to display, particularly like on programmatic pages, programmatic generated pages for SEO, ⁓ you can embed calculators and build free tools, ROI estimators, ⁓ sort of a lot of things that could lead into the product that can be a more native experience. That's one of the big reasons I think.
what a lot of developers will tell you and or designers is that obviously you get full control and you have a hundred percent rain over the configuration over everything when it's your own site. So there's definitely like some pros in there. I'm not even gonna list them because I think they're pretty small and insignificant and don't really outweigh all the cons that come along with that too. But those are the main like pros that come to my mind. And I think that the pro we have to maybe anticipate
Nick Loudon (05:51)
you
Corey Haines (06:17)
is that for example, if drew can crack the code on going from design to code, that that then actually skips a whole step and makes it a no brainer to try to go from a design to something built on the web with, just clicking a button.
Nick Loudon (06:35)
Yeah, the line is much like shorter. Like why would we add in a no code builder after this when we can export it into like perfect, perfect air quotes for now code, you know.
Corey Haines (06:46)
Yeah,
definitely make it faster, but that's if and when AI can bridge the gap and other technology like opacity, for example.
Nick Loudon (06:56)
Yeah, I think when we're talking about like, we'll call them no code, but some of them are like light code builders, like I would consider Webflow not a truly no code builder, it's like a light code, light builder. ⁓ There's like the problem that all of them have other than Webflow is that it's not true clean HTML. So when you pull a paragraph in Framer,
like, I'm over here in the like panel and I can pull a paragraph onto the page. It's deciding classes and wrapping the paragraph in a div. And every time you're making changes in the, in the style panel, it's building the class structure and the HTML underneath. Whereas Webflow is the only one where it actually has true HTML that you can fully control right there. And there's no added divs. There's no added spacing that you don't manually put in or don't have full control of taking out.
and I think that's why after using Webflow for a long time, now I'm like, it's really hard for me to even want to touch the other tools because they're so it's like wearing handcuffs, even though like if you're, if you started out learning Framer and Webflow on the same day, you'd probably be able to build a site faster in Framer. Like the learning curve is lower, but once you know, you can build a site over here in Webflow.
and then you're like pushed into another platform. It's like, dude, why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? It doesn't make sense. I've watched like something else I wanted to mention and maybe Zach, you can speak to this a little bit, but I've watched a ton of videos on like Webflow versus Framer. Which one should you pick? And there's like a class of videos where it's like developers, web developers talking about the two tools. All of them are like, you must use Webflow.
if you're gonna use one of these two, you cannot use Framer, don't use Framer. All the developers say that. And then there's this whole other class of founder, designer, YouTubers who are like, Framer makes it easy, because I could do this, this, and this. And they're not concerned at all about the HTML, they don't care. They're focused on the visuals and the drag and drop easiness and the import from Figma.
And almost all of them have some sort of design background. So as the designer, is it just that it's easier if you've used Figma? That's why they like Framer? Is that what you think, Zach?
Zstvns (09:33)
No, I think that what they are most concerned about, at least the designer founder group, A, it's a lot easier to make things very, very, very flashy in Framer. The time that it takes to create really dribble-esque.
animations or fun stuff like that. It's easier to do in Framer. Like, you know, we did that thing for Senja where I have those looping, rotating images that spin around and run another.
To do that in Webflow, it's a little bit harder and it requires just more steps. It's possible and you can do it. It was just way easier, like in FrameRoot it was click, rotate, set on a loop and then you're done. So you're able to do a lot of really flashy stuff. It is also far more of a WYSIWYG than Webflow is where you can actually move things on the canvas. But that does come with a lot of drawbacks that you know if you have actually
Nick Loudon (10:26)
you
Zstvns (10:35)
had to worry about things like the SEO, the scalability of a site, and this is where something like classes feel like a constraint. But then you learn how to use them and they become a massive unlock because you're able to build things at such a bigger scale and make adjustments way faster. I think that what it is, it's just like, you know, with...
Nick Loudon (10:52)
you
Zstvns (10:58)
What did we, someone said this at value con and I forget exactly what it was for, but they referred to a lot of the newer AI tools. And I think Framer would fall into this category as well as the sugar of design and marketing where it's like not very substantive. Like, you know, it's, it's eating cotton candy compared to having a steak dinner with potatoes. It takes a lot longer time to prepare. It doesn't have the same kind of immediate gratification on your taste buds that cotton candy does.
but it's not freaking cotton candy. It's actually something that's gonna sustain you for a long time. I think that's what they are getting at. They want that quick hit and spike of dopamine that comes from getting something, but they don't see the long-term negative side effects of going about building a site like that. I think that's the main drawback with it.
