The Forgotten Webflow E-Commerce

0:34Janne Parri: Okay, Rahul, so is Webflow commerce totally useless in your opinion?

0:40Rahul Miah: Not totally useless, but it's very hard to sell, I think. It's very hard to sell. It's expensive and there's a few limitations to it. So yeah. I think that's the main

0:48Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. W

0:50Rahul Miah: Issue.

0:50Janne Parri: Which are the main limitations?

0:54Rahul Miah: I n I mean for most of our clients it's integrating it into other services. They integrating it into their social media, their Instagram, their Facebooks, other platforms just like do that straight out of the box. So yeah, it definitely has its use cases, of course. You can br create some beautiful websites on there, but yeah.

1:10Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, that's my experience too. Like there's the power of Webflow but then there's like limited capabilities on the commerce side. Like back here we usually use a third party payment provider and that's not possible with Webflow or Stripe and PayPal in that scenario. So that's a total turn off here in Finland, I would imagine that's that's a thing for many others. Yeah, yeah.

1:35Rahul Miah: Probably the issue with most of the world, yeah. I can imagine.

1:39Janne Parri: But which would be like the golden use case for Webflow commerce?

1:44Rahul Miah: It's so tricky. It's like such a niche I've always said that it's great for someone that wants a really small store that's just beautifully designed and is willing to pay the price for a beautifully designed website. If they just want a small, simple store, then there are other options that are a lot cheaper, a lot more powerful. There's a very small bubble, if you will.

2:04Janne Parri: Yeah. You kind of have to be some sort of Webflow lover or the developer has to be ⁓ one.

2:08Rahul Miah: Yeah. That's another thing. If the client sold on if the person sold on Webflow then that makes it a lot easier, but yeah.

2:17Janne Parri: How often do you end up using like the Webflow commerce or do you do more like s Shopify stuff? If we talk about commerce.

2:24Rahul Miah: I think I've only done one e-commerce website in Webflow. Every single one that I've done. I've done probably over a dozen now. Have all been in Shopify actually. It's just the default... Like.

2:34Janne Parri: So it seems, so it seems. Okay, before we go any deeper, let's do little intros. So my name is Janne Parri, you are listening to Webflow and friends podcast, and my guest today is Rahul Mia. Rahul is a designer and creative developer based in London. Rahul is a Webflow partner, a member of the Webflow Ace program. And actually, probably the first Shopify partner to appear on this show. By day he's a part of the Fishfinger creative agency team. Fishfinger is a award-winning London studio. By night, I don't actually know. He might as well be a Batman or something. Hopefully, we get some sort of confession out of him today. But

3:17Rahul Miah: You'll never know.

3:18Janne Parri: Yeah, but Rahul. If I remember correctly, your schooling was more on the creative side, but like with many Webflow folks, the technical side plays bigger and bigger role in your job. So how do you balance those two things or sides, like the technical and creative and how did you arrive at where you are right now?

3:39Rahul Miah: Yeah. I guess I always was more technical, even throughout my studies. Initially I studied computer science. Before I went into university. I was gonna go for more of a computer science or a product based job, education. And then my teacher told me, try graphic design. It can unlock more doors. I was like, Okay, I'll try that, I'll give it a shot and then ended up studying graphic design instead, which is completely on the opposite spectrum. Yeah. But I guess I was always even throughout all my projects in uni, I always tried to push the technical side, be a bit more creative, ended up eventually learning how to code, and tried to integrate that into like all my graphic work. Bit of a weird

4:19Janne Parri: Beautiful. And when did like Webflow and Shopify came into the picture?

4:25Rahul Miah: Shopify never actually came into the picture for a very long time actually. I was always somewhat I was always interested in turning code in designing in code. I've tried coding and learning coding for like apps, iOS apps, web apps. I guess this was god probably like twenty eighteen. I started discovering Webflow. Through a Charlie Prangley video? Charlie Marie, actually, Charlie Marie. I was like, interesting. This seems interesting. Cause I just like for context, my HTML background was I did a HTML JavaScript course and I did the whole course in a week. But I was like, sweet, I'm in, let's do it. And then Webflow appeared, I was like, interesting. Let me give that a shot. And then I realized I could

5:11Rahul Miah: You even though I enjoyed coding, I actually hated how CSS a lot. Just like I found it very just time consuming and I just wanted to make and create. So Webflow allowed me to do that. So yeah.

5:24Janne Parri: I used to teach like Webflow at some point and it was for a group that just learned Figma and then they jumped into Webflow and they were like, why can't I just drag everything around and so on? So there's the that struggle, but obviously it's more like towards the logic of coding. And I would imagine the course like the HTML CSS course gave you a jump start on the Webflow because that's a tough thing at the start.

5:53Rahul Miah: It definitely helped. If anything I was trying to figure out how I could implement what I did learn in HTML and CSS in Webflow. Actually the most magical thing was the code embed where I could start adding custom code and it was starting to like change stuff in the design. I was like, okay. I understand now, I understand how everything works. ⁓ Yeah. ⁓ I love just like breaking stuff and trying to figure reverse engineer how it works. So it's very much a lot of like breaking Webflow and try my best to see what I can rip make.

6:23Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, totally. Do you still end up like breaking Webflow or going over the boundaries of Webflow?

6:31Rahul Miah: I definitely started building a reputation of breaking things. It was a common thing where I just accidentally break things. Back in the day when I had a little bit more time, I would definitely had my fair share of trying to like reverse engineer Relume or like other tools to see how they interact with Webflow and that would result in A few mini bans on Webflow, the time out limits and all sorts of shenanigans... But I do enjoy trying to just push the limits and seeing how I guess it's the creative part of me, I like trying to see how I can use various parts of Webflow in different ways.

7:05Janne Parri: I'm not sure if this is one of the things you were trying to do, but like within Webflow copy pasting is beautiful and Relume is awesome because you can like copy paste stuff out of Webflow. And nowadays when people are doing like HTML with AI they kind of want to paste that right in. So was that one of the things you were trying to do?

7:29Rahul Miah: No, it's not something I personally ever just even saw that part, until recently. It was funny, I think I had a few a friend that was trying to build something similar. And they basically reverse engineered a big part of Relume and I like, Wait, I did this ages ago. I could've just given you all this work. You could have I could've helped you, but yeah, I don't know. I guess like there's so much going on these days with like AI is hard to keep up, so I'm like locked in on working and building things,

7:55Janne Parri: We will probably end up talking about AI more at some point on this episode. Because it's a topic for almost every episode. But I wanna I wanna get back to the e-commerce stuff. This is a Webflow podcast and there's Webflow e-commerce, but as you said. Like Shopify is the default or the industry standard and everybody opts in for Shopify if they are building any anything like serious in e-commerce but I also know that there's all sorts of integrations that kind of combine Webflow and Shopify. So do you do you know of those and what's the state of state of these?

