You have hundreds of website builders to choose from, but what makes Webflow the best of the bunch?

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Webflow is a cloud-based platform that combines CSS with visual design tools — allowing you to design, build, and launch simultaneously. In that basic definition, it probably sounds similar to a drag-and-drop website builder (like Wix or Squarespace).

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But that explanation feels a tad reductive. Business owners and designers alike gravitate towards Webflow because it gives you full control over the look and feel of your website.

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What exactly do we mean by that? Well, there are two major facets of your website: the visual design and the code that makes it appear and function as intended. Web developers can look at a few lines of code and visualize how the actual product will look, but if you showed those snippets to a web designer or a client, it would probably look like a bunch of gibberish.

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Webflow combines all the HTML, CSS, and Javascript into a visual canvas, helping designers “code as they go” (and phase out the lengthy development stage) — delivering your website faster without sacrificing the functionalities you need.

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It’s also hands down the most efficient hosting platform for speed and security. Thanks to the clean code and less reliance on plugins, we can optimize the performance out of the box and achieve higher Google PageSpeed scores!

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Shortening project timelines and slashing budgets aren’t the only benefits of Webflow. We’ve only scratched the surface of its capabilities. Let’s dive into the 10 reasons we build our clients’ sites in Webflow and see what it could do for your business!

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Top 10 Reasons Create Ape ♥️’s Webflow

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1. Collaboration is King

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For some companies, building a website is a one-man job. But at Create Ape, we know two heads are better than one. Between researchers, designers, project managers, and branding experts, you’ll have all hands on deck to ensure your website is the best it can be.

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Webflow allows us to work together in the visual designer to build a cohesive product. While one team member constructs the page layout and applies your branding, a content writer can write messaging in the Editing Mode as they work.

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Plus, if a client or project manager wants to make a change, Webflow lets you leave comments (just like Figma) for the design team to address before reviews.

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2. High-Level Personalization

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Webflow is chock full of themes and templates that make quick designs a breeze. However, Create Ape understands that your brand is unique. Luckily, the platform’s expansive styling features help us turn a blank canvas into a singular digital experience for your business.

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Features like the asset folder store, organize, and implement your logos, videos, and photography. It also helps us keep typography, sizes, and colors consistent throughout each page by assigning classes to headings, buttons, and other interactive elements.

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By weaving your branding directly into the code, Webflow captures the details that make up your visual identity — which speeds up the build and gives us more control over the presentation of each page.

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3. Live Prototyping

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Websites always look better with movement, animations, and working buttons that take you page-to-page. Unfortunately, we can’t see how everything gels in a mockup.

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With Webflow’s prototype builder, we can implement interactions as we design to produce a live prototype. Instead of showing a static page, we present dynamic content to exhibit how the final product will behave, complete with scrolling behaviors, hovers, dropdowns, and more.

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This live prototyping process has been a game-changer in building client confidence. It allows us to present the closest thing to a live website while still leaving room for edits. Plus, there’s no better feeling for a designer than seeing your work come to life right before your eyes!

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4. Responsiveness Made Simple

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More often than not, your audience is accessing your website from their phone. If it’s not optimized for mobile screens, 73% of your users will leave (and good luck getting those sales/leads back).

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Webflow knows that responsiveness should never be an afterthought, so the platform presents the screens in different views to see how each page transitions across desktop, tablet, and mobile.

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If a design looks perfect on a desktop but needs an adjustment on mobile, editing an element on a smaller screen won’t impact the layout on the larger screens. No irreversible mistakes here!

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As a bonus, the views for tablets and mobile let you add custom interactions for those devices (swipes, taps, you name it). This helps us make your digital experience more fitting for whatever scenario your user encounters your website in.

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5. Client-Friendly CMS

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Your website should always be teeming with the latest happenings at your company. But updating the content is always easier said than done. Especially if you have to fiddle with a complicated content management system endlessly.