Nick Loudon (11:49)
Zach, have you looked at Figma sites?
Zstvns (11:53)
Yeah, they're They're really bad. For now, and I should caveat the previous comment with that as well, for now, it is not a...
Nick Loudon (11:54)
They're horrible, yes.
Zstvns (12:08)
enterprise level or I would say even just scalable tool, so to speak, Framer ⁓ or Figma sites. We used for Figma sites to send out brand guidelines for a client, but that's because the brand guidelines have no market utility to them apart from just making it really easy for their team to access some of the stuff that we had made for them.
Nick Loudon (12:32)
Yeah, what I'm going to do is I'll give you like, I have some notes of just things that I've written down over time of like how these things stack up next to each other. ⁓ So like Webflow, Framer, Wix, Figma sites, how they like stack up next to one another. And just some of the things that should be included in all of these, aren't clean HTML is like always the first one on the list. It's like, look, you should be able to fully control the HTML, but something that...
And everyone who uses Webflow who knows what they're doing ⁓ uses his REM. So like REM the value for, you know, like spacing and stuff. like pixels, don't you, we don't use pixels. Like no one should use pixels. That's like an accessibility standard is using REM or ⁓ for like scaling purposes. And framer only supports it on text, I think. Everything else, nothing is REM. Everything is pixels. Figma sites doesn't support REM and Wix doesn't support REM. So it's like, this is...
Like if you ask like a traditional or any web developer, old school, who's been around for a long time, they're going to tell you that the, like the industry standard is that you use REM and like the, these website builders, that's what they do. They build websites, don't have it. It's like, it just seems crazy to me. Margin, a lot of them don't have margin. think Wix is the only other one with margin and webflow. ⁓ Many of them have limited CSS variables. So.
Zstvns (13:46)
Don't do it.
Corey Haines (13:49)
Hmm.
Nick Loudon (13:58)
they'll take like, if you set a variable in Figma or in one of these other ones.
when it's actually like seen as the, in the HTML itself, like if you actually look at the code, it's just raw values. It's not actually stored as variables, which is not good. ⁓ Like inheritance of classes and styles isn't there. So if you have like a heading one, you can't add another class and then change the parent class to have it inherent on all of them. So there's like all of these like major gaps that Webflow actually hits on that the other ones don't. So those are all like my big gripes. ⁓ But
Zstvns (14:21)
Yeah.
Nick Loudon (14:34)
I think there's like a broader question, which is like, why are so many people picking it over Webflow to build their SaaS marketing site? Like, why would they pick it over Webflow to build? Is it just ease of building?
Zstvns (14:50)
I think it's for the same reason that teenagers pick cotton candy over steak and potatoes. It's really good and it's delicious at the beginning, but if you keep having it, you know, year over year over year over year, you're gonna have some downstream side effects that you're not gonna be very happy with. And you should just eat your meat and potatoes. ⁓
And I get like the point of something like framer is like we want to skip over the dead face, you know, we just we don't want to have to go through that but
at the same time, we notice this with the clients that we've seen that are on Framer, it's like, you actually have to, like, you still have to design stuff and there's still a lot of iteration that has to be done. you know, Framer is really good, but it's not going to be able to do the same kind of image generation that Figma can or something in Photoshop or Illustrator or even Figma has a better vector editing tool than Framer does. And
You move through the steps, it's almost like a mark of maturity, your willingness to walk through the steps to do them right of get your design finished first, then move into the development of it, I think plays a major role in it. So if you're looking to really validate something and you don't wanna spend a whole lot of time on it, you're not even sure if it will scale, but you know that you need to change eventually, Framer's not a bad place to start. ⁓ Or if you're a designer who...
is going to build a portfolio site that doesn't need a lot of the same kind of marketing potential and prowess, then use it. But it's not what I would consider a business-ready marketing website. Especially if you're focusing on things like programmatic SEO, conversions and leads, like Framer's not a great tool for that.
Nick Loudon (16:43)
Yeah. As a marketer, Corey, do you have like, if you didn't know anything about Webflow, do you think that you would be attracted to like, I can spin up something on framer that looks like so awesome, so fast.
