Building our V1 website
There are so many ways to build a company website. It can be fairly overwhelming. Do you build from scratch (e.g. using React)? Or do you use a full landing page builder?
As an engineer, we are inclined to build everything from scratch to have full control over the UI + data. The downside of this when you are building a company is that you, if you are a technical co-founder or early technical hire, the majority of your focus should be on building the product, not the website.
The goal of the website is for customers to clearly understand your brand proposition. You should use whatever tool will enable you to quickly get your site up while still having the control you need in the UI.
We chose to use Webflow. A very common choice for startups. The key advantages are:
- Helped us customize our site to our brand. We can fully control + build out our UI with the drag and drop HTML elements // CSS controls. This is important because we want our site to fully represent our brand and we didn’t want to be tied into a basic template.
- Helped us have more equal contributions and go faster. My co-founder is a fairly technical PM, but she wouldn’t be comfortable making PRs to Github to change CSS, so it gave us both equal access to making UI changes in the Webflow interface.
- Helped us build our SEO presence. Our blog has been a top priority since we started Dryftwell to start building content to drive traffic organically to our site. In travel, SEO is especially important. Lucky for us it’s also really fun articles to write with our team. Webflow has a CMS built in to make it easy to build out custom blog pages.
- Helped us stay within budget. Our plan right now is $20 which is super affordable for us. Cheaper than even just hosting with other tools. A great price point for startups just like us.
For now, our greatest win with Webflow is it allows us to spend time working on building our internal tool (in React) and our mobile app for our customers which will be launching this summer.
If you are planning a trip to Austin this summer (our beta city), head over to our Webflow site, www.dryftwell.com.
Fill out your trip details info in the Typeform and we’ll get in touch with you soon to pair you with a local who will help provide custom recommendations for your trip on what to do/see and where to eat/drink.