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Webflow’s collections simplify posting blogs, case studies, FAQs, and other dynamic content. It’s as easy as creating a page template, setting up a folder, and importing your articles. Every new file in a collection will automatically inherit the template properties; all you have to do is plug in the content and post!

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You can also customize fields to feature new content on other pages throughout the site, ensuring your audience never misses a beat from your business.

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6. Eliminate Plugins

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Plugins are great for expanding the functionalities of your site, especially if you want to implement a new feature or flow quickly. However, the bloated code and slap-dash integration can seriously impact the speed and efficiency of your user experience.

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But the biggest drawback of plugins is that outdated software is responsible for 56% of WordPress website hacks! All it takes is one hacker finding a vulnerability in the plugin, then private information, SEO ranks, and brand reputation are all at risk.

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While building out functionalities from scratch takes a little longer, Webflow lets you customize the design and necessary steps. Plus, you don’t have to rely on a third party for software updates — putting you in control of your website’s speed and security.

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7. Automated Audits

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Regular website maintenance is a tedious yet crucial part of every digital business. But what if we told you that your hosting platform could perform all the error tracking for you? 

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All Webflow sites have a built-in audit panel that flags usability and accessibility issues before you go live. This handy little tool is a web designer’s secret weapon, helping us identify broken links, contrast problems, and general housekeeping tasks as soon as they crop up.

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We all know how important accessibility is to your search engine rankings. The audit panel takes compliance further by pointing out nondescript text and skipped heading levels — ensuring your website content is user-friendly and SEO-ready.

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8. Search Engine Controls

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As if the audit and responsiveness tools weren’t enough, Webflow has a robust suite of in-house SEO tools to help your website rank higher in Google’s algorithm.

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Meta titles and descriptions are just one piece of the puzzle, and they’re easily defined under each page’s SEO settings — helping you target different keywords depending on the page’s content. But the technical capabilities are much more expansive.

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With Webflow’s SEO manager, you can control page indexing rules, 301 redirects, and schema markups. You can also verify your site with Google to access your search data, allowing us to see how users find you and fine-tune your content.

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9. Fast Landing Page Builds

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You never know when your next landing page is around the corner. In the WordPress days, you had to plan in advance to launch pages and campaigns simultaneously. 

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You can still build a landing page from scratch in Webflow, but why bother when you can create dynamic and easy-to-edit pages in Team Templates?

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Team Templates are site designs you can clone and edit as needed — meaning your code and interactions are pre-built. All you have to do is replace the copy and images, then the page is ready to release alongside your latest marketing campaign.

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If someone from your team has limited design and development experience, you also have the option to establish a landing page collection with pre-built content blocks. Now, everyone in your organization can build beautiful landing pages with confidence!

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10. Flexible Pricing

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And now, for the most convincing part, pricing! You’d think having all these features and functionalities in one hosting platform would cost an arm and a leg, right?

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Luckily, Webflow has several pricing options to suit all our client’s needs. The pricing plans cover anything from simple, static pages to large, content-driven websites, and they’re scalable to accommodate your growing traffic.

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Plus, you can bill yearly or monthly (with a pretty sweet 22% discount if you bill yearly)!

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Code As You Go!

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Our Create Ape team loves Webflow because it closes the gap between design and development, helping us create user experiences that are true to our vision. But we can’t possibly overstate the incredible benefits for our clients!

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From expedited project timelines and reduced costs to simplified content updates and website maintenance, Webflow is the mutually beneficial hosting solution that makes our partnerships thrive.

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Are you ready to see your website come to life right before your eyes? Are you ready to switch and set your digital business up for success? Start your Webflow redesign project today!

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Our team at Create Ape is delighted to finally share with you our latest The Manifest award! We’ve been named one of the most-reviewed web development agencies in Los Angeles. This is an incredible achievement for us and our team. We know that the year has just started, but we think this is truly one of the highlights of 2023.

If you are one of those people who don’t know The Manifest, they are a business ranking platform that aims to gather and verify the hard data, expert insights, and actionable advice that you need to build your brand and grow your business – to provide the practical business wisdom that manifests in your success.