Corey Haines (16:56)
No, I mean, I've never, you know, I think the value prop for Framer is it's like Figma, but you're building a website. And I'm like, well, I didn't know how to use Figma either. So that doesn't like appeal to me at all. ⁓ If anything, you know, I've always been a fan of Webflow because ⁓ even if you're not a designer, even if you're just working with a template, you can still kind of make little tweaks and changes or at least
Nick Loudon (17:08)
Yeah.
Corey Haines (17:23)
kind of componentize sections and then swap out the content and you can kind of treat it more like a UI kit versus when I see something like Framer, it feels like you're always starting from scratch more or less. And that to me just like feels like, you know, kind of ⁓ a deal breaker. ⁓ But I understand where people are coming from. And I think this is just a problem of when people are first starting out because I think for the same reason people choose Framer.
when they're first starting out, it's like, I'm going to use this to make a really nice landing page. Like literally just a single page website. People do the same thing if they're more technical with custom coded sites, because they're like, I know Tailwind CSS and I have this template here and it looks nice. So I'm just going to use this. I'm already building my app. I can just have one additional file here. That's for my homepage landing page and then just be done with it.
Nick Loudon (18:02)
you
Corey Haines (18:21)
But then they don't realize, oh, now for anybody else to come in and make changes, make updates, add content, create pages, manage the CMS, it's going to be virtually impossible in custom code. It's going to be harder in Framer. But particularly with custom code, you know, I've had this before in previous jobs where I write the copy, hand it off to the designer, and then I put it in the backlog for developers to build. And then it sits there for three months. We've had this with clients too, where we're like,
hey, here's all the designs. And then it builds up this backlog. And then they're like, so we're gonna have to cancel because now we have too much work for our developers to work through. And it doesn't make sense for us to keep paying you to make things that are just gonna sit in a backlog for months and months and months. ⁓ That to me is like one of the biggest drawbacks of both custom code and something like Framer because you also have to get your designer to design it. But.
Nick Loudon (19:04)
you
Yeah.
Corey Haines (19:20)
One other thing I'll just mention about custom code, one of the drawbacks is the technical SEO challenges because ironically, unfortunately, you know, we saw a stat on a slide at value con where it was like 95 to 97 % of all sites are built on some sort of component based front end JavaScript framework, like react, for example.
Nick Loudon (19:25)
you
Corey Haines (19:50)
⁓ And unfortunately, a lot of those frameworks that are JavaScript based like React are actually not very SEO friendly. And so I've gone through this with a couple of my side projects where I am just playing whack-a-mole with technical SEO challenges because, ⁓ this particular framework, the adapter that it uses to generate the page renders the content.
or like the structure before the actual content per page because everything's componentized. And so all of the meta descriptions and metal titles are either missing or they're all the same or they're missing a certain variable. So then I to write another script to overwrite that and inject it onto the page after it's rendered. And then there's a bunch of other things I'm playing whack-a-mole with and like it's really, it's kind of just a nightmare. Whereas you get something like Webflow, for example, and I keep telling this,
I don't even know where the idea came about that Webflow is not good for SEO. Because I'm like, I couldn't think of a better tool for SEO. Like it's just almost impossible to screw up. And that's a huge benefit.
Zstvns (20:53)
Yeah.
Nick Loudon (20:54)
What is that?
Yeah,
there's a big red flag at the bottom that's like, hey, your headings are out of order. Like you would be hard to miss. They like, they try to point it out to you.
Corey Haines (21:10)
Yeah. And like there's basic
fields for all the things that you need to put in and you're not going to have a lot of the technical issues about when things are rendered and how, and how it's displayed or picked up by Google to be. It's like, it's all just even like the site map is automatically updated and generated and updated. I've had issues with custom coded sites where I was like, ⁓ the site map isn't updating for whatever reason, because the gem I installed it's
there's something conflicting with it and whatever and it's like you take for granted all the things that come out of the box with something like Webflow once you start using something else.
Zstvns (21:48)
The thing that blows my mind too, that I wish more teams would recognize is how much are you paying your engineers? It's probably somewhere around like 200, 250 per hour. Maybe, maybe even more. Yeah. We'll say 250, make it, make it even. Whenever you have to make an update to anything on your site.
Corey Haines (22:02)
geez. Yeah, that's pretty like conservative-ish.
