Webflow is a visual tool that allows you to create and design your website. You can start by creating your site's structure, then adding content and styling it to your heart's desire. With the built-in CMS (content management system), you can easily manage all of your website's content without ever touching a line of code. You can craft your own design from scratch without reaching out for a template.
In this article, we will explore how to build a website in Webflow, a powerful yet user-friendly web design platform. We'll cover the basics of creating a website, from setting up your account to adding pages and content. You'll also learn how to style your website using designer tools and create custom animations and interactions.
How to build a website in Webflow?
In the world of website design, there is a plethora of software and tools. So which one do you choose for your project? Webflow, right? That’s because building a website in Webflow is a great way to get a professional-looking website without having to learn coding. In this section, we'll walk you through the steps of creating a website from scratch in Webflow.
If you have a tight working schedule, you might find it difficult to carry out the overall methodologies for building a website in Webflow. To help you, we’ve come up with a Webflow website development service. You may knock on our door if you need quality service on time. However, let’s explore what next!
Set the goals and purposes:
Whether you’re going to design a website for yourself or your client, the website must have specific goals and purposes. The core objectives of launching the site should be clear to you to connect with the targeted audience. You need to be aware of the products or services the site is going to offer. It’s also essential to have a solid understanding of the methods of persuading the traffic to increase revenue.
There is no point in investing your money and effort unless you get something in return. It will be easier to build a brand identity for your website when you know what you’re exactly going to do with it. To get the best outcome, you might experiment with the website’s scope from close. As a result, it will be straightforward to set out the design by pouring down your acquired knowledge.
Get the UI/UX design ready:
It seems frivolous to start a website without getting the UI/UX design prepared. Seriously speaking, you must focus on the user experience and interface to outplay your competitors. A large portion of the success of your business heavily depends on how your audience interacts with your website. Your traffic is your main asset, so you need to think about it. You need to ensure a stunning experience for the audience to allow them to make an unwavering drive for leads.
To illustrate, you have to create your wireframe by conceptualizing the entire functionality, content structure, and elements. You need to design a mockup that expresses your brand and suits your business the best. Always try to give realistic structure and direction throughout the website to make a significant difference.
Integrate the best-performing CTA buttons, primary action buttons, and other necessary icons carefully. Besides, you need to give supreme importance to the image overlaying, dropdown menus, placeholders, error messages, and other aspects that can bring about an appealing user experience and interface.
Create a hierarchy of text styles and fonts to make the textual content stand out. Specify the eye-catching colors and gradients that can impress the traffic and increase the website’s appearance. Keep in mind that you have to optimize your content after creating wireframes. Otherwise, you will face several hindrances to getting your website highly ranked.
Open up your Webflow dashboard:
Now it’s time to get familiar with the Webflow interface to gain Webflow-endorsed expertise. To bring your abstract design to reality, you need to sign up on the official Webflow website. If you’ve intended to build websites with Webflow regularly, you need to go for the paid plan to start with. The paid plan will allow you to build a myriad of websites with no future annoyance. After entering the dashboard, you will find a "New site" option. You just need to click on the button to get your hands dirty with Webflow technology.
You will experience the full power of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript without comprising the design functional mockup you’ve already illustrated. It’s no wonder that you will find a large number of Webflow templates out there. You can start designing your website by adhering to a particular template. But if you want to take your creative power beyond templates, you should look for a custom design.
Create your website:
Once you’re on the Webflow dashboard, just click on the "New Site" button and Webflow will bring you to the interface where you have to perform your design and development. In the left-top corner of the interface, you will find Dashboard, Project Settings, and Editor options.
The Dashboard defines where you were the first time. The Project Settings option will allow you to set up your project name, subdomain, folder, icons, password, locations, and other primary things. The Editor tab will allow you to edit the whole website. But you have to publish your website to get access to the Editor mode.
Add elements:
You will see a "plus" icon at the top of the left-hand side bar. Simply click on it and a bar will pop up to allow you to add elements. You could select sections, containers, grids, columns, and columns from the upper section of the bar to start working with a bunch of new blank pages. In the middle of the bar, you will find a div block, link block, list item, list, and button. You’re free to use them throughout your website whenever they're required. Just need to drag and drop them to the specific location.
You could apply headings, paragraphs, text links, text blocks, and many more components to the site from the "Typography" section of the bar. Media, forms, dropdowns, navbars, sliders, maps, search icons, and many more useful elements are placed in this bar to help you make your website more attractive and engaging.
Add navigation bar:
To set up a navigation bar at the top of your website, you just need to drag the bar and place it in a specific position. The position, style, and animation can be customized further using the designer tools. To fine-tune your navigation design, you may use flexbox. It’s a built-in webflow component that will align the elements so they are responsive in different viewports.
You can also reach out for a grid, but flexbox seems ideal for listing or sequential elements like a navigation bar. To include a form, you have to drag it from the bar and locate it smartly. Style the form with the designer tool as well.
To allow you to experiment with the overall layout of your website after completing the design phase, there is also a "layouts" option.