8:35Rahul Miah: Yeah, a bit somewhat. All my Shopify builds I've been building probably for like five plus years now. Has always been building my site fully in Webflow and then moving it over to Shopify. Previously that I can't remember what the tool was called. But essentially it you would export your theme, it would convert it over into a Shopify theme. And it had a lot of limitations in all honesty. It's not as powerful as the tools we have today. That honestly resulted in me just trying to just learn liquid and how Shopify's coding theme system works. And then I think it was a couple of years ago, Liquify came out. For the like

9:09Rahul Miah: Liquify, don't know if you know, like lets you build in Webflow and convert it into a fully compatible Shopify theme. And that was something really powerful for me, because I'm fairly fast at building in Webflow, but not in Shopify, but I could have the best of both worlds. So our clients mostly arrived knowing Shopify. They Shopify, they to use the integrations, the apps in Shopify. Building in Shopify was important and that allowed me to be the best I can be in Webflow whilst allowing them to have the flexibility of Shopify. So Liquify was incredible. It just completely changed the game and I think they're just doing incredible things. There's a whole other world in Webflow to Shopify where there's the headless solutions and that lets users build in Shop Webflow and keep everything always in Webflow.

9:52Rahul Miah: And essentially Shopify just acts as a backend. I personally haven't used a lot of these. I've used a couple. And that honestly for me just comes down to the experience I want to give to my clients. For me, using the two platforms together is just a lot of work. A lot of my builds I very much try to consider how the user interacts with the website as they update it. That's an important part for me. It's like I want it to be easy as possible. There's definitely use cases. Shopify has its limits. Webflow does not have the same limits, especially when you're creating beautiful creative websites. And that's where these headless options can come in, for sure.

10:26Janne Parri: Yeah. I do not do like e-commerce per se. It's always been like a tempting option. But at some point I saw these headless things and I got excited, but then I tried some of them and realized the same thing that you said that you have to have Webflow. You have to actually have the plan, you have to have a Shopify plan and the plan for the thing between them. So there's kind of three apps you have to manage. So that's

10:53Rahul Miah: Free plans.

10:56Janne Parri: That kind of sucks. And yeah, so I didn't do anything with those. But again at the start asked what is the best use case for Webflow e-commerce, but what would be a best use case for like Webflow Shopify integration or combination?

11:12Rahul Miah: I think ⁓ Yeah, no, I think it could like there are definitely people out there that want an incredible experience when it comes to their e-commerce. You've seen those awards winning sites. ⁓ those aren't always possible in Shopify, just directly. And for better or for worse, Shopify the back end is one of like the easiest when it comes to updating products. And Webflow's one of the best when it comes to building beautiful front ends, you know, so if you want to build a truly custom experience, headless option definitely comes into play. You basically like in terms of your website you have no restrictions. Your restrictions is what's possible in Webflow, which as you can imagine is a lot. You can do a lot.

11:55Janne Parri: And how does it work? Does it send the customer to like Shopify checkouts or something like that? Or where is the like jump off?

12:06Rahul Miah: Yeah, the sync, in all honesty, is mostly visual from what I understand. Like the way we build in Webflow with the CMS, that gives us our products. That shows us our products. But everything is linked back to Shopify. When you're creating a cart, you're actually creating a cart through Shopify's APIs and sending that checkout. So this checkout process, even in like if we like ignore the Webflow world, like head people have built Shopify headless custom build sites, they all end up usually going to a Shopify checkout. And that's just how Shopify works. Yeah. The big thing is how the products are managed in Shopify, your statistics. All of that part. All that magic.

12:44Janne Parri: And that might actually be a good thing because Shopify advertises how streamlined their checkout is, so yeah.

12:50Rahul Miah: Yeah. And then compared to Webflow commerce, like Shopify is more global, so you have multi much more options than when it comes to checkout options in various countries. So it's a lot more powerful.

12:59Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. And the in the integrations like shipping and stuff ⁓ we mentioned

13:05Rahul Miah: A hundred percent.

13:06Janne Parri: Before. But how if we talk about just Shopify, how far you can take that in terms of visuality? Like if you wanna just use Shopify, what are the limits and can you like get around those?

13:21Rahul Miah: Yeah, yeah, there is a there are a few limits, but like it really depends on what you're trying to do. In most cases Shopify is very much a template-based solution. Very similar to Webflow Components. In that sense, you can do a lot more fancy custom logic, because you are custom coding everything when it comes to the components, but is very much a component based layout. The biggest restriction is actually the pages. I'm sure people have seen some Shopify sites where all their sub pages are domain, forward slash pages, forward slash the page. You can't actually change that. You know, you're very limited in what you can do in terms of page layout, which can have interesting implications when it comes to SEO. I know there's

14:00Janne Parri: Hm.

14:00Rahul Miah: A bunch of SEO experts that have figured out solutions. But yeah, that is the biggest limitation when it comes to Shopify is you're using their template system, their hierarchy, their page navigation.

14:11Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. And companies also like to do like separate website, let's say it's Webflow and then some sort of like subdomain for the shop if that's like the minor thing. So you can get around get around that.

14:24Rahul Miah: Yeah, I haven't actually experimented with this before or like seen I don't know if I've seen anyone do it before, but like there is definitely a world where you could build a huge website in Webflow and then also have e-commerce products in Webflow and that's where the headless solution can come into play, because you manage everything, your whole site on Webflow, and then the small little e-commerce part is just managed in Shopify through headless. Like there are definitely options for these headless solutions.

14:48Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. When do you see the whole thing going like? Do you see that there might be some sort of integration, like native integration or something like that? What does your crystal ball say?

15:01Rahul Miah: I definitely oo I definitely see a future where there's a better integration. Like it has to happen, I think. I assume this is part of this whole CMS upgrade magic they are doing, is to just improve the CMS. But yeah, I don't in all honesty, like. Webflow's e-commerce is doesn't have a lot of restrictions in my opinion. I think it's a bit weird in the way they separate the CMS versus e-commerce CMS. There's limitations of course in checkout.

15:32Rahul Miah: Even ignoring the payment part, you know, you can't add custom fields. Like but that shouldn't be too complicated. So I can definitely see a future where if they wanted to keep it all in-house, it's just up making it just a little bit more updated in line with the rest of Webflow. I can also totally see especially with the whole Webflow cloud world coming into play, like there's a lot of custom solutions you can implement, custom APIs. Like I can't see the idea of just integrating web Shopify's API directly into Webflow, that doesn't sound impossible to me. So I can definitely

16:10Rahul Miah: See Webflow just making that connection and basically cutting that bridge.

16:14Janne Parri: Yeah, because I feel like Webflow e-commerce haven't got a lot of love lately. So ⁓ I'm not sure what what they're are planning with that. In my perspective it as I said, it there are like limitations that I cannot get around. So I would love them to do something about it. And when they like announced the deprecation of memberships and logic. Yeah, those ones I was like afraid that they will cut the e-commerce with it with them. But all

16:43Rahul Miah: E commerce is next. ⁓ Yeah. ⁓ Credit where credit is due, with all these updates, ⁓ we have a site that's running on Webflow commerce and I've never had issues. Never had any Webflow related issues.

16:55Janne Parri: That's nice.

16:56Rahul Miah: Like where credit is due, like even the legacy editor being deprecated, all of the commerce functions still work in the new editor. So yeah. That

17:04Janne Parri: There was one limitation. I'm not sure if the this is fixed, but the localization. To my understanding the localization doesn't work with e-commerce.

17:14Rahul Miah: It doesn't work. Yeah. I'm hoping this new CMS upgrade would hopefully solve that soon, but yeah. Localization's a tricky one. It's a common problem.

17:23Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. And totally. Especially if you if you live in a country that the first language is not English. I English always needs to be there as one language, but if you have a primary language, that's a deal pr deal breaker, but

17:39Rahul Miah: Yeah, I believe in some countries you're actually you have to legally have their ⁓ local language as well for commerce, so it's a problem, I would say. Like it's a big reason why you wouldn't want to use e Webflow e-commerce.