This award means a lot to us because it represents our amazing relationship with our clients and partners! With that being said, we’d like to give each and every one of you a huge shoutout for being one of our supporters. Thank you so much for trusting us and our team to help you with your development needs.

To celebrate this award, here are some of the best reviews we’ve received thus far! 

“Create Ape is a top-quality agency that offers full service at a lower cost than a comparable agency. We get quick and responsive service, outstanding design, and technical expertise from them, and their results are excellent.” Executive & Consultant, Medical Equipment Company

“I was impressed with their responsiveness and eagerness to move the project forward. Create Ape was very good at understanding the scope of work and quickly quoting us an accurate price. They had a flat hourly rate and shared a range of estimated hours the work would take to complete, which helped us budget appropriately. Furthermore, they only charged us for hours worked.” Engineer, Medical Device Manufacturer

What are you creating? Tell us a little bit about your project and someone from our team will get in touch!

Businesses are spoiled for choice when it comes to resources to create a website. Between free templates and a huge range of hosting platforms, almost anyone can create a website for their company.

The DIY method seems like the easiest solution, but will it set you up for long-term success? Will your brand stand out against a jungle full of custom, user-approved digital products?

Call us biased, but UX/UI design is well worth the investment because of its ability to bring in users and keep them coming back for more. According to this article from medium.com, UX design has insanely high ROI rates (some as high as 301%)!

Users also agree about the power of UX because it benefits them as much as the business. In fact, 3 out of 5 users agree that a positive user experience is more influential than marketing or advertising.

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If you’re interested in seeing how UX design can help your business, but don’t have the resources to create a website yourself, don’t panic! That is where we come in.

Digital agencies like CreateApe have both the services and expertise you need to redesign your digital product or create an all-new website from scratch. Leave your project with us—and we’ll deliver something that your company and your users can be proud of!

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CreateApe's Resources to Create a Website

• Research
• UX/UI design
• Website development
• Branding
• Marketing
• Copywriting
• Video
• Digital Products
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Benefits of Hiring a UX Agency

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We’ve talked ad nauseum about the financial benefits of UX design and how it affects customer satisfaction, so let’s take a step back and look at how an agency improves the product itself.

Free website templates are great for building personal websites or portfolios, but professional companies need something more substantial.

Free website templates usually have restrictions that can negatively impact the business (and the user experience by extension).

The Drawbacks of Free Website Builders

• Page limits
• Limited storage
• Limited features
• No customer support outside contact forms
• No custom domain name
• Advertisements/company branding
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Your branding means more to your users than the free website builder’s logo. Competing brand identities on your page can confuse and distract the user. It also just looks less official.
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Benefits of a Professionally-Built Site

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UX/UI design is so much more than just the website. It covers everything from discovery to new products and features post-launch. It also tells you everything you need to know about your users and how to keep your brand moving forward in the competitive market.

Let’s say you’re a healthcare provider that needs a professional website for patients to book appointments. CreateApe can build as many pages as you need, design appointment portals and insurance features, create a chatbot for customer support, claim an original domain name, and conceptualize a unique brand identity from scratch.

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The result is not only a fully-functional website but a more valuable brand and products that set you apart from your competitors.

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How CreateApe Builds Sites

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CreateApe is a full-service agency, meaning all your resources to create a website are in one place! No matter what stage of development your product is at, we can step in and fill in any gaps you need to get it finished.

Let’s walk through the typical process we take to create a website from the ground up.

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Our UX Process

Jungle Guide: 

UX design is heavily reliant on research to understand your industry, your business, and (most importantly) your users. We start each project with a robust research phase so we can bounce ideas off each other and find solutions that work for the users.

If we’re redesigning an existing website, we’ll look at your Google Analytics to understand your website traffic and user behaviors. We also do a HotJar evaluation to see where users are most active or dropping off.

If we’re creating a website from scratch, we skip this phase and move straight to competitive research and user interviews. Research is important for both kinds of projects because the UX design should be built around your data and findings. 

