Webflow's Code First Future,and What It Means for Us

0:33Janne Parri: Okay then, so Webflow announced that they will re-architect the whole platform so then the code will be the fundamental source of truth. What do you think that means? And how are you like approaching these news?

0:50Dan Foster: It's a really good question. I think I feel two ways about it. Firstly, I'm really excited. And secondly, I'm a little bit nerve wracking, a little bit, you know, figuring it out still. I think that's okay. On the exciting side. So first thing, it's great because it confirms our hope, our expectations, our assumptions that this is the direction of travel that Webflow is going in, right? That they want to move towards agentic development. They're setting up the foundations to do so. So that code is the source of truth as they're saying. It confirms the work that we already saw in progress with MCP2. So that's good. It's kind of a confirmation that things are moving in the right direction and exciting about what this might enable. Also kind of they deliberately left it a bit vague which is always exciting. Slightly nerve-racking because we've been using Webflow kind of in its current guise for a long time.

1:42Dan Foster: So of course there are some questions about what might change. Will the designer look different? Will we be able to build sites as we've been doing? Or will our workflows need to change? And will it affect our business at the end of the day? But I think any impact should be pretty positive. We think we're on the right platform and I think this is a nice step in the right direction. That's my hope.

2:06Janne Parri: Totally. I'm on the same boat. Like it's great that they are acknowledging that they are kind of playing this catch up game with other platforms. This is the way to go. Yeah, there's no like clear timelines, but they said that they will show something in the Webflow Conf, so that's exciting. But yeah, I'm also like puzzled or wondering that it must be a huge lift to like do the whole fundamental architecture. And hopefully it will come sooner than later. But yeah, what do you what do you think? How much will we be able to see

2:46Janne Parri: At the Webflow Conf.

2:48Dan Foster: I mean, I don't know. I don't know any more than you do. They always have a way of making the events quite exciting. They usually have one or two big things to announce. I guess this will be that, in whatever guise it turns into. I would love to see some of the updated experience, if it's changing, and some tangible evidence of what we can expect to be different in this updated, slightly iterative, and improved Webflow version, perhaps. I don't know. But it's hard to say right because it I expect as you say it's gonna take them a while to Cross all the t's and dot the i's and get this new iteration of webflow fully out there but I think just confirmation that they're moving in the right direction would be great So anything that kind of gives a hint of that would be cool

3:33Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. And this game had a quite good time. Since I don't know if you saw but Timothy Ricks sent out a LinkedIn post and ha has been doing some other like videos about other platforms and in the post he was saying that okay he might not be going on with Webflow if they do not change. A couple of days later they came up with that article. So at least to me it kind of gives us more hope and more hope for the like platform and confirmation that they are still in the game strongly and they are no knowing where to go. Wouldn't you agree?

4:15Dan Foster: Yeah, I think so. I think it's interesting because what I would say is... And then maybe it's the nature of the types of clients we work with and the size and scale of some of the businesses we build websites with and for. We're not hearing every single day that like something has to change. We're being held back in the same way. Maybe some prominent folks in the community would have you believe. Cause I think at the end of the day, as a practitioner tool, like if you could pick any tool out there and you want to be the most AI centric and Claude enabled and you go Webflow or something else. Yeah. Maybe there are some alternatives.

4:49Dan Foster: For our customers, a lot of them are these kind of established marketing teams. There's several different people on your team. There's governance and workflows and approvals and also maybe a little bit of AI hesitancy in some of the bigger companies. And actually that still positions Webflow at the top spot. And I say that genuinely because if it wasn't, we wouldn't want to push it. But it feels like Webflow is still well ahead of most of its peers. And you remember most of these customers that we're helping move over to Webflow are on legacy platforms. Platforms, let's say, which are miles

5:19Janne Parri: Hmm.

5:19Dan Foster: Behind the sanity-clawed AI workflows that kind of we're talking about on LinkedIn. These are WordPress installs from 15 years ago that are out of date and getting hacked. These are headless CMSs that nobody knows how they work and can't manage them. So in that respect for our customers, I think this stuff is really exciting, but it's less of like a burning platform, something needs to change. But I know in the community, there's a lot more maybe excitement about kind of the urgency of this. So let's see. You

5:48Janne Parri: And obviously the community is mostly like builders, makers, developers doing stuff and they wanna be on the cutting edge So a lot of like optimizers and so on. But obviously we want to they want the platform to be on a like good road and be confident that even if things change that it will still be the kind of like the best tool, best platform to use in the future.

6:18Dan Foster: That's it. I think it goes back to my first point, like it's just confirmation. Think this article and the rumours and murmurs we're hearing that, know, Webflow continues to move in the right direction and also have the right people. Like they're super smart group of guys and girls over there. They know what they're doing. And I think there is lots of cool stuff happening in the web ecosystem now. So lots that they can look at and see what's working and what's not and hopefully bake into their product. So yeah, really excited to see kind of the next iteration.