17:51Janne Parri: Yeah, and I do not know how they build that and you have mentioned this new CMS structure, but to my understanding it is quite like complicated if you add the commerce to your Webflow projects, you cannot just go and delete that. It stays there forever, basically unless you start a new project. So there must be something might be going on the UI. Yeah.

18:16Rahul Miah: Something undeletable, yeah. Webflow magic, Webflow witchcraft, just

18:19Janne Parri: But I'm

18:21Rahul Miah: Who knows what's happening back there.

18:24Janne Parri: Yeah, but I saw someone saying that they were hiring like e-commerce related jobs at some point. I didn't check those myself, so this is just hearsay, but I'm kind of hoping that there would be an update because obviously especially if you are building like a site for your company and then the company wants let's say just a small little e-commerce thing. It would be so handy to just do in Webflow, wouldn't you say?

18:51Rahul Miah: Just being able to yeah plug and play everything, have no limitations, just be nice. Hopefully. Fingers crossed.

19:00Janne Parri: But how much do you do like regular sites versus commerce sites?

19:04Rahul Miah: Ooh, good question. I would say probably sixty percent of the sites I work on are just regular sites. It's not that common that we do commerce. Quite often a bunch most of our clients are startups that we brand, do all the branding for and then naturally that evolves into building their website. So yeah, most of the time it is a marketing site for a company instead of just like that online business. But yeah.

19:29Janne Parri: Do you do you handle like all the all the technical stuff like analytics and those sort of things too?

19:37Rahul Miah: We do, we do. Not always. It's not something our agency we're experts at per se. It's something we can do basics for, but usually we offer our partner to help come in and work on the analytics or the client already has a marketing agency that they can work with. We're mostly doing the design side.

19:56Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Before we go deeper into the design stuff and cool things you are you are building still on the commerce topic, I wanted to ask you because you are both a partner in the Webflow partner program and a Shopify partner. Like what are the differences? Are or are there any similarities? How do they compare?

20:17Rahul Miah: I would say the big one is commission. That's the most noticeable one. Especially in Shopify you earn a percentage of the client like the use the store owner subscription and that's forever that's not I think I can't remember exactly how much it is but like yeah we'll get we get a couple of hundred bucks every month you know it's not a sub it's not a small amount but

20:36Janne Parri: That's not.

20:37Rahul Miah: It's quite nice. I'd say that's the biggest one. Also just by being a Shopify partner, which anyone can sign up to become, you essentially get a developer account and that unlocks all the restrictions when it comes to Shopify before for you as a developer, which is very handy.

20:56Janne Parri: Yeah, the Shopify program is like divided for like the technical or the developers and service providers. Is it is it that way? Do you

21:06Rahul Miah: Ooh, it's been a while, I believe I believe so. So the technical so the w I'm part of the Shopify developer program. That allows me to create development stores, which the biggest part of any of these commerce is actually the Shopify plan. That is something we don't have to pay for. We can jump into

21:22Janne Parri: No it's

21:23Rahul Miah: Any Shopify customer site and just start developing. So that's the big re it removes all the restrictions when it comes to like having a sub Shopify subscription. Especially also Shopify has a huge library of apps and custom apps that you can integrate into your site. And you can contact the those developers directly as well. There's I've had been in contact with a few developers and they've just been incredible building custom features for you for this app that you wanted. So the development side of Shopify is very friendly, I'd say.

21:53Janne Parri: That's nice. Have you built apps of your own?

21:55Rahul Miah: No, not yet. Maybe someday, but at the moment not really, no.

21:59Janne Parri: And how do you like how do you even do do those? Like what language do they use? Do you have any idea? Because I it is total black box for me.

22:07Rahul Miah: Oof can I assume it's a mix of liquid and JavaScript. But yeah, again, no that's a whole world. That's a mystery to me in all honesty. But liquid i would assume is the way to go. Liquid is quite powerful in that sense.

22:21Janne Parri: Interesting. Yeah. And Shopify is interesting also because well I'm not a part of like the whole community or the partner program, but to an outsider it seems to me that the hype is still like going on and it is going well. With all the AI stuff and so on. Wouldn't you agree?

22:41Rahul Miah: Yeah, they're in a unique position where they are the standard, aren't they, for e-commerce. Everyone they're a known brand in that sense. All our most almost all our clients are like, we want a Shopify website. And that's because they have certain apps they love that they want to use. Or like their like delivery service that they partner with already uses Shopify as an integration. But even in the AI world it's just gone a lot easier. I know I haven't tried it myself, but I know a few people that have just been able to use AI to like build a custom Shopify store. Which is quite interesting, quite powerful.

23:11Janne Parri: Hmm, okay. That's nice. Yeah, I do not hear people like by coding the whole e-commerce thing themselves. There might be people but the use case might be a bit more complex so that people are still opting in for the platforms instead of doing everything by themselves with cloud or something.

23:31Rahul Miah: Yeah. It's a bit scary, especially when you're handling money, you know, and Shopify just does all that scary stuff for you. So you can just work on the pretty part. So it definitely helps.

23:42Janne Parri: Do you know does like Shopify have some sort of MCP?

23:46Rahul Miah: Ooh. I s I'd have to assume they do these days, but in all honesty I could not tell you. I've been Yeah, I have no idea, in all honesty. I just yeah, I assume so.

23:57Janne Parri: Yeah, everybody has, but the question is how useful it is. Have you

24:01Rahul Miah: That's the thing.

24:03Janne Parri: Have you played around with Webflow MCP?

24:06Rahul Miah: Webflow C P yes, I have played around with a lot. Has its pros and cons. For me, usually I'm just a bit too impatient for AI to like do things. It's like just do it for me, do it all quickly for me please. But sometimes it has to think and then connect and yeah, but I'd like using it for like tedious tasks. Quite often I'll ask it to like just go through my site, find all the links that haven't been like connected to anything yet and that's quite handy. Sometimes I've like

24:31Janne Parri: Yeah. Yeah. Same.

24:33Rahul Miah: Vibe coded HTML and just told it to build, and that's actually worked pretty well for me. I've been had a lot of success.

24:40Janne Parri: But like actual like static components on a static page.

24:44Rahul Miah: Yeah, so like I remember I like used I used claw to just generate this form. A multi step form, and then I asked it, can you just add it to Webflow? Can you build out all the section all the like sections for me, all the form elements, and it just did it. Yeah.

24:57Janne Parri: That's nice.

24:58Rahul Miah: Sometimes it just works wonders and th every now and then AI has its moments where it's just like, no, I'm not gonna do it today

25:05Janne Parri: Yeah. I should give it a another try. I have been just using it for like those tedious tasks you mentioned, like site settings, meta descriptions, CMS work, like bulk editing stuff. And to be honest, that's

25:20Rahul Miah: Alttex is a big one.

25:22Janne Parri: That's super like handy already. But obviously everybody would like to have a trustful, useful like tool that they could like point to a Figma design and say that build this please. But yeah, it's not yeah there yet, I believe.

25:40Rahul Miah: No. Yeah, they're working fast on it, so I assume at some like sooner rather than later it'll be a lot more powerful. But yeah, sometimes it just has its moments, doesn't it? Like just AI in general, I guess. It's a major issue, but yeah.