Add symbols:
At the time of designing an appealing website, you will certainly need various symbols. And that’s why the Webflow interface comes with a collection of symbols under the "Symbols" option. You simply need to click here and look for a suitable one. It’s also possible to create a new symbol as per your requirements.
Navigator:
The "Navigator" tab is placed below the "Symbols" to let you straightforwardly navigate through your web pages. This tab will allow you to jump into any section of your website.
Create pages:
Then you will come across one of the most important sections, called "Pages". You could create as many pages as needed for your website here. But some static pages will be auto-generated. You may make changes to the settings. The Webflow interface will allow you to create CMS collection pages, utility pages, and e-commerce pages. You will also notice the pre-created pages in this section.
CMS collections:
If you click on the tab below "Pages," you will get familiar with the essential CMS Collections option. In this section, you can create collections and add new collection fields. Generally, you need to create blogs, categories, authors, tags, and many more common fields for the collection. You could customize the fields accordingly as per the necessities of your project.
Next, you will find the e-commerce section. It’s especially designed for building e-commerce websites. In another article, we’ll learn how to build an e-commerce website in Webflow.
Assets section:
Let’s move on to the "Assets" section. In this section, you could put all the assets, such as images, logos, gifs, and other graphical elements, together for further use.
It’s easy to find a particular asset from countless collections using the search bar. General settings, audit, search, video tutorials, and help options are all available in the same sidebar. If you feel the need, you can seek their assistance.
Style:
On the right-hand sidebar, a style bar will catch your attention first. The overall design process can be done in this section. Press on the tab and look at the pop-up bar. The bar will present several segments with unique CSS properties. Suppose you want to style the heading-3 section of your site.
Hence, you need to select the section first, then configure its layout, whether it will be positioned in flex, grid, or anything else. Then come to the below section. To select the padding and margin, just scroll over the rectangular shape.
Once you’ve done the previous steps, your next move is to size, overflow, and position the heading section. Then come to the typography and set the properties as per your heart’s desire.
Add font:
If you want to set a new font, you have to click on the dropdown box next to the "Font" option. Then you will find an "Add font" option at the top of the list to insert Google fonts.
Add background image and effect:
You can also add a background image, set borders, and various effects such as transitions, transforms, border shadows, etc. to bring real life to your website.
You will see a style manager next to the "style" option that will help you to keep track of the entire styling process. The "interaction" section is also accessible from the interface's right-top corner, where you can add interaction and animations to your website. We have covered this topic in the following step.
Moreover, we’ve pointed out how to create style guides for each section to have an effortless design session. You need to stay tuned for the next parts.
Create a style guide:
Once you start working on a new project from scratch, you will see a blank canvas. You will find a sidebar of components on the left upper side of the page. And a designer tool will appear on the right upper side. Instead of beginning your web pages’ design right away, you may create a style guide on a new blank page. You can create a large number of classes that will be required to complete the design. It will facilitate your designing process and save you from the hassle of repeatedly calling CSS properties.
Suppose, in your proposed project, you have to work with countless images, different forms of heading tags, paragraphs, forms, a navigation bar, and many more useful components. Some of them might have generic properties and attributes.
Hence, you can create generic class names by applying the precise CSS properties. Furthermore, you only need to call the classes and use them in the specific location where they match. Keep in mind that you can also customize a previously defined class if required.
Meanwhile, if you want to ignore the original design of a primary class in a definite section or div, you may add another class next to the primary class in the selector tab. The new class will define the design this time, inheriting no properties from the primary class. And that’s why Webflow has brought about a new revolution in the web design platform.
Add animations and interactions:
If you’ve already done the basic design, now it’s time to give them real life. How? You need to incorporate vivid animations and vibrant interactions to make the entire website catchy. You will discover an "interaction" section queued last in the Webflow interface. Once you click on it, you will find a pop-up section with many components. A wide range of animation tools will be at your fingertips to empower you to build rich and complex animations without the hassle of coding.
You have to select the specific sections where you intend to add animation. The animations vary in events, such as clicks, mouse-overs, mouse-ins, scrolling, and so on. You are free to select the events as per your choice. As to the types of animations, you will be highly thrilled to see the assortment of animations.
To illustrate, you could easily create scroll-based parallax animations and tie motion to scroll progress. The animation tools will enable you to transform element style, size, and position based on scroll progress over the entire element or a specific element.
Moreover, Webflow will allow you to add expressive animations to your site when a user moves down the page. You could create precise microinteractions based on mouse movement. Do you want to create multi-step animations? Well, Webflow will let you do so; you just need to set up the "load actions" table. You will enjoy a new level of interactivity on the "on click" table as it will show you the modals, panels, and other hidden elements.
Do you need to add present interactions? It’s also feasible as Webflow will present you with more than twenty pre-built interactions and animations. In fact, the overall process of integrating your preferred animations is easy. You just need to reach out for the specific items to bring them into action.
Ensure responsiveness:
Webflow is a great platform for creating responsive websites. The design interface is easy to use, and you can create prototypes very quickly. When it comes to creating a responsive website, Webflow really shines.