6:46Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, me too. But okay, Dan, before we go any further, we have to do little intros. My name is Janne Parri and you are listening to Webflow and friends podcast. And my guest today is Dan Foster, co-founder and technical director at MakeBuild, a webflow enterprise agency from London. So Dan has worked as a UX consultant at Fjord and Accenture before co-founding MakeBuild with Tim Janes. Today MakeBuild employs over 10 designers and developers working on big clients like Typeform, Sky, PVC, to name a few. And you guys, you guys have

7:28Janne Parri: Also won the Webflow All-Star Award with Typeform in 2025 I believe for migrating four thousand sub pages to Webflow without any like downtime. So clearly you guys are playing this game at the highest level. But Dan in your own words how did you and MakeBuild get to this place?

7:54Dan Foster: Well, thank you so much for having me on the podcast, Janne. It's a pleasure to be here. As I mentioned to you in the pre-show chit chat, I've had a few people ask me, clients and community people, when are you going to be on the podcast? The illustrious workflow and friends. So it's good to finally be here. And thanks for being so patient with me, because I know we've been trying to figure this out for a while. Yeah. So MakeBuild, we started back in 2020, March 2020, not like there's anything else going on, just to keep us busy. And it was interesting because I met my co-founder Tim, creative director and co-founder of MakeBuild in a previous job were actually teaching design teaching UX at a boot camp and were teaching the same class and we got on pretty well. So we started kind of dabbling with tools on the side and he mentioned Webflow and we this is cool, kind of part of this no code, low code movement. And Tim and I were both designers by trade right so having this tool that allowed you to go from designs into production code just seemed really magical.

8:49Dan Foster: Working on some side projects together and then when we both moved on from the teaching gig we started MakeBuild and it's been kind of slow and steady growth since then. We actually realised that we'd previously both been at Accenture at the same time but it's one of those companies that's so big that we didn't actually know each other but it kind of it was a nice vote of confidence because you know we're kind of from a similar background we kind of get the importance of delivering really high quality work and following process but also I think because of that world were excited to try something a bit smaller something a bit more nimble and agile and that's what we created with make build the idea that we could spend less time talking about a problem and more time doing some cool design and then making and building it making it real right? So that's kind of the origin story since then we've really led into the world of marketing and marketers so working closely with our friends at some of the companies you mentioned helping them to design build

9:47Dan Foster: Grow kind of the best websites on the internet is our goal. And yeah, we're like 20, 21 people now, mostly based,

9:54Janne Parri: Okay, that's nice.

9:55Dan Foster: Yeah, mostly based in and around London, in the UK. We've got a few folks across Europe and it's a mix of kind of full time and freelance. For us, the people are so important. The people we work with every day, our team and the people we get to kind of create projects for, our clients, because relationships really important. We believe that from the start and getting people in for a face-to-face, having a coffee is really key so we always lean into our London base quite a lot and it's really nice to kind do that face-to-face thing. So Yana, anytime you're in London do hit us up.

10:29Janne Parri: Yeah yeah. I have a growing list of Londoners who I need to contact when I end up end up there. But yeah, there has been few folks from London and that would probably be my first like trip when I get out of out of our small beautiful country of Finland. But okay, about make build like what kind of services do you offer? Like do you start all the way from like visual design, branding and how far do you go to the technical side or so do you do more than just websites and so on?

11:04Dan Foster: Yeah, so we roughly bucket our services into design, build and grow. And design is everything from initial ideation and strategy, helping clients figure out what they want and need. Sometimes there's a spark of an idea, but we can help extract that and flesh it out into something that really works. All the way through to wireframing and user journey mapping and workshops and that kind of stuff through to visual design and prototyping. Then in build, it's more often than not, centered around a Webflow website as you might I guess. But we do dabble with other platforms as well. And sometimes it's extending Webflow beyond its core platform and integrating custom code or increasingly Webflow Cloud. And then into growth, it's looking at how we can drive optimisation. So A.B. Testing and personalisation increasingly. And of course, A.E.O. Is a hot topic that a lot of our customers are looking for help with. So design, build and growth mostly centred on a Webflow project.

12:00Dan Foster: With other bits either side.

12:04Janne Parri: Yeah. That's always interesting, like how do people and agencies like build or move the like boundaries, like what do they focus on and what they leave out and so on. But I have noticed that for many Webflow well community members, agencies and freelancers it's quite a like normal thing to like build the focus with kind of the platform. So focus on marketing because Webflow focuses on marketing teams and maybe leave the smaller clients to some other service provider or maybe even platform and grow with the optimization side and so on. So that's a good way to do that.

12:53Janne Parri: And have you seen that you have been make build has been like growing with the platform being Webflow?