25:55Janne Parri: Do you think MCP updates will be the big thing in the next Webflow Conf?

26:01Rahul Miah: I'd hope so, yeah. I'd assume so. I feel like Webflow's great. Pr but with in this world where everyone's vibe coding their websites, like the solution to that is to be able to vibe code through the MCP. That's how I imagine Webflow spin would be. Yeah, I assume there's has to be some sort of connection there. I know they did something recently with OpenAI for building sites. That was announced, I think, a couple of days ago. So Yeah, I'm not a hundred

26:25Janne Parri: Yeah, it was the some sort of codex a plugin or thing like that.

26:30Rahul Miah: Percent sure what that is, but I assume like the

26:32Janne Parri: It might be

26:33Rahul Miah: Idea of vibe coding is coming.

26:36Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. It might be a connector like with Claude. I haven't checked it out myself either, so yeah. But I isn't the Claude connector just a way to use the MCP through the chat or something like that?

26:49Rahul Miah: I assume so, I assume so. I'm not a hundred percent sure. Like I know the open AI the codex announcement was about building sites. How that connects to Webflow I'm not hundred percent sure. But yeah, I know the MCP is quite power is getting more powerful in the sense of it could turn HTML into Webflow elements.

27:07Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I feel like AI is getting a lot of attention and all the use cases where people vibe code their site. Like I had Julian from Memberstack talking about this. They're like site build. And for many of us it is just like the speed of building. Which is feels like wrong or somewhat unfair right now because Webflow hasn't caught up with all the other platforms and if they could like fix that, I believe everybody would be happily doing Webflow sites still and not hyping about all the all the other workflows. Wouldn't you agree?

27:49Rahul Miah: No, a hundred percent. Like I am in London, there's quite a strong Claude community actually that I'm involved in and the common thing for most people that know Webflow in that space is the speed. It's just speed. Webflow is weirdly becoming slower for a lot of users because they can't just ask it to do stuff.

28:07Janne Parri: It used to be like the fast option. Like do you remember those ads? Yeah, those

28:11Rahul Miah: Yeah, it's funny. We've gone

28:13Janne Parri: Ads about like you do not have to message the developer and wait a

28:17Rahul Miah: Developer.

28:18Janne Parri: Week. Yeah.

28:19Rahul Miah: Yeah, it's funny we've gone full circle and now we do ha we are the developers, so we are the ones that people have to communicate to, you know.

28:23Janne Parri: ⁓ Yeah ⁓ That's so weird. Yeah. Any other predictions for the Webflow con for the future of the Webflow or wish list stuff

28:37Rahul Miah: Hmm. I think it's just making components easier to use. I think components have this weird fit I love building in components. It's I like tr to see how far I can push them with custom CSS. But quite often it can easily become overwhelming for clients. So I'd

28:54Janne Parri: Total.

28:54Rahul Miah: Be curious to see how they can make components both more powerful but also easier, more user friendly for users. I don't know, I feel like when people go crazy with all these props on the side, it's just even for me, I'm like overwhelmed. I can't read through everything. So yeah, I'd be curious how they if there's any updates to components, that'd be nice.

29:13Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. This is a Familiar topic for returning listeners, and I'm totally with you. Like the components are super powerful, but somehow they get super complex, well not super complex, but complex enough to be a bit difficult to use. And obviously there's the like closed components with all the props and then open components that well, use also props but can be like nested inside each other. And I love the idea of building a system like there is in mast or Lumos that the end user can like build their own components. But does the client actually end up like building those?

30:01Rahul Miah: This is the issue, right? Like a especially for me, I'm very much obsessed over like how easy it is for a client to update Webflow like Webflow. So when we start getting very deep into these nested components, I just know that it's just too much for them. Ironically, like going back like to Shopify, like Shopify's components are incredible. They have a bunch of options. Fields, colors, they have sliders that you can connect to. Image video and because obviously it's all custom code, you can do a lot of creative stuff with like logic, if statements, looping, various options that just make components really powerful. And I know you can do a lot of that with code components, but there's still restrictions in what you can and can't do

30:45Rahul Miah: Because of the all the available props. So I'd love to see them just like add options like if there was a color picker, a way for me to select to upload a video,

30:53Janne Parri: Indeed, yeah.

30:54Rahul Miah: Have multiple drop downs for variants.

30:57Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, totally. And are those like Shopify components easy to use? Are you can you like give those to the clients and be sure that they can use them?

31:08Rahul Miah: It's just yeah, it's a lot easier. In fairness to Webflow, they have done a lot that was previously at Shopify only that they've integrated as well. But yeah, like even previewing a component, you'll get a beautiful preview of your component that looks identical to what you've built. And then even props, like if you add an option more props will appear. So instead of just a massive list of props they it slowly increases, which is quite nice. Yeah.

31:32Janne Parri: And actually there was there was the component canvas. That's kind of a new newer feature. It was a interesting thing when they announced it, but now I realize that I really haven't used that. So I can't just do the

31:46Rahul Miah: Yeah. What did you think that was? What would you think component canvas would be? Because I had a very different idea of what component canvas was when it was announced.

31:54Janne Parri: Yeah, I kind of my first thought was something along the lines of more towards Figma and design. But I quickly realized that's not a thing. They are not gonna go that far into the design stuff. But yeah, yeah.

32:10Rahul Miah: Yeah, I very much assumed it would be like a space where I can see all my components in one place. You know, somewhat like a design system, but then turns out it wasn't that. I like, okay. Interesting.

32:20Janne Parri: Yeah, you can just see the variance. Which i in some cases is handy, but I'm just realizing that I do not use it at all right now. Maybe there

32:29Rahul Miah: No.

32:30Janne Parri: Can be some new feature that kind of combines everything together. Maybe even what you are describing that I could see all the components together in a Figma style like canvas. That would be cool. And maybe bit more useful. Yeah, interesting. And I've also talked about like the UI of components. You mentioned that the props keep adding on and that becomes complex. But I don't remember who was it. Maybe Matt Evans gave me an idea that maybe

33:03Janne Parri: Maybe the build mode should be a separate thing like the legacy editor that is now being deprecated but maybe revamped. What do you think of that kind of idea?

33:12Rahul Miah: You've amped Yes. I think I don't know, I understand why they've integrated it into Webflow, but my favourite thing used to be back in the day is that when I started after once I built a site, I'd like jump on a call with a client to show them how to edit at the website. And it was always seeing their reaction to typing question mark edit and then a whole interface appears on front of their website where they can edit. Yeah, I know, I think I agree. I think web pros looks very technical. I think for a client it can be quite overwhelming. It's this weird space where like the visual editor almost becomes more overwhelming than just a traditional CMS, if you will. The traditional page builder.

33:52Rahul Miah: I really like the idea of like UI just updating as you click on things instead of just seeing all the options everywhere.

33:59Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. But again that might be a like somewhat missed opportunity in a sense that all the clients want just the chat interface that they can ask AI to do stuff.

34:13Rahul Miah: Good point. Yeah. I mean that would be incredible if you can just ask chat, just build me a site, build me a page and it just used all the components. That's reliable. I like I guess you can somewhat do a DM C P I assume. I haven't tried it myself. 'Cause I know it can build in components, but

34:27Janne Parri: Yeah, but the MCP is still quite like technical, even if it can do components well. I would imagine that they will have to do some sort of like native AI thing builder thing. And that might be again a thing for the Webflow Conf. Or do you think that the MCP would

34:48Rahul Miah: Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting.

