>> Yeah. What what what I'm going to do is

as the designer, why is it just that it's easier if you've used Figma? That's why they like Framer. Is that what you think, Zach? >> No, I think that what they are most concerned about, at least the designer founder group, is a they can it's a lot easier to make things very very very flashy in frame. the time that it takes to create really like you know dribbleesque animations or fun stuff like that. It's easier to do in framer like you know we did that thing for Sanja where I have those looping rotating images that spin around on one another to do that in web flow. It's a little bit harder and it requires more steps. It's possible and you can do it. It was just way like in in framer it was click rotate you know 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 wizzywig than Web Flow is where you can actually move things on the canvas. But that does come with a lot of drawbacks you know if you have actually 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 um what did we someone said this at Valoon 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 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 going to 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. >> Zach, have you looked at Figma sites? >> Yeah, they're horrible. >> They're horrible. Yes. really bad. um for now that and I should caveat that the previous comment with with that as well but it's for now it is not a enterprise level or I would say even just scalable tool so to speak framer um or Figma sites you know there we used Figma sites to send out brand guidelines for a client but that's because the brand guidelines have no market util 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. >> Yeah. What what what I'm going to do is I'll give you like I have some notes of just things that I've I've written down over time of like how these things stack up next to each other. Uh so like Web Flow, 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 but 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 any everyone who uses web flow who knows what they're doing uh uses is rem. So like rem the the value for you know like spacing and stuff. So like pixels don't we don't use pixels like no one should use pixels. That's like an accessibility standard is using rem or m 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. Uh, so it's like this is to 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. I think Wix is the only other one with margin. and and web flow uh many of them have limited CSS variables. So 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. Um like inheritance of 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 Web Flow actually hits on that the other ones don't. So those are all like my big gripes. Um but I think there's like a broader question which is like why why are so many people picking it over Web Flow to build their SAS marketing site? Like why would they pick it over Web Flow to build? Is it just ease of building? >> 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 going to have some downstream side effects that you're not going to be very happy with and you should just eat your meat and potatoes. Um, and I get like the point of something like Framer is like we want to skip over the dev phase, you know, we just we don't want to have to go through that. But at the same time, we noticed this with the clients that we've seen that are on Framer. It's like, well, you actually have to like you still have to design stuff and there's still a lot of iteration that has to be done. Like, you know, Frame 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, you know, like 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 want to 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, Frame is not a bad place to start. Um, 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. Framer is not a great tool for that. >> Yeah. >> As a marketer, Corey, do you have like if you didn't know anything about web flow, do you think that you would be attracted to like, oh, I can spin up something on frame that looks like so awesome so fast? >> No. I mean, I've never, you know, I 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. Um, if anything, you know, I've always been a fan of Web Flow because, uh, 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 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 um that to me just like feels like you know kind of a a deal breakaker. Um but I understand where people 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 cuz it's like oh 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 customcoded sites because they're like, "Oh, 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." 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 I've had this before in previous jobs where I write the copy, hand off to a 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, um, so we're going to 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 going to sit in a backlog for months and months and months." Um, >> yeah, >> 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. Um, but one other thing I'll just mention about custom code, one of the drawbacks is the technical SEO challenges because ironically and unfortunately, you know, uh, we saw a stat on a slide at Valocon where it was like 95 to 97% of all sites are built on some sort of um, component-based front-end JavaScript framework like React. React, for example. Um, 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-ole with technical SEO challenges because oh this particular framework um the 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 metad descriptions and metal titles are either missing or they're all the same or they're missing a certain variable. So then I have 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 that I'm playing whack-a-ole with. And like it's really is kind of just a nightmare. Whereas you get something like web flow for example. And I keep telling this, I don't I don't even know where the idea came about that Web Flow 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. >> There's a big red flag at the bottom that's like, "Hey, your headings are out of order." Like you you would be hard to miss. Uh and they like they try to point it out. basic fields for all the things that you need to put in and you're 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 >> y >> generated and updated. I've had issues with customcoded sites where it was like, "Oh, 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 you take for granted all the things that come out of the box of something like Web Flow once you start using something else. [Music]

Why you shouldn't use Framer for your website

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