13:00Dan Foster: Yeah, definitely. So we've been... Partner program for a few years now. When we first started it was literally just me and Tim, by the way, working on our laptops remotely. So the team was very small and were just two freelancers really operating under a brand. But over the last three or four years, that's grown and we've built a team. And with that, our agency and our operations and the types of projects we do. But yeah, we've grown alongside Webflow, which has been really exciting. As they, I think particularly in Europe, have started to make a bigger name for themselves, we in London have been able

13:30Dan Foster: To kind capitalise on that and bring the implementation services that these customers often need a hand with alongside the platform that Webflow bring. And it's a really good like symbiotic relationship. Think we both help each other because sometimes we're having conversations with customers and they're thinking about platform and we recommend Webflow and sometimes Webflow are able to kind of point people in our direction or you know through the partner matchmaking form online when they're looking for a good agency. We pop up there too.

14:02Janne Parri: And speaking of like those conversations with customers, clients, the article that we started this episode with also mentioned that Webflow has seen that about thirty percent of the enterprise clients already use some sort of agents with their production site sites. So I wonder have you seen similar things with your clients and what sort of what sort of conversations do you go through regarding AI and what can it do and what your clients might wish it could do and so on.

14:40Dan Foster: Yes, yeah, it's good question. I think like most... People in the world. All on a bit of an AI journey of maturity and on a personal level, some people love it, some people hate it and also on an organisational level, some of the customers we work with are really invested. Maybe they themselves operate in kind of the AI niche. So they want their whole marketing team and their operations to be AI enabled. So of course they're leaning into agentic website management. And then there's other customers who are just starting to dabble. They've seen stuff online, they're looking for cool opportunities and ideas, but there may be a little bit

15:13Dan Foster: More immature. So we have customers spreading the whole length of that. And also remember there are some customers who maybe they want to do it but they can't because their company doesn't allow them to use Claude or something or they're a bit more restricted. So we see a lot of interest along the whole spectrum from really expert power users who are building agents and maybe even using you know MCP, betas and really getting into the mix of stuff. They're all the way down to people who are bit more immature and open to ideas. But maybe still very happy with the visual designer and to be honest, that's one of the reasons why I really love webflow and still think it is positioned so well for that marketing site use case because often you've got different levels of AI maturity and preference, right? You've got some folks on a team who want that visual builder. They want to see stuff in front of them maybe they're used to writing Word documents and Google Docs and this is kind of a nice step up where they can create their blog post visually and there are other users on maybe on the same team who want a prompt 50

16:11Dan Foster: Articles into existence and need to do it via MCP and think Webflow is kind of making a really good name for itself as the platform that can kind of do both, especially as MCP is getting better finally.

16:23Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. I just like started my summer break and then the MCP two point came out and I was like, all right. Well

16:32Dan Foster: You

16:32Janne Parri: But so I haven't played around with it, but have you tried it? And is that a thing that you would like tell to your clients that maybe they should use that or give it another try maybe or anything like that.

16:48Dan Foster: Yeah, and like, you know. To that same point around maturity and interest in AI tools, we're never going to be the agency that's pushing all of our people to always use AI and all of our customers must. But if they're expressing an interest, like, we've really leaned in to Claude lately. Had a conversation with a client recently who said, you know, we want everything to be on Claude. Website is the only bit that's not right now. If we move over to Webflow, can we plug it into Claude? And we're like, yeah, like the way the MCP is going, there's more and more operations that you could do previously only in the designer, now available.

17:19Dan Foster: In MCP, is great. And increasingly, we're starting to talk to them around custom skills. So for example, Webflow produces, I think there's like a GitHub repo of like loads of different skills which have been honed to help you get the most out of MCP, which is great. But increasingly, we're talking to clients about custom skills that can help do even more on your website, right? Maybe there's a really custom, unique setup or component or something, and a little bit of extra helping hand.

17:49Dan Foster: Beyond the core Webflow skills just help smooth that transition from Claude into Webflow even further.

17:59Janne Parri: Yeah. And then there was this or there is this like library of certain like instructions for MCP's LLMs within Webflow. So that was kind of a at least in my mind, like clever thing to do that even if you like change your agents or LLM, those instructions live there and as a developer you can set it up and have more peace of mind that whatever tool uses and reads those will be able to do better work in that

18:35Dan Foster: Hmm.

18:36Janne Parri: Sense. So have you already utilized those?

18:39Dan Foster: The agent instructions, I personally have not. I'm focusing more on the skill side of things, but we definitely need to dabble with the agent instructions, and I think some of our team are starting to explore that. But that's the thing, Jan, that I'm finding I'm spending less time in Webflow in the tools these days because I'm so much fun chatting to clients and doing things like this. So it's probably my summer homework as well. I need to brush up on the latest features.