34:51Janne Parri: Be just enough?

34:52Rahul Miah: I think I assume they're just putting spending a lot of time into that MCP, right? So my assumption is just how they how the UI looks for that. Like I can definitely see a user-friendly version. But in the background is just MCP. But for the user it's just a nice chat interface. Maybe a couple of buttons, something more visual. Yeah, I don't know. I've never actually I considered what Webflow Conf could be this year. Like in all honesty.

35:16Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. It's quite early to think about it, but I have my summer vacation coming, so I will be I will be having at least a month of like downtime, like not downtime, like off time. So it's kind of month less away in a sense to me. So I'm already thinking of it. And I feel like in the last episode with Chris Skitch. He's from London. Have you been in the to the meetups?

35:45Rahul Miah: Yes. Try and attend as much as I can. Yeah. Like the London community

35:48Janne Parri: Beautiful.

35:48Rahul Miah: Is a very special community. Like

35:51Janne Parri: So he was or were thinking that with all the layoffs news and AI hype that the Boston Webflow Conf kind of has lot like pressure to come up with something exciting and like bounce back from all the negative stuff and sentiment around

36:10Rahul Miah: Yeah. Yeah, I guess we are ve in a weird space where with especially with all these layoffs and like the AI well, like Webflow's probably not in the most friendly of terms when it comes to community. I'd say I'm quite biased in the community 'cause I'm lucky enough to be in London where the community almost transcends Webflow, you know, like Everyone wants to be there to just catch up with their friends at this point. It's less about Webflow almost sometimes.

36:36Janne Parri: Yeah and the workflow obviously there was the golden days and still there is a community. It's better than no community. It is just like different nowadays and there's all the other stuff going on. Everybody's anxious like what's happening next.

36:52Rahul Miah: Yeah. Yeah, I guess there is a lot of anxious. Vibes, I don't know, like yeah. No one really knows what's happening, I guess.

37:00Janne Parri: Yeah. A lot rests on our shoulders as community members what we are gonna do, but I feel like we kinda need also something to be excited about. Wouldn't you agree?

37:12Rahul Miah: Yeah. I think that was the thing back in the day, is like everyone was excited. There's a lot of stuff happening and it was new and exciting. Maybe everyone's just used to it now where there's not that spark is here.

37:24Janne Parri: Yeah, Matt Evans put it quite well. We were excited about the no code stuff and what we can build, like there was the possibility to build websites, but also maybe web apps, and now maybe the hype is going towards the AI stuff and AI platforms. So yeah. Okay. Enough about that. What are you building right now and what gets you excited? About your work.

37:48Rahul Miah: Ooh. What gets me excited about my work? I think one of I'm very lucky in the sense of I am not in the world of SEO, AEO, like all these technical builds and web apps. I our bread and butter is designing something beautiful. Design is the first thing. Especially I am lucky enough to work with incredible brand designers and developers. So for us it's just trying to build beautiful things on the internet. Yeah, I think that's what's exciting. Most of our projects at the moment are very much animation heavy and trying to build experiences more than just data.

38:25Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. And do you get to design and develop those things, or do you share the responsibilities?

38:30Rahul Miah: Yes. My primary role is web design and web development. Web development came shortly after whilst I introduced Webflow to our agency. My the common thing I say is one day my manager came in, look sat on the on the on the just like fell onto the couch and said he hates this website that was being developed. It was being developed by a third party company and it was just a bunch of bugs. And I just went, I bet I could build this in a week in Webflow. And that's when we started taking Webflow a bit more seriously. And now we use it for all sorts of things. I guess the most exciting stuff with I'm building personally with Webflow is honestly not websites, just internal tools. We're building invoice generators,

39:11Rahul Miah: Presentation builders... A lot quite often for quoting we design these web presentations. Essentially PowerPoints, but we have actually just built a builder in Webflow for these presentations that work quite well. ⁓ yeah.

39:25Janne Parri: Build a builder, so how much of that is Webflow and how much of that is something else?

39:31Rahul Miah: The Webflow is it's it like for the presentations is essentially just a web page. With components. We have slide components of various layouts, three column grids and one column grids, and then we have some GSAP in there that lets us control go to each slide with a mouse mouse cursor with our keyboard, just like you would a PowerPoint. And it has that allows us to integrate like add animation quite up we're a very animation focused company. So the ability to add like really nice animations to our concepts and pr helps a lot and just brings it to life. Quoting as well. We do the same thing. We create an interactive quote where they can see mood boards, there's sliders in there. We've always had the fun idea of having like at the bottom of the quote where they see the price, having a lucky box.

40:14Rahul Miah: Where the client can choose double or nothing. Where not double or nothing. Double or the set quote. They could if they wanna risk it, they can get the job for half the price or double the price. But yeah. We we like having fun. And the web allows us to have fun instead of a PDF.

40:31Janne Parri: Yeah, I was just thinking of the like possibilities or what are those like

40:36Rahul Miah: Hehehe

40:37Janne Parri: Statistics. Would it be fifty or who controls the Yeah,

40:40Rahul Miah: No, it was gotta be fully weighted of course.

40:45Janne Parri: Yeah. But that sounds exciting. You mentioned GSAP, do you use any other tools like what are those supply in Rive, things like that?

40:56Rahul Miah: Yeah, so y I try and I try as much as possible to just experiment with everything I can. Mostly 'cause I enjoy it, genuinely, but also I do feel like I need to keep up. GSAP I've just used since the beginning of time for me, like since my early days. Like I remember going back to one of my first websites I've ever built and noticed there was some GSAP code in there. I like, I didn't know I was using GSAP back then. But yeah, these days Rive, experimented with Rive. Experimented with I'm currently trying to play with Unicorn Studio, I think it's called, for like free JS.

41:28Rahul Miah: But yeah, it always comes down to what's best for what we're trying to do and what's most performant.

41:34Janne Parri: Yeah. And how long like how again, how far can you take GSAP? You mentioned like you do animation heavy and I'm picturing like this graphic stuff like almost like cartoons on the website. Can you can you manage all of that with GSAP?

41:51Rahul Miah: Yeah, we have one of our websites has like the hero is this world that we've created for Pet Treats actually. And the user can jump between different worlds by clicking on these signs and the whole page moves over. GSAP is incredible. I think with Webflow as well, like we can actually mix the two together. They're they work beautifully together, so we can do custom code but also use Webflow interactions. With GSAP and like connector too, which is quite handy.

42:20Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. I would imagine that you would opt in for the custom coded solution, but when do you end up using like the GSAP interface, what is it, like native [Webflow] feature?

42:33Rahul Miah: The native ones. Yeah, it really de it's mostly if it's easy. So like if it's just a quick little animation, sometimes it's faster for me to just build it with Webflow interactions. And if it's a little bit more complex, I actually just end up using AI to just code it for me. ⁓ so that's quite handy. No, I think Webflow interactions is quite pa it also it also depends on who's I'm handing the site off to. So quite often if I know I'm gonna me or my the other developer that we I work with is using a site, they can use custom code, they understand how to edit the animation. But quite often a client might need touch something, so we'll that's when we'll use Webflow interactions. 'Cause it's just a lot more simpler for them to just update a value or other interaction. So yeah.