Zstvns (22:14)
there goes $250 minimum for an hour because they are gonna have to stop whatever they're working on to go do this thing. Even if it's changing a period to a comma on a paragraph, they're the one that has to go in and do it and there goes an hour where that could have been spent on your product and that adds up. Let's say they do that once a week for a year. Even if they get four weeks vacation, that's 48 hours, a full
120 % of a work week that could have been dedicated to your product. And they're spending a lot more than that. Like we were speaking with a client recently who was debating whether they should or should not switch over to Webflow. And to make changes on their hard-coded site, it's gonna take their engineering team just to implement some new copy. It's gonna take them four to five days to get that done. Copy.
Corey Haines (22:50)
Mm-hmm.
Nick Loudon (23:02)
you
Copy. It's crazy.
Corey Haines (23:12)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Zstvns (23:14)
And that's their
engineering team, the people who are supposed to be working on their product. Your engineering team should not be working on your marketing website. I think that that's a ⁓ huge, no-no. Especially because they...
Nick Loudon (23:20)
No.
Yeah, I was a
Zstvns (23:31)
they don't know how to design and they aren't copywriters. So like you're taking the tools and making them gatekeepers to give lifeblood to your company. When that should be in the hands of marketers and designers.
Nick Loudon (23:46)
Yeah, the.
The one thing that I think is pretty probably clear to to most at least designers is that ⁓ Framer's really just good for them. it's like devs know that they don't wanna use Framer, marketers know that they don't wanna use Framer. And in my mind, people who are like founders who are just like doing everything on their own.
they might be more inclined to not use Framer because it requires a lot of, I think, like design visuals. ⁓ The thing about Webflow too that I really like is that it's like, okay, so here's my analogy is that all of these tools are like, think of it like you're bowling. Like Wix, you're bowling and the bumpers are up. You're good, like it's gonna get down there. It might not hit all the pins, but it's gonna get down there.
Framer is like, Webflow you're bowling but the bumpers are down. You can mess up a Webflow site. I meant Webflow, sorry. Like you could be bowling and you could mess up some classes and do some things and like you could break this thing. It's definitely possible to break it. Just like a custom coded site. Like there's no bumpers. You could break something. Like just be, you need to know what you're doing to use this most of the time.
Figma, it's like, or not Figma, all these names, exactly the same. Framer is like, you're bowling and there's no bumpers and you're also wearing socks and like the lane is tilted a little bit to the right and there's only a couple pins at the end. It's like everything just feels weird and like you can't hit all the pins, there's not enough over there. Like it's just, like everything is just out of order and in my mind, Webflow is the closest to like true control over those things. ⁓ And then I was gonna...
say something about the, shoot, what is it? frick, I forgot, it slipped my mind. Yeah, I don't know, just, the more that I use, learning to use Webflow taught me what HTML and CSS is. Like, that is something that I can take if Webflow explodes tomorrow. I have that in my pocket that I understand what HTML and CSS is and how it works.
That is not something you get when you work with Framer. That's not something you get when you work with Wix or any of these other WYSIWYG builders. You can get that with a custom-coded site, I have a hard time believing that there's really anything that makes sense if you're a developer outside of Webflow or custom-coded. I wonder if there's probably some other tools that I should be considering too. There's so many. I don't know.
Corey Haines (26:38)
For SaaS startups, not really. I think that that's, you know, we're talking about the big three right now. ⁓ Maybe the only other one that's kind of worthy of mention, because again, a lot of people use it, is WordPress. ⁓ Maybe I'll go through that just for a second, but I think WordPress kind of has like the worst of all of them and none of the benefits, where it's also very, very easy to...
Zstvns (26:42)
Yes.
Corey Haines (27:08)
mess up a WordPress site or to mess up the even the raw HTML on it. It's very, very hard to build anything that is designed in Figma from WordPress because you're basically custom coding it anyways. Otherwise we're using a WYSIWYG builder. That's a plugin in WordPress to do your designing or try to match a design. But then you're, you know, you're completely nerfed. You're handicapped. ⁓ you know, there's like,
Zstvns (27:09)
Mm-hmm.
from
Corey Haines (27:37)
there's like five guard rails up and one pin at the end of the lane. It's just incredibly difficult from an SEO perspective. All the things that used to be good about WordPress SEO are now completely outdated or obsolete or even negative indicators to Google because it might be tempting or easy to do things like keyword stuffing, which like hasn't been a thing for over a decade. ⁓ and WordPress sites are notorious for having security vulnerabilities, which also is very bad for
Nick Loudon (27:45)
you
Corey Haines (28:06)
SEO and just conversions in general, but you're going to have all sorts of things that are, that it's prone to. ⁓ WordPress is real like strength is our CMS kind of, but like, really don't see any advantages over Webflow personally. And it definitely doesn't give you any advantages for something like programmatic SEO. Cause I've looked into all the plugins and they're all very, very simple. It's basically like, Hey, upload.
this CSV and then try to match it to fields. But like that's, mean, so rudimentary, it's kind of laughable.