19:06Janne Parri: Yeah, that's the way it goes. Like and there's so so many other tools that one needs to check out and so on. And especially I would imagine that when the company grows like you do less and less like that day to day like actual production stuff and do more of like the conversations that you mentioned and sales and whatnot. So yeah. So

19:32Dan Foster: Still make sure I get into the tools occasionally. I was in this morning updating something on our website. I was like, it's nice just to see how things are going and make sure I've still got my finger on the pulses, like technical director after all. But yeah, we've got an amazing team. So it's not like I need to be in Webflow pushing code daily. We've got such a great team of devs and designers, of course. But yeah, they're more than capable.

19:53Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it shows if the listeners wanna check out like all the all the case studies, like it really really shows those are awesome. And you mentioned before like that you are also using Webflow Cloud more and more. I'm like wondering in which cases do you use that if you have a concrete example that would be that would be nice and yeah I have this tendency to group multiple questions so let's go with go with those

20:26Janne Parri: Flow cloud

20:26Dan Foster: Webflow cloud, yes. So there's two kind of primary examples that come to mind. One is a full like case study and it's on the website so I'm talk about that properly and definitely go and take a look if you're interested or ask me any questions. And then the other one is something we're working on like a live project so I can't speak about it in too much detail but I can give a hint. And the two kind of buckets are firstly it's like full production web apps like kind of I guess maybe how it was initially pitched you can now build web apps on Webflow. And then the second one is kind of behind the scenes stuff. Maybe it's like proxies or it's management apps that can sit inside of your workspace to help your...

21:06Dan Foster: Customers or clients do their job on the website. So it's like an extra little layer, kind of a control panel to help manage the site, which is interesting. So I can't do too much about that one, but maybe next time. Whereas this one, the full kind of production web apps. So we've done a couple, the one that which stands out, we did for a company called Sky, who are like a telecommunications TV company here in the UK. And they approached us asking for some help in reimagining how employees get recognised for great work. Which is kind of a random ask, especially because a lot of our work is a little bit more external focused, right? It's create me a new B2C marketing site or B2B landing page, that type of thing, where this is more of an internal use case, a site that their company can use to shout out when one another have done great work and kind of get some rewards out and build a real like culture of recognition. And they were the ones who came to us with the ask. They came to us and said, we want to build this thing. We're not just sure what it is.

22:02Dan Foster: So went through that whole discovery design journey to kind of scope this thing out and create a concept and then when it comes to development they were really keen to do it on Webflow because they've already kind of gone all in on Webflow as a business. So they said well what can we do? How can we push the limits of Webflow to enable this? And thankfully with Webflow Cloud getting released I guess it was a year or so ago it was kind of a nice time to try it at scale and working really closely with our colleagues over in Sky and our friends at Webflow Solution Architects, were able to push Webflow Cloud to its limits and deliver something really great. So think on launch day, there were like 12,000 users, more than that now.

22:40Dan Foster: And it's really cool. Yeah. So you can go in and you can like nominate, I could nominate you, Jana, for like great work on the podcast. And then you get a little notification and then maybe your manager sees that and they go, wow, great work. I'm going to send you a voucher or something, which you can then redeem. And it's really cool. Cool system. What was really exciting was, obviously there's the technical and we can talk about how we built it and all that, but from a business impact perspective, even on launch day, we had people saying, this thing is so good. First, it looks nice. We're like, great, nice. But secondly, the sales teams who are speaking to customers on the phone are so motivated. They're selling more than ever. We were like, amazing.

23:19Dan Foster: This little thing we made actually has helped improve sales and performance. It's really cool.

23:26Janne Parri: Little thing that you made. What did you say? Like twelve thousand? What was it thousand and two hundred or twelve thousand?

23:31Dan Foster: Yeah, there's a few users. Yeah, was 12,000, but it feels little, because it has a little job

23:35Janne Parri: That's

23:37Dan Foster: And it does it really well. It's not like some big sprawling, like global, like, I don't know, massive thing, but the impact has been big, which is great.

23:47Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. And you mentioned that the client came to you. I would imagine like if one is known for like Webflow and websites, they might not get too many of those inquiries. And I'm like interested how you approached that. Like did you have talent in house to produced that? Did you have to hire someone and what was the whole like experience in your point of view?

24:14Dan Foster: Yeah, good question. In our dev organization, we kind of split the team into designers and developers and operations and marketing and everything else. In the dev team, we have some different levels of dev, where we've got our mid-level webflow devs, we've got more lead devs and seniors, and then we've got some full stack experts as well who sit within that world. So thankfully, we already had a couple of experts who know the world of full stack and pushing code to GitHub. And kind of managing back ends and databases and they were already putting that to work to extend our Webflow marketing site which is cool but it was interesting that this was the first time that at scale were really pushing the limits of Webflow Cloud as a whole new kind of part of the platform. So we already had the people thankfully and it's good because we're getting more requests for that type of work more Webflow Cloud interactive web app experiences so I can see that side of

25:11Dan Foster: Their team continuing to grow actually.