43:20Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. And I just saw there was some new feature like using was it component props in an embed field or something like that. Does that open any possibilities for like animations interactions. I was thinking like you could have like let's say simple simply like some color fields in the component prompts and then use those.

43:47Rahul Miah: Yes, I guess the big I mean for me again it goes all goes back to the client's experience in Webflow. I am very obsessive over making sure the designer looks exactly like the live site. So color changing backgrounds. And then with custom props, you can actually use connect them to custom CSS so you can see the colored background in Webflow, but also then you can animate it with GSAP. Or have JavaScript on the front end, so Yeah. It's one of s I saw a Timothy Ricks video recently. 'Cause at first when it came out I was like, I'm not sure how powerful this is, I don't fully understand it and then he started doing all sorts of crazy CSS and breakpoints as he usually does.

44:27Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. And he did I believe he did two videos. Like first one and then adding to the first one some new use cases that he realized

44:36Rahul Miah: Yeah. I think it's one of those features that none of us fully understood and then we started like playing with it and we're like, I understand now. It's actually quite powerful.

44:46Janne Parri: Yeah, I should rewatch those videos and figure out way to do stuff with those. But yeah, Timothy Ricks is a great guy at always the first source when trying to figure out. Yeah.

44:57Rahul Miah: Always creative, yeah. His creative his brain works in a different way, his creativity works in a different way.

45:03Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. What I like about like well components and those animations, like you can have those fields well attributes now you can like batch attributes but even before that we could have like the attribute field for just animations, so we could do a bunch of like ready made or standard animations and then add those to components of parts of components that we wanted. Yeah, that's a handy thing. Do you use attributes or how how do you like manage the animations?

45:38Rahul Miah: Yeah, I use attribute I use attributes a lot, I used to use attributes a lot for like custom CSS actually. That was the primary way I mean everyone's done it now, you know, adding changing a style based on an attribute value. But I've started actually playing with attributes in a different way of creating an empty div component and using variance, because that creates an attribute in the HTML. And then you could actually use that variable that attribute to in your custom CSS to JavaScript. Which is I personally found that a lot easier for clients, because you in Webflow you just get a drop down for all your variants. But then all the attribute magic

46:15Rahul Miah: You can still do. So that's how I've been experimenting with attributes recently.

46:19Janne Parri: That's interesting. Yeah. I believe it's that like the same way that team does some of the attributes.

46:25Rahul Miah: Potentially, I assume so. One example I c

46:28Janne Parri: Yeah, it.

46:28Rahul Miah: I guess is I'll have like a background color component. That just in the CSS is just if this attribute is set to black, set the parent section to be back. And that's quite nice for the client as well, because they can visually see what's happening without having to type the colours.

46:46Janne Parri: I had one question again in my mind but then it sc escaped yeah the obvious one obvious question the framework question like which framework if any do you use?

46:59Rahul Miah: I have spent years and years building my own one.

47:02Janne Parri: Beautiful.

47:04Rahul Miah: Yeah. I ve I get very obsessed over making things clean and as efficient as possible, especially my CSS, so I don't like having loads of classes everywhere, so my solution to that was just building my own framework. Probably very similar to MAST, I guess. I don't use the grid columns and everything, but Mast or Finsweet's one is probably the closest. And that's just more yeah, just making my life simple, I guess. I like trying to use as many of Webflow's default elements as possible and then changing their CSS.

47:38Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. And would that framework or clonable be somewhere out there for others to clone maybe?

47:47Rahul Miah: It's out there. I've never publicised it, I guess, because just I think I guess this is why most people build their own frameworks. It's just it works for them and it's their needs. I definit there is a issue when it comes to work collaborating with different people, different agencies. But yeah, I think Yeah, I don't know. I don't

48:05Janne Parri: Yeah, that

48:06Rahul Miah: Know why I don't share it, I just like it's just my thing. So I've never fully publicized it. It's

48:09Janne Parri: Yeah, then

48:11Rahul Miah: Like there's probably stuff that doesn't make sense in there, but it works in my weird brain. So here we are.

48:16Janne Parri: Yeah. And you would have to write the documentation and all that stuff, so but

48:22Rahul Miah: Yeah. I've never been too loyal to a framework. I've always been like, I can figure out a framework, it's fine. That's not you know, it should hopefully most of them are fairly user friendly, so I can kinda figure it out.

48:33Janne Parri: But please tell me bit more, like what are those weird quirks that you have out there or the stuff that you are like excited about, proud of.

48:43Rahul Miah: What am I proud of? Hmm. Interesting.

48:45Janne Parri: Or how do you handle those crits? You said that you do not have the crit system, so what about that?

48:50Rahul Miah: Yeah, grids I don't know why, I just I'm very much loyal to flex. Very loyal to flex and max widths. I definitely grids definitely have their place, of course. Like I do have a couple of grid classes just for like two columns, three columns, four columns. But I don't do the thing where pe I know quite often people do like this is three column they have like the twelve column system, don't they? I guess for my brain that's just not how my brain works. I'm like, I need this I don't know. If it's fifty percent I'll probably have a fifty percent class. I don't need to create multiple classes for every little column. I guess quite often w I have a lot of flex classes in mine. So I use the webflows H flex and V flex a lot. And quite often that is just me adding the H flex and then I have a bunch of classes for the spacing. Just gap one, gap two, gap three, and

49:36Rahul Miah: Mixing that with a couple of classes to make flex centered allows me to build like ninety percent of the things I need to build with just like seven or eight classes, which is quite nice.

49:47Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. Interesting. But what about the mast system? Isn't that kind of based on like flex and max widths? Like the column system?

49:56Rahul Miah: I assume so. I I know it's based on columns. I don't actually know if that uses flex or grid, in all honesty.

50:02Janne Parri: I believe so, yeah. I've been tinkering a round with that and like Lumos and I'm a bit torn like which one is like better for me.

50:11Rahul Miah: I don't know. I gu I haven't touched Lumos in since it came out and I know Webflow's done so many updates so that too if he just adds on to mask all the mask Lumos all the time. But I guess for me it was a little too attribute heavy. Whereas like I my brain doesn't work this way, I'm sorry, I can't do it.

50:31Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. I just recently started using it and yeah it has a lot of stuff in it. That's maybe the best thing and the worst thing. So if you want something lean, that might not be the one for you.

50:47Rahul Miah: How come you switch to Lumos?

50:48Janne Parri: It from where?

50:49Rahul Miah: Yeah, what were you what was your reason? It was just experimenting.

50:51Janne Parri: Well yeah I was using Client-First and for the longest time like Relume just kept me in that camp and then I wanted to do more with the components and Mast and Lumos both have robust column systems like build in. So yeah, I started using those. I don't know what's going on with the Client-First, it's like outdated. There's some beta Cloneable out there, but they haven't just

51:18Rahul Miah: No idea.

51:18Janne Parri: Come out with their new release for a while. We'll see. We'll see. Do you have anything like ready made in content wise, like blogs or some boring pages like privacy policy or something?

51:33Rahul Miah: I said I'd do this like four years ago and I say every file every few moments of like I need to build a nav bot I can use all the time, I need to build a slider, I can use every I just don't. I have no excuse why. I just build everything from scratch every time and it's probably not the most time efficient, but it's just what I do. I should. I want to build out some sort of library for myself or even if it's public, I don't know. Where I have a bunch of sliders and blogs and block templates. But yeah I guess all my sites are very different when it comes to their design, so I've never had the time to like build something simple that I can use for everything. I definitely want to build with code components actually. I love using code components just because they're live on the designer. They work in the designer. The JavaScript runs. So I'd love to build out some custom sliders and interactive maps and models or yeah. Had a wacky idea with navbars.

