We’re picking Framer for our marketing sites and you should too

Engineering
2 min read

We’ve been building marketing sites for 15 years. In the beginning, we had a few choices:

  • Static HTML (upload new content via FTP)
  • Drupal
  • WordPress
  • Dreamweaver (UI based site builder from Adobe)

The line between where design ended and development began was clear, but the feedback loop was tight. Designers created everything in pixels. Every state, every gradient, every button was an image. Responsive design wasn’t a thing. You were constrained to fixed widths and unlimited vertical space, so designs were stacked. If you wanted something positioned differently (breaking the stack), you would give it specific coordinates, and it would stay there (absolute positioning).

It didn’t take long before the emergence of interactivity and increased demands for content generation took hold of the internet. Content became less of an art and more of a commodity. It was about volume, keywords, and search engine ranking. In short, you needed a CMS (Drupal or WordPress), and if you wanted to stand out, you needed interactivity (shout out to jQuery). The web was becoming even more dynamic!

As a result, tools like Dreamweaver, a UI-based site builder, were never really worth the trouble. You simply didn’t have the flexibility needed to meet your needs. With the subsequent emergence of mobile browsing, high pixel density screens, and touch interactions, frontend development became a full-blown engineering initiative. Gone were the days when you could write some HTML and CSS and YOLO it.

For years, not much changed. WordPress emerged as the clear CMS winner. A vast library of templates became available, and developers would either build their own or adapt existing sites to meet a business’s needs.

And then a few things happened:

  1. PHP lost market share to JavaScript
  2. DOM manipulation frameworks like React emerged as the frontend frameworks of choice

As a result, fewer developers on teams wanted to work with WordPress sites. They wanted to use the same stack they were building software in, and websites now required a PhD in software development just to deploy. Your CMS might be an instance of WordPress, Contently, Ghost, etc., hosted on a separate server from your actual site. You’re now consuming their APIs with some kind of static regeneration mechanism whenever new content is published on the front end.

My sense is that this has created an even bigger gap for marketers and designers to feel connected to a site’s outcome. And perhaps most importantly, it made the process of iterating on a site’s design and content slow.

These changes reinvigorated the need for a Dreamweaver-like product that could meet the demands of teams wanting to make a brand impact but still maintain the speed that a platform like SquareSpace or Wix afforded marketers.

Webflow arrived, making all of these promises with a built-in CMS and a UI-based site builder that was fully customizable. I used Webflow for a few sites and gave up. It required all the knowledge of frontend development but felt no faster than writing code and usually required some amount of code to achieve the level of interactivity I wanted.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Framer, formerly a mobile application prototyping tool, pivoted into a marketing site builder.

Their biggest contributions were the incorporation of Framer Motion into their product in a mostly intuitive way, just the right amount of abstraction to make it easy for designers to latch onto, and their embrace of code components.

The product isn’t perfect, but it has meant that we now only need to staff a marketing site with a designer to achieve 90% of the outcomes we want. Occasionally, we need to write a custom component, but we warn against overbuilding a marketing site before you’ve found a fit for your product.

All of our designers are now well-versed in Framer. It lowers the cost of site development and, in my opinion, has increased the quality of the outcome without sacrificing speed.

If you’re interested in making the switch, let’s chat about how Bread can help.