25:14Janne Parri: Like are those inquiries coming like inbound or through like some webflow channels or have they just seen the work you have done this far and asking about something similar?

25:27Dan Foster: Yeah, interestingly a lot of it is kind of expansion. So often we're working with these companies maybe on a marketing site and they go, could we do this? Like somebody was asking if it's possible to do something like that. And I know it's not really a marketing site, but, and what's great is that now rather than maybe a few years ago where you maybe you could glue some no code stuff together and you could get kind of a prototype or something just about workable. These days you can go, yeah, Webflow can do it. It's part of Webflow cloud. It's really robust. It hasn't got absolutely every feature just yet but it's improving and that's quite nice actually so it's often an expansion route we start with a marketing site and then this stuff comes after or yeah sometimes it's like a referral or something like that yeah

26:09Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. And what would you say would be like the ideal use case for Webflow Cloud? If someone in the audience knows nothing about Webflow Cloud, why what would be a good use case for that?

26:25Dan Foster: That's a good question. You know, if you were coming at, want to build a full stack web app from scratch and you weren't on Webflow already, it might not be the first choice, especially in this kind of AI enabled world in which we're finding ourselves. But I think for us, I'd probably recommend it for those folks who are already kind of either exploring or on the Webflow ecosystem. I think it's such a great fit because a lot of time and effort, especially if you're one of those bigger enterprise scale companies, goes into figuring out which platform going to invest in getting the IT approvals and the security and the contracts. So once you've already done that, you've got these tools available, you might as well use them. So from a customer's perspective, it's often those customers who are either exploring or already on something like Webflow. And then from a use case perspective, that will vary so much because it is kind of a blank canvas. It is full stack web app. You can do kind of anything. So what we're finding is it's quite cool for those situations where kind of a classic Webflow site won't cut

27:21Dan Foster: It, when you need that backend, where you need to store data, where you've got logins, all that kind of stuff. Those are kind of the little flags that we look for where we go, this could be kind of a Webflow Cloud type build.

27:34Janne Parri: Interesting. And what about for your agency friends? Like if there are some agency owners there and they are wondering if they should do some sort of service around that, would you recommend that and how should they approach it?

27:50Dan Foster: Wow, yeah, free agency consulting coming your way. I'm no expert, right? And the thing about MakeBuild, we're figuring this out and we're growing along with the platform, right? We're nimble and we've got the type of people that love testing out new stuff and figuring stuff out, which is great. In terms of building a practice around it, I think it has to, A, be a good fit for you and your team. So if you've got these kind of complimentary skills that you need to... Be able to push, you know, backend code and you understand that world as well as the kind of the front end Webflow world, then definitely worth dabbling and having a look, I think. Yeah. If you're much more comfortable with kind of the classic marketing site use case, well, then I actually, think the way that the Webflow platform is going back to our conversation before seeing things like agentic development through MCP2 or seeing AI code components, which I think is pretty cool as well. There's a world in which maybe you don't need.

28:45Dan Foster: To lean all into this Webflow cloud type use case. I think it's a mix of do you have those skills, are you interested in building full-stuck web apps and are your clients asking for it, right? If there's areas where you think yeah this probably isn't gonna be a Webflow designer type build then yeah it might be worth looking at but it is different, it is very different kind of proposition yeah.

29:06Janne Parri: Yeah. That's the thing that nowadays Webflow has so many like sub things going on that especially for people working alone, like you can definitely pick a lane. Agencies can do more about those like localization and optimization and people can just like focus on those and build a good service around those. And just be fine without ever like checking out the more development oriented stuff, for example. But speaking of that, if we bring it back to the re-architecture thing that we started this episode, how do you see that all those like development oriented things like the Webflow claw cloud

29:51Janne Parri: Code components and whatever there is DevLink if someone remembers DevLink. How do those fit into this new like image of Webflow's future? Do you think that they will fit in nicely? Do you think that they will be obsolete and just replaced with something new and So on so what does your crystal ball say?

30:18Dan Foster: Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know. I can't see a world in which those type of features allowing people to prompt... Rich widgets into existence with our co-components allowing you to use agentic development tools via mcp 2.0 or 3.0 whatever it is eventually. Can't see well in which of those type of features get taken out of the platform now because that's what people are asking for they're asking to push their marketing sites further bigger better than ever before they want interactive widgets they want to control and manage their sites at scale from their cloud desktop app right whether or not

30:54Dan Foster: They're still called all those things, who knows? I don't have that tap into the Webflow product marketing team. It may be that they all get rebranded and rebuilt or something completely new, but those features are becoming more important in both our workflow and for our customers because it's not kind of enough to have kind of a classic Webflow landing page with a couple of animations anymore. Think especially the kind of competitive B2B SaaS world, for instance, like the bar is quite high for making a real impact on your landing pages. And that's both from a how does it look and feel from a user perspective, but also how well optimized is it using A/B tests and AI powered optimization? How personalized is it via things like Webflow Optimize? And how readily understood is it by AI agents and AEO? And I'm sure we'll get into that eventually. But

31:46Dan Foster: That's probably the next question on your list, isn't it?