52:24Rahul Miah: Ages ago, but it didn't really work.

52:27Janne Parri: Like using code components.

52:29Rahul Miah: I had this wacky idea to have like a code component with a nav bar. So all the user had to do was just go into their CMS and there was two CMSs. A na a navigation CMS that they can just add pages to using multi-reference. And that was connected to another CMS that was hidden, that would just have a constant sync of all the pages in Webflow. Unfortunately you can't nest what's it called? Collections. You can't nest collections in components, so it don't fully work out, but we'll see, hopefully someday. Navbars are the ones I struggle

52:59Janne Parri: Yeah, that sucks. But

53:00Rahul Miah: At the most in how to make them user friendly.

53:02Janne Parri: Yeah and the U Yeah, exactly. Like why there why isn't there a some sort of like UI or feature for building nav bars? Or at least the links for the for the nav bars. I believe WordPress has that. Like

53:14Rahul Miah: Yeah. I'm spoiled, so Yes.

53:19Janne Parri: Has for ages had that. So why not?

53:22Rahul Miah: WordPress has Shopify has it. We work with for more complicated websites, we work with a development agency that have built their own CMS and they have a beautiful UI for building nav bars and updating nav bars. That just works so well. But yeah, Webflow it's the struggle.

53:38Janne Parri: That's weird. Maybe. Maybe again in the Webflow Conf. Like I had the

53:42Rahul Miah: Hopefully. Fingers crossed.

53:44Janne Parri: I had the had Matthew Munger on the show and he said that there might be some like classic wish list items in the Webflow Conf this year. I was particularly asking him about like the CMS slider. That's the classic one but now I'm not sure if I would prefer the navigation thing. I kind of hate sliders because they're well I totally design them and end up doing them but for some reason that's not my favorite component

54:18Rahul Miah: Not it was one of those things where I just went very deep into figuring out how it works one day. And I just like kept that memory forever, so but yeah, I mean CMS. I that's one thing going back to your wish list before actually. I'd love components in the CMS. Just allowing me to build be so nice. It's one of my big our biggest limitations when it comes to building websites, actually.

54:39Janne Parri: That's true. Like within like something like rich text field, like putting components there. Yeah.

54:47Rahul Miah: Or just yeah, just some

54:47Janne Parri: Actually.

54:48Rahul Miah: Interface that lets me create pages with components, but then have all the flexibility of having like a collection list that shows all the pages.

54:56Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. I believe Framer has something along the lines. Like they can

55:00Rahul Miah: Think so, I believe so, yeah.

55:01Janne Parri: Add like components somewhere. And all the hack hacky workarounds with just to get a button to the rich text field. Like yeah, I haven't checked the wishlist for a while. But I feel like that hasn't been as active as it used to be again.

55:19Rahul Miah: Yeah, I need to check that out. I wonder what there is. Maybe start bingo before the comp.

55:24Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. There's the CMS slider probably still there. And EU hosting for the GDPR, yeah. Those are

55:31Rahul Miah: EU hosting. Yeah, that's a big one.

55:35Janne Parri: Probably the big things. Okay, yeah, we have gone quite deep into all sorts of technical stuff, but if there's still someone like thinking that they wanna wanna do more visual stuff, technical stuff like creative development. What would you advise for them? Where should they start? And what should they do?

55:57Rahul Miah: It I it's probably the same advice most people give, it's just start doing stuff. Just start making stuff. I think especially in the creative world, everyone's just making stuff 'cause they love it. Not 'cause they have to do it. You know? Obviously the job part comes in, but so much of being creative is doing what you love, doing what you enjoy, like even like for me, like I could vibe code a lot of stuff. In this world. But like I actually enjoy building a Webflow and that's why I do it. I like building beautiful things and trying to make custom hacky solutions for something things. So I think my best advice would be just start making, start doing stuff. Inspiration's everywhere, you know, there's so many sites out there to gr gather inspiration from.

56:42Rahul Miah: I also just follow a lot of creative people and that inspires me. I like feeding off other people's energy.

56:47Janne Parri: But there's the danger that you think that everything should be on that level as every famous designer in social media. And if you're just starting out that might be a bit depressing.

57:01Rahul Miah: It definitely can be. Yeah, I think also time's a big one. One of my I was lucky enough to have some sort of a mentor in my early days of design. Her the best advice was just slow down and just spend time in the details. Focus, see what peop if see what other designers are doing and like actually spend time looking at how they are achieving what they're doing.

57:22Janne Parri: Yeah. That's actually a solid

57:23Rahul Miah: It's fine if you can't achieve that straight away. It's fine. It takes time.

57:27Janne Parri: Yeah, that's some solid advice because we do not have the patience to go through that, especially now with the with the AI. But when we see some cool sites, we just expect that it came to life in a single evening or something like that. But it might be the the developer or designer spent like months on it and then some other months just like fine-tuning the details. Or something like that.

57:54Rahul Miah: Yep. Like I think yeah, we live in a very chaotic industry. This like especially this industry is so chaotic. But you don't notice behind the scenes how much time people are spending on like the small things. I'm very lucky to be friends with some very talented people and I've seen them work on a website for literally a year, if not more, and those that's the site that's winning all the awards. That's the getting all the recognition and they've spent put the time and energy into it. So yeah. I think it's just slow down. Sometimes we need to slow down. Let our creative brains be creative. It's fine.

58:29Janne Parri: Totally. The devil is in the in the teach details. And you kind of need to spend some time on those. Bimo Tri was on the show and he said that he at some point he actually when he saw some cool animations he like screen captured them and then slowed them down and tried to figure out like which easing they use and which sequence and so on. So yeah. Again.

58:57Rahul Miah: Yeah. No that's definitely a powerful way of doing it.

59:00Janne Parri: Yeah. Again I guess there are no no shortcuts. One just have to has to start. But I feel like at least for me the Webflow was a good way to learn like H HTML, CSS. Now the native GSAP feature, the editor is quite handy for just learning like the basics of animation and I believe AI has given quite many of us like the power of like building well, GSAP, like custom animations on top of everything else. But maybe you just when you're building AI, maybe just take a take a step back and ask the AI to explain everything.

59:41Rahul Miah: A hundred percent. It all comes down to slowing down. It's like we can build with AI as well. But if you just take a second to actually see what it's doing, you'll probably learn if it's like Yeah. Breaking everything you can do anything that's there, you know, people are making stuff, so it's not impossible. It's just slow down and breaking it down, figuring out. With the recording option, I remember a friend a while back was asking me about this amazing website. I don't know if you've seen Charles Leclerc, an F1 driver, his website. It was incredible. I would try to figure he she was trying to figure out how the a certain animation was done on the site. And were on a call and we just recorded it, we slowed it down and we broke it down and were like, Okay, that makes sense. We figured it out. So

1:00:23Janne Parri: Was it something magical or was it just GSAP or something you can do with GSAP?

1:00:28Rahul Miah: It was a bunch of clever tricks with masking, where the text and the map all intertwined into each other. Yeah, there's a lot of clever masking, that we just figured out by slowing things down and figuring it out bit by bit.