Zstvns (28:45)
Yeah, it's.
use Webflow. Make yourself happy.
Nick Loudon (28:50)
Well,
like I get I get why someone If they don't know how to use Webflow would be like I'm never using this like it's just too too much No, what that's that's the thing as a service provider Like if I go to the dentist Like I have a base level expectation that if they're gonna be Filling my tooth with you know filling a cavity that they're using ⁓
Corey Haines (28:59)
Yeah, you can't do it yourself.
Nick Loudon (29:20)
good materials, they know how they're doing it, it's gonna work correctly. Like there's no, like I don't, I have an expectation that things are done correctly. Like not that they get done and I don't care how it gets done, it just needs to get done. And so when someone hires us as a service provider or me specifically as a service provider, like their default expectation is that if I'm building them a website, it gets done correctly and has clean code, it has, you know,
⁓ rem scaling and it has, the variables, variables built in. has CMS where it makes sense. Like they have a default expectation that they don't even know what those things are, but they expect the right things to be in place. If I'm, if they're paying me for a website, so whether they know it or not, it's my responsibility to pick the best platform that does the most best things for the client. And I can't think.
of a single situation where if I'm being hired to build someone's website or we are being hired to build someone's website that I'm using Framer.
Zstvns (30:26)
I can't either and I'm the designer in the group. I think that even as Nick mentioned, ⁓ having to go back to Framer and learn some of the, my favorite example is if we need to create a,
a heading, an H2 heading that needs to look like an H3 or an H4. That is very easy to do in Webflow. In Framer, you have to create the Figma equivalent of six component variants for
each of your headings. So you have a component that is your heading one, but then stylized like a heading one, and you do the same thing for H2 through six. You have a total of 36 different components that you then have to use. And then if you want to change the colors on them, those are additional components for light mode and dark mode. And that's where the benefit of things like classes come in, where instead it's the same element, but you have more granular control over that
Nick Loudon (31:09)
you
Zstvns (31:34)
component and or that element and You can change it a lot more freely and then go back if you need to but the Like the drawback to all those components is it create it creates its own set of chains within? Framer and then the only person who's even able to make anything becomes your designer and then you run into the same issue that you have with the
Nick Loudon (31:45)
you
Zstvns (31:59)
with engineers is that, you need your designer working on some other stuff too, not just like, you know, if you want to spin up a landing page, your designer should be able to make templates for you and they can do this within Webflow so that you can then build the assets necessary to create a page or you use CMS based templates. And Frameware does have a CMS, but I don't think that it's the same.
to the same degree that a Webflow CMS is built out where you have a lot more flexibility over things like, I want this thing to be hidden. And you're taking into account a lot of the potential switches that a marketer might be using on their website where we need the CTA to say this, and it's gonna be conditional based on this page or whether this other element is in there. So.
But when you set all those things up at the forefront, you make it so that other people besides the designer or the web flow developer can then use the page. And I don't see that being feasible with a tool like Framer or the custom coded sites. You create bottlenecks on either one of those.
Nick Loudon (33:04)
Yeah, I think just as like a pitch around what you were saying with like CMS is that the like it I think it's their business plan framers business plan is $200 a month for their scale business plan That's like the highest most expensive business plan you can get with framer You get 30 CMS collections. So you make 30 different collections As opposed to in web flow either. It's $40 a month for their business plan and you get 40
So you get more for like a fourth of the price. And CMS is like a foundational piece of web building if you want to, as their plan is called, scale. Like you...
Zstvns (33:45)
What's the,
I didn't know this either. Did they charge per editor on Framer?
Nick Loudon (33:49)
Yeah, you get three
editor seats, max, I think. And I think there, it's like 20 bucks a pop. Yeah. So anyway, if you actually, if you want to scale, like you should be building not on Framer. That should, that like, honestly, if you're like, I have a new product I'm launching and I just need a page. I know how to use Framer and just put it out there, template, don't care. Like, great. I think that's totally fine.