31:49Janne Parri: Now that you mentioned it, yeah. Wait a I had something escaped my mind yeah, yeah, it's hard to see that they would like take those abilities away, especially knowing that they like Webflow is aiming for the bigger clients, the enterprise clients and Usually those would be the clients that want to have those more development oriented features.

32:15Dan Foster: Hmm.

32:15Janne Parri: Even if they don't use it like just in just in case that they are they want it at some point. But yeah, we'll see what the future brings. But I'm like thinking that maybe the re architecture will do something that those features will not be needed anymore or there's a simpler way to like have host something on Webflow and that would not be Webflow cloud. I have said so many times cloud that I'm mixing those

32:45Dan Foster: Do you know something I don't? Is this the new name for the Webflow Cloud feature? It's getting rebranded as Webflow Claude, is it? Yeah, maybe. Who knows? But yeah, Janne, can

32:50Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. I d I dunno.

32:55Dan Foster: I ask you a question? Have you doubled with things like, I know you said MCP2 is quite new, but have you played with like AI code components or Webflow Cloud yet or not just yet?

33:05Janne Parri: No not really. I have I have had some tries. Not with like real clients. There was

33:12Dan Foster: Hmm.

33:12Janne Parri: This what was it called? L like AppGen, I built something or tried it out and so on, but I haven't gotten deep into those like Webflow Cloud and code components. That's on my list because I know that people are doing cool little things like also little things that like you do not have to do anything like major with those and so on. And MCP that's like higher on my list because that would obviously help the workflow with even like basic marketing sites or so on. But yeah

33:49Janne Parri: MCP two point sh seems like great, but I'm wondering do you do you remember if that can do like interactions too at this point?

34:01Dan Foster: I remember seeing some caveat around... GSAP animations. Maybe it hasn't got the full suite of capabilities yet. It's interesting, saw, I had a chat with some of the Webflow team and they kind of gave our team a bit of a walk through, you know, some of the things it can do and some it can't. As kind of 2.0 was getting rolled out and it was amazing to see the improvement from MCP1 with the Bridge app and you need to do this and it can do a few things kind of well, but there's lots of improvement. Whereas MCP2 is like, wow, it can do almost everything you can do in the design.

34:32Dan Foster: And they seemingly have taken the bridge app away from most use cases but not everything so it is definitely improving whether or not you can do absolutely everything yet I think not but I think that's again the direction of travel right it's continuing to improve

34:44Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, totally. And I'm I'm like fine if it can't yet do those like interactions or GSAP stuff. Just like the addition of like components, editing those and component prompts like that's a big thing for me, so that you can like just prompt and say that okay, using the components that are already in Webflow build a new page for that. So and fill it with relevant content. So that in itself is beautiful.

35:17Dan Foster: Hmm.

35:18Janne Parri: But I'm wondering how does that like relate to this new architecture thing? That is there like something towards this new way of building some like markers or anything like that? I they kind of like said something along the lines in the architecture but I didn't really get how those are like related. Do you have any any knowledge about that?

35:45Dan Foster: No, I don't. My read on it was getting to the source, they want to... Do a better job of exposing the real code of your website and allowing you to interact and manipulate the code directly. And there's so many different ways you could take that. That could be, you know, a slightly better designer experience that doesn't have this invisible middle layer that then controls the code. Or it could be, you know, AI agents via MCP are able to more readily interact with the raw code on your site. So it's more performant and quicker. Cause I know particularly with MCP 1.0, one of the bug bears that people had was it was

36:22Dan Foster: Slow to get stuff done. So my hope is that it will flatten the complexity in the platform a little bit and allow us to use our desktop agentic dev tools and Claude Code and whatnot to interact quicker at scale and more performantly with our sites. That's my hope anyway. Let's see.

36:43Janne Parri: And I have another question about your read of that article. It's like coming back again and again that article. But there was mentions like owning one's code and like portability of code. So what do you think of that? Do you are we getting like code that we can freely like import, export from the platform? Or what do you think?

37:09Dan Foster: Yeah, you're right, because I guess we've always had... The shift E export as a zip file, which was helpful. I know a lot of companies who use that a lot, not necessarily our customers, but they have weird and wacky workflows where they design a site and they export it and they put it into another CMS and people using Webflow in that way for a while. But you're right, the import, getting code into Webflow has maybe always been a little bit more tricky and gated. It's always been, well, you've got to pop your code into this footer section or you've got to put it into this code embed or increasingly serve it maybe through Webflow.