1:00:42Janne Parri: Yeah, that's a cool website. I will link it down the description. I would ch I was just wondering why does a F1 driver need so cool a website? Obviously it's great if you get one, but why does it need so

1:01:00Rahul Miah: No. It's one of my favourite websites. It's just I find it incredible. But yeah you're right, I don't know why an F1 driver needs I guess it's a very posh world. It's a very fancy world and you need a fancy website.

1:01:11Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. And i in a way it's a marketing tool. I do not remember visiting any other driver's website, so yeah. And Finland has had their fair share of like F one drivers, so. We're closing to the end, but I'm like I wanna still ask you, do you have any like personal projects like side hustles or something that you're tinkering with right now?

1:01:38Rahul Miah: I mean my biggest project, if you will, is that I am jumping into the world of freelance soon. I am leaving the agency life. And I am doing

1:01:44Janne Parri: Ooh nice.

1:01:46Rahul Miah: That zero plans, zero clients, I'm just going headfirst. I'm very excited. But no idea what I'm doing, but I'll take it one step at a time. That is probably my biggest project at the moment. That's taking up all my time figuring that out, building a portfolio, but yeah, outside of that it's just

1:02:03Janne Parri: That's awesome.

1:02:04Rahul Miah: Yeah. Outside of that, I guess just experimenting with webflows, code components, more and more and seeing how far I can take them. I think there's a lot of interesting things we can do with actually using them for ways they're not intended to. I vibe coded file browsers for clients. Using Webflow Cloud. I s I was talking to someone at Webflow actually and they were were talking about the idea of actually it's quite hard to see form submissions in Webflow, but what if we just like vibe

1:02:36Rahul Miah: Coded a tool that could let clients see form submissions in a nice way in Webflow? So yeah, it's just

1:02:41Janne Parri: It sounds to me that you are about to break something again.

1:02:46Rahul Miah: All the time. Breaking stuff all the time it's the most way best way for me to be creative is to break things.

1:02:52Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. But do you do you ever use those AI code components or just the somewhat regular ones?

1:02:59Rahul Miah: I've tried them a couple of times. I haven't had a lot of luck with them, but yeah. It's still one of those things where Webflow's AI probably isn't as good as Claude or C Composer.

1:03:11Janne Parri: But about the freelancing stuff. I do not wanna skip that because that's obviously

1:03:16Rahul Miah: Hehehehehe

1:03:17Janne Parri: Cool and amazing. Welcome to the freelancing life.

1:03:22Rahul Miah: Thank you.

1:03:22Janne Parri: I would imagine you are planning something cool for your own like portfolio site.

1:03:29Rahul Miah: Okay. I mean I've been, as I'm sure everyone has, trying to build my portfolio for years. I've been honestly trying to get into the freelance world for years. I just kept putting it off or kept trying to plan and predict. And the best thing to do is to just jump head first, I think. It's like don't spend time planning it or trying to create some incredible portfolio. It's just gotta take too long. So yeah, I'm It's not gonna be an award winning portfolio if by any stretch of the imagination. But that'll come afterwards, hopefully. I will hopefully be more creative. I just need something out there. I need to just jump head first. But yeah.

1:04:07Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. I'm on the same boat. Like I have I have been trying to update my portfolio or my sites probably at least a year. Probably two years or something like that. I have had the actual new project for at least a year. And the good thing is that some clients are still like giving credit to my old site. Which is nothing like nothing like out of this world like some good colours and and yeah, I'm always like hesitant to say that feels a bit old but good that you like it or something like that.

1:04:41Rahul Miah: I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves, especially 'cause we see these incredible

1:04:44Janne Parri: Soorely.

1:04:45Rahul Miah: Portfolios out there. I think just get something out there. Granted I am the biggest hypocrite on that, all my friends have been telling me for years to build put my portfolio out there and I have not, but I am doing it finally. And it's just do it. Let's just do it. Like no point stressing out.

1:05:02Janne Parri: Yeah, we should have some sort of accountability group for

1:05:06Rahul Miah: Hehehe

1:05:07Janne Parri: Portfolio updates. Something like that. Yeah, yeah.

1:05:08Rahul Miah: Yes. Then we need an accountability for the accountability, 'cause it never happened.

1:05:17Janne Parri: And put some money on it that on the line. Okay, okay. Now we're just rambling. We have one weird section at the end, but if people wanna check you out or follow you or maybe even contact you, where should they go?

1:05:33Rahul Miah: I am not prepped enough for this. LinkedIn I'm all I'm active everywhere. LinkedIn and Twitter's probably the best places to be, X. But yeah, I if you can find me, I will always respond. I am always there. But yeah, LinkedIn's probably the best place.

1:05:44Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. And have you found your way to the to the new Webflow community platform?

1:05:52Rahul Miah: Yes. I it's one of those things where like I'm too busy for social media these days, you know. Like it's the last thing in my brain to try something else. But I've occasionally been snooping on there. Haven't posted anything myself, but yes. Hopefully soon.

1:06:06Janne Parri: Me too, me too. And I'm hopeful that it gets some momentum and some stuff. I should be posting every episode there. I'm trying to buy it's not at the top of my list, sometimes it gets cut off. Yeah,

1:06:17Rahul Miah: Yeah. So one more task to add.

1:06:20Janne Parri: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay, Rahul, do you know what the last thing is about?

1:06:26Rahul Miah: This way you teach us teach me something new.

1:06:29Janne Parri: Ki kind of, yeah, kind of yes. It's not like Webflow or tech related. It's a funny little Finnish section at the end of every episode. So what follows is that I will give you a Finnish saying, I will translate that to English, and your job is to guess what it means. So it can be like a metaphor, a saying, or anything of that sort. Are you ready for your saying?

1:06:53Rahul Miah: I'm ready, I'm ready.

1:06:54Janne Parri: Yeah this is quite weird one. In Finnish it is puhua puuta heinää and in English it is to speak wood and hay. So what does it mean if I say

1:07:06Rahul Miah: Peak.

1:07:07Janne Parri: That person speaks would he?

1:07:10Rahul Miah: Would hey? Ooh.

1:07:11Janne Parri: Wood hay, yeah, it's a weird little combination word like wood and hay as a hay on the field.

1:07:20Rahul Miah: Is it something about like speaking like speaking nonsense or like

1:07:24Janne Parri: Exactly, that's beautiful. Like spot on. Yeah, it's totally like

1:07:28Rahul Miah: Buta Hana?

1:07:31Janne Parri: Buda Heina yeah, with a hard P and yeah. Wood hay. I do not know like where that come from what's the logic behind that, but it's the thing with this.

1:07:32Rahul Miah: Dehana. Okay. Ooh, okay. Interesting. Yeah, I was wondering if it was something to do with farming, if it was like a farming talk or something. But no. I like that. That's fun.

1:07:47Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. Or maybe maybe it is that you're talking something without like any substance like or something like that. Just like wood and hay.

1:07:55Rahul Miah: It's random, yeah. Mm.

1:07:57Janne Parri: Like nothing. Wind. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay, Rahul. Yeah. Yeah.

1:07:58Rahul Miah: Fun. I might try and use that.

1:08:04Janne Parri: You can see all the puzzled faces. Okay, Rahul, thanks sh thanks so much for being being on the show and

1:08:13Rahul Miah: Thank you.

1:08:14Janne Parri: For the for all the listeners and watchers we'll see you in the next one. Bye.

1:08:20Rahul Miah: Bye.