Zstvns (33:54)
for the next speech.
Nick Loudon (34:15)
As soon as you want an actual marketing website, you should stop using Framer. I think it's like a good place to start. It's fine to, you know, it's fine to use card. It's fine to use Wix and just buy a $20 template, the cheapest you can find just to capture emails until you launch your product. But when you want a marketing website that has features, integrations, it has, you know, all the images, product illustrations, testimonials.
programmatic SEO pages, everything all tightened up, as much custom code as you need to do any tracking. Like all that stuff is so much easier to build and set up in Webflow than it is in Framer. ⁓ I don't know, it's just crazy. Also, here's my final challenge. We'll be done, I think, after this, unless you guys have any final words. Next time you see someone who has launched a new site on Framer, go and get a heading map Chrome extension.
that tells you what the headings are on the page. And I guarantee you, eight, nine times out of 10, they're either gonna have multiple H1s or they're not gonna have any, which is like website building 101 is that you need one H1 on your page. So I just, next time you see someone post a framer, like, I just launched this new thing, go get a heading map Chrome extension and go check on the website and see if their headings are in the right order.
and I can almost guarantee that they're not. It's because it's really annoying and complicated to do the most basic things in Framer, but at least it looks good. Final words.
Do you guys think I'm right about everything I ever said?
Corey Haines (35:56)
Hmm.
Unfortunately, yes, I think you are. No, I mean, as the marketer, I feel like I had to remind everybody sometimes that your website's number one ⁓ purpose is to be your 24-7 salesperson. And you need your website to do a job, which is to convert people to becoming customers and to make it available.
Nick Loudon (36:02)
Why don't you like that?
you
Corey Haines (36:29)
for people
to find you and you know, maybe try to like make some analogies here. It's like Framer is like, cool, you got a nice plot of land out in the suburbs, but like good luck getting people there because the SEO side of things is a mess. Like good luck creating a lot of pages. Good luck handling all the CMS or even having enough to work with. ⁓ The custom coded site is more like
you're building your own skyscraper from scratch downtown. And like you just kind of get way over your head, ⁓ way quicker than you thought that you would. It's kind of like, you know, reinventing the wheel on a lot of aspects. And then you have too much control more than you ever wanted to. And Webflow is, you know, somewhere in between it's, kind of like, all right, just outside of downtown, but it's a nice modern building.
Nick Loudon (37:04)
Hahaha
Corey Haines (37:28)
There's ground rules and it's not like, yeah, yeah, right. It's like, it's got, it's the cool coworking space just out of downtown. Yeah. And so, yeah, it might be hard to start with something like Webflow, but it's the best long-term solution for sure. Whereas it's way easier to start with a framer or a custom coded site.
Nick Loudon (37:31)
plenty of parking. Yeah.
Zstvns (37:34)
I'm probably farting.
Nick Loudon (37:38)
coffee shop on the first floor. Yeah.
Zstvns (37:58)
I have a final parting thought.
With every level of entrepreneurship, you relinquish a little bit of control. And part of that is going to be giving your, especially if you are a technical founder, you need to give up your marketing website to people who can actually market for you and design and bring all those pieces together so that people can find you. So if you're a technical founder and you're thinking of building your site by hand, remember,
Nick Loudon (38:24)
you
Zstvns (38:32)
This is not supposed to be you forever. Like you need to get this into the hands of somebody else who can take this off your plates that you can actually do the things that you're really good at. And the same thing could be said of anybody who is thinking of building a framer site. If you're doing this because you need to do it all yourself, that's fine. With your...
growth as an entrepreneur, you will have to give it up and it should go to the team that's gonna be best fit for doing the job, which is your marketing team. Your marketing website is a marketing asset and it needs to fall under their jurisdiction and control so that they can test, they can ship, they can implement changes and if you create any bottlenecks for them to do that, you are hindering the growth of your company.
Nick Loudon (39:20)
You're nothing without me you're we are all nothing without any of us yeah Okay, thanks for listening to me rant for many minutes on My web flow is better than framer. Okay? Blessings to all and to all a good night. See you guys next time
Corey Haines (39:20)
Yeah, it's all about me. Don't bottleneck me, please, people. Just get out of my way. Let me do my job.
Zstvns (39:27)
and let me do my job and let Nick do his job.