37:40Dan Foster: Cloud or GitHub or whatever. But yeah, more interoperability, like, workflow is just a tool that you can use to access your code. But you can access it from the other side too. It can be really exciting. And I know for a long time, kind of in the enterprise world, there's questions about, where does my code live? And geographic restrictions and EU hosting and all of those things. So maybe it's a nod towards that. I don't know. Let's see.

38:06Janne Parri: That would be awesome. I haven't thought about that it might like somehow like figure out this EU hosting thing which has been on the top of the wish list for a long time, so. Yeah, okay.

38:18Dan Foster: Yeah, yeah, I agree.

38:21Janne Parri: Beautiful. Hopefully something along the lines.

38:24Dan Foster: Well, I

38:24Janne Parri: It

38:25Dan Foster: Guess on this whole article, right, it's the precursor to this big announcement. So my

38:29Janne Parri: I think.

38:30Dan Foster: Natural next question is, are you going to be there when it gets announced? Are you going to Boston? Are you going to be at Webflow Conf? Will we see you in the room?

38:37Janne Parri: Yeah, I'm afraid not unless there's some sort of major event that I can I can get back and get back and get there. Like I have some business to attend, so to speak, back here in Finland. But obviously I'll be I'll be watching it online so so yeah. But I'm already doing plans for the twenty-seven. Yeah. Twenty seven is the next year.

39:02Dan Foster: Cool, live podcast, I think it has to be, surely.

39:05Janne Parri: That would be that would be cool, like stream it at least like some sort of reactions. Yeah. And it's already quite near like September th the first. Starting on September the first, like that's a couple of weeks away. So exciting

39:20Dan Foster: Yeah, not far.

39:22Janne Parri: Things. And I also know that they will do some live demos, so I think that there are some folks within Webflow like preparing already for those things. So

39:32Dan Foster: A live demo. You've got to be so brave to do those. I love that they do. Fingers crossed it all goes smoothly. Yeah.

39:38Janne Parri: Totally. And I feel like this will be in a way like make or break moment that all about those announcements and so on, like they kind of need to need to like boost the confidence that people have in them... That they have the right direction that we have been talking about all along. So yeah.

40:00Dan Foster: Hmm.

40:00Janne Parri: Are you gonna go there?

40:02Dan Foster: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Think it'll be four of us from the MakeBuild team flying over, which should be fun. I think... Tim might be on a panel or something, watch this space, let's see. But yeah, looking forward to being there. And I would say, yeah, if anybody is watching this and wants to say hi, please do come and say hi. Love meeting fellow Webflow fans and whoever else. We can talk about this article in more depth because clearly there's a lot in there.

40:30Janne Parri: Totally. And is MakeBuild like nominated for any awards this year?

40:34Dan Foster: Yeah, so we've got, we're a finalist for agency of the year, which is great. Would be awesome to win it. We've been up for that one a couple of times before, but you never know. Always up against very stiff competition because the world of Webflow agencies is great and there's so many companies doing awesome stuff. So it's a good group to be in. So we're a finalist for that one. I think we're a finalist for brand transformation of the year for some work we did with a customer in Barcelona. Solona called Lodgify. We recently redesigned and rebuilt their website on the back of a rebrand that Cotto branding agency did and that was really fun. And then actually one of our developers is up for developer of the year. So Ollie McMillan,

41:17Janne Parri: Ooh, beautiful.

41:18Dan Foster: He works with us about 50 % of the week. I think it's like two or three days a week and then does some other projects on the side. And we've been so lucky to have him work with us on a number of really big projects including type 4 which won all-Star Award last year but yeah he will hopefully you know get his flowers this year as dev of the year so if you feel like supporting go and go and give him a vote on the Webflow Awards site.

41:44Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. Definitely everybody online hearing this, like make sure to vote in general, like all there are all sorts of categories and cool people. Okay yeah let's go towards another topic like those AEO stuff and optimization

42:03Dan Foster: Hmm.

42:04Janne Parri: And so on. So what would you say how much of your like revenue or services are focused on those things, those parts?

42:14Dan Foster: Yeah, good question. Again, design, build and grow. Lot of our work is helping big exciting companies with big marketing teams move their sites over to Webflow. So that's often the catalyst for a lot of our client relationships. And then often that evolves into a longer term setup where we're helping them on an ongoing basis or we're doing little projects with them. And that's where we're seeing a lot of growth for the grow part of our business. So that's optimization, A/B testing. Figuring out what to test, which I think is the first challenge. Like it's all well and good saying you're going to A/B test a couple of buttons, but really what's going to move the needle and what is strategically important for your business? We do a lot of that and then actually, you know, helping to design and roll out the experiments and review and play it back. And then increasingly the AEO piece as well. AEO a little bit on this ongoing basis, but also in the initial setup. It's increasingly if a company is redoing their whole site, they want to know that A, it's got the SEO funding,

43:10Dan Foster: Fundamentals so traditional search we'll pick it up but increasingly that it's got the a yo or geo whichever acronym you're using those fundamentals as well So if somebody is searching on chat GBT or Claude or increasingly Google because Google is promoting its AI overviews right

43:25Janne Parri: No, yeah.