You can easily change the width of your columns and create custom breakpoints to ensure that your website looks great and functions well on all devices, from desktop computers to smartphones and tablets. Thankfully, there are a number of tools and techniques you can use to create a responsive website using Webflow.
One of the best ways to ensure responsiveness is to use Flexbox. Flexbox is a CSS layout mode that makes it easy to create layouts that look great on all devices. With Flexbox, you can create columns that flow gracefully across different screen sizes, and you can easily adjust the width and height of elements as needed.
Another way to ensure responsiveness is the pre-built media queries. Media queries are inserted as breakpoints to allow you to target specific device sizes and orientations. So you can tailor your layout and content accordingly.
Test and publish:
Now that your website is designed and built, it's time to test it. In Webflow, you can test your website by clicking the "Preview" button in the top-right corner of the screen. This will open a new window where you can view your website.
Once you're satisfied with your website design, it's time to publish it. In the upper right-hand corner of the screen, click on the "Publish" button. You'll be given a few different options for publishing your website.
If you want to publish your website on your own domain, select the "Domain name" option and follow the instructions. If you don't have a domain name, Webflow offers a free subdomain under webflow.com.
Congratulations! You've just created a website using Webflow. Nothing can deter you from building a fully-featured, highly functional, and responsive website. But if you are still struggling to grasp the basic concepts, you may ask us at any time. Besides, we are always ready to offer you our first-class Webflow website development service to help you grow your business.
What is the difference between Webflow and other website builders?
Webflow is a unique platform because it provides both design and development capabilities. This makes it different from other website builders that only allow you to create designs. With Webflow, you can create a completely custom website without having to write any code yourself. Additionally, the platform offers a wide variety of features and templates that you can use to create your site.
Other website builders, such as the most used WordPress, Wix and Squarespace, are limited in terms of design options. They also require you to know how to code in order to make any changes to your site. This can be a challenge for beginners who are not familiar with coding languages. Additionally, these platforms are not as customizable as Webflow. Overall, Webflow is the best choice for anyone who wants complete control over their website's design and functionality.
What are the best features of Webflow?
There are many great features of Webflow, but some of the best include its ease of use, its design flexibility, and its powerful built-in tools. To illustrate, Webflow is extremely easy to use. Even someone who has never built a website before can create a beautiful website in Webflow. The interface is intuitive and user-friendly, and the drag-and-drop functionality makes it simple to add elements to your page.
Webflow is also very flexible. You can create any type of website with it, from a simple one-page site to a complex e-commerce store. And if you want to make changes to your design later on, you can do so easily. There are no restrictions on what you can or cannot do with Webflow. Finally, Webflow comes with some powerful built-in tools that make website creation even easier.
How do I get started with Webflow?
If you're looking to create a website, Webflow could be a great option for you. It's a platform that allows you to create and design your website without any coding. Here are some steps to help you get started:
- Go to webflow.com and click "New site."
- Select the "Blank Site" option in the canvass
- Enter the name of your site and click "Create."
- Start designing your site.
- To add text, images, or other elements to your page, select the element you want to add and then drag it onto the page.
- To change the positioning or style of an element, select it and then use the options in the Properties panel on the right side of the screen.
How do I use Webflow from scratch?
To get started, simply sign up for a free account, and then create a new project. You'll be prompted to choose a template for your website. There are several templates to choose from, or you can start with a blank canvas.
Next, add some content to your website. You can add text, images, and videos using the editor. Webflow also includes several built-in features, such as slideshows and galleries.
When you're done adding content, it's time to style your website. Webflow includes several built-in themes and fonts, or you can create your own custom styles using CSS.
How do I add images to my website?
Adding images to your website is a great way to improve the look and feel of your pages. In Webflow, you can add images in two ways: by uploading them from your computer or by using a photo from the web.
To upload an image from your computer, click the "Upload" button in the toolbar and select the file you want to upload. Once the image has been uploaded, you can drag it into place on the page.
If you want to use a photo from the web, enter the URL of the photo into the "Image" field and click "Insert." Webflow will automatically resize and crop the photo to fit on your page.
How do I add text to my website?
Adding text to your website is a great way to help improve the user experience and provide additional information about your company or organization. In order to add text to your website, you'll first need to create a text block.
To create a text block, click on the "Text" tab in the toolbar at the top of the screen. Then, click on the "Create New Text Block" button in the lower left corner of the screen. This will open a new text editor where you can enter your text.
Final words:
Webflow is an excellent platform for creating websites without the need for coding. However, there are a few things to keep in mind when using Webflow to build your website. Do you know how to build a website in Webflow? First, make sure that you curate all of the pages you need before starting to build the website. This will save you time later on.
Second, be sure to use the correct mockup for each page. Webflow has many different templates to choose from, so you may choose one that best suits your needs. But if you want to start designing manually, there is no obligation to reach out for a template.
Finally, always test your website before publishing it. Make sure that all of the links work and that the pages look correct on different browsers and devices. However, you are encouraged to use our Webflow website service to complete your project in a timely manner.