Without this research, you have no idea who your users are, what they want, or what drives them away from a website. You also need to understand who you’re up against so you can make your product better. We’re here to help you navigate this process from beginning to end.

The Jungle Guide, CreateApe’s signature UX evaluation, help you ask all the right questions in the discovery phase and lay the groundwork for a perfect product! Read more about CreateApe’s Jungle Guide in our UX Strategy Blog! 

UX/UI Design:

Once we have research and strategy to guide us, we can start building your future site! We start with wireframes, which are like blueprints. We can determine how many pages we’ll need, where content lives, and site navigation.

By creating this primitive structure, we can focus more on creating logical user flows instead of being distracted by aesthetics. A nice hierarchy of information that will help the user quickly accomplish their goals is what we’re after.

That being said…looks are important! Who said you had to sacrifice style for substance and vice versa? Our UI designers take those wireframes and ramp everything up into a high-fidelity mock-up.

We'll take your branding elements and use them to create visuals. For example, where will logos be placed? How will we use your color palette to guide the user through the interface? What sort of icons will we use? Etc.

Website Development:

Once we finish with the designs, we turn everything over to our full-stack development team. Our front and back-end developers can handle everything from code creation to interaction design to deliver a fully customized digital product.

Whether or not you have a development team on staff, our team can guide you through the development process from beginning to end into whatever framework you choose. Much like our UX/UI process, every solution we create goes through vigorous user testing and QA.

Leave it to us to make sure everything on the user-facing side of your site works as intended. If you’re creating a project from scratch or need to bring someone on to improve the performance of your existing site, CreateApe is your all-in-one web development resource. To read more about hiring a website development team, check out our blog!

Launch:

Our job isn’t over once we launch your MVP. When you bring us on as your UX partners in crime, it’s just the beginning!

Once your product is in front of your users, we’ll help you perform regular website maintenance to ensure everything is search engine friendly and working like it’s supposed to. This means updating software, fixing broken links, optimizing load speeds, stress tests, updating certificates, plugins, and theme updates.

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You’ll also have our full creative team at your disposal depending on your needs. If you need to add a new page, redesign a contact form, create a new product video, or write a conversation-starting blog post, you can call on your friendly team of UX apes and we’ll swing into action!

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What can CreateApe Help Me With?

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At CreateApe, we’re so much more than just website design. We’re advocates for your users within your business goals. We’ll stop at nothing to find solutions that work for you and your users.

In the spirit of going above and beyond web design, our expertise extends further than UX/UI. Anything creative you can think of to take your site to the next level, we can do it. Our design team is staffed by wizards in their field that can take your ideas from concept to reality.

When you hire CreateApe for a project, you have all these resources to create a website at your disposal.

CreateApe's Services

• UX Research - Understanding your competitive market, your users, and their nuances.
• UX Design - Building end-to-end flows that help users and business owners accomplish their goals.
• UI Design - Designing visuals to boost the brand’s identity and strengthen the user experience.
• Website Development - Creating highly-customized code for your product across multiple devices.
• Branding - Conceptualizing a unique personality and visual identity to set you apart from your competitors.
• Marketing - Promoting your brand and digital products with personalized campaigns and collateral.
• Video - Telling your brand's story by scripting, animating, and editing video content.
• Copywriting - Communicating on your behalf by developing a unique voice and tone to guide your users.
• Digital Products - Whether you need a website, app, ebook, or landing page, our apes can make your vision a reality.
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So, How Do I Build My Perfect Site?

There’s an abundance of resources to create a website available to you, but will they really give you the results you’re looking for?

If you have an idea for a digital product or a clear business goal, a UX design agency (*cough* like CreateApe *cough*) can help you figure out those pivotal first steps to get off the ground. We’ll help you figure out exactly what you need to reach your goals and connect you with the resources to get you there.

So, whether you need a fully-customized product, strategy, or specialist to help create your website, drop us a line!

Still not sure about starting your project with CreateApe? Check out our UX/UI design case studies to hear our success stories.