43:26Dan Foster: At the top, right? You need to be to be kind of mentioned and cited up there. So yeah hearing a lot about it from our customers and helping them kind of move in that direction what I think is so exciting about this AEO space in particular is evolving so quickly, even 6-12 months ago, the wisdom on the things that would get you mentioned in AI search have changed. I went to a conference in Singapore for Ahrefs's annual conference which was really

43:56Dan Foster: Fun, would recommend it if anybody is even just a bit interested in the world of AI search. Was a really interesting mix of super kind of high level kind of predictions about the future and the way things are going with AI search all the way down to super nitty gritty. There was a guy who I think I mentioned it in like a blog post I wrote. He works for an agency over in Australia I believe and he'd queried AI overviews like a million times using some bot to kind of work out how it responds to certain prompts. And he was like playing about the data

44:28Dan Foster: And there's these analyses and chat. It was, my mind was blown. So I was thinking, we're just gonna learn about, know, schema or whatever. He was like, that's just the tip of the iceberg. And he went into so much detail. So was really interesting. I took a couple of things away from that talk. One was, yeah, things keep changing, so you gotta kinda stay on top of it. Secondly, that... AI search is not a monolith, think somebody said, like Claude, ChatGPT, perplexity, Google AI overviews, they all work a little bit differently. And it's not 100 % clear how they all work yet. So it's not a case of going, I'm going to optimise my site for AI search by adding schema and I'll be done with it. Well, they all respond differently to different, maybe types of schema or hierarchies or backlinks or, know, mentions on other sites. They all kind of decide upon these.

45:14Dan Foster: Ranking factors slightly differently so thought that was interesting and I felt like there was one more thing yeah I think it was Tim the kind of MC for the day CMO of hrefs said winning in AI search is about building surround sound which I thought was quite a nice metaphor so it's not good enough anymore for you to say I'm gonna optimize my website for search and it's gonna have a load of keywords stuffed into it great increasingly search is about building like consensus and having lots of different sources around the internet all kind of saying that yeah you guys know what you're talking about so a chatbot sees all of this and goes yeah that seems sensible I'm gonna send my users there so increasingly it's kind of the off page it's the PR again it's Reddit it's YouTube it's all that good stuff that's

46:03Dan Foster: Factoring into kind of search rankings as well but I found it really interesting as somebody who's kind of dabbled with SEO and AO for a while that's not my area of expertise have an incredible search specialist on the team. But it was nice looking at the trends and seeing where things are going.

46:18Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, totally. It's so interesting about all those things and it's fundamental for websites obviously. But then especially if you're just like one guy doing websites and then you have to master this whole AEO thing. Client asks like how do I get on the first place or first answer of ChatGPT. You have to produce some sort of answer and maybe even service like that's a whole new whole new game. I used to do some SEO services, but that in itself was like a lot of a lot of work, a lot of things to keep up. And now

46:58Janne Parri: I feel like as you said it's like in a way bigger it goes towards like PR and all the all the like off site things so A lot of a lot of work if you wanna do it like correctly. And on top

47:12Dan Foster: Yeah, and

47:13Janne Parri: Of that it changes very, very fast, so

47:16Dan Foster: Yeah, it will stabilize, but I think as it's still relatively new, there's so much kind of movement. Think the other thing is what's quite exciting about AEO versus SEO. Obviously SEO has been around for a long time, as long as there's been traditional search, there's been SEO, people who can kind of promise to optimize your site for it. Think what's quite interesting about SEO is I think maybe it's been a little bit unloved sometimes. And you see a lot of SEOs talking about this on LinkedIn, like, you know, with the the unloved middle child, you know, nobody wants to pay for a lot of SEO work but now AEO because there's an AI element maybe there's a little bit more excitement from kind of board level or senior folks in the company going well, we need to be on ChatGPT So it's kind of reignited this excitement

48:03Dan Foster: Around search again and of course often the best people to implement AI strat AI search strategies or the best people to recommend on a an AEO play are the SEOs because they know how bots read websites and they know how to optimize for keywords and they know how to build consensus and PR and backlinks like these people have gone from maybe being a little bit unloved sometimes although super important to now being kind of the stars of the show because AEO is all everyone's talking about. And there's that added layer that I think Webflow mentioned in a publication a while ago that supposedly if you're visiting a website having been referred through an AI search

48:44Dan Foster: Engine or answer engine you're more likely to convert more often than not particularly in b2b settings so so increasingly before when it was like well we just need more traffic okay seo well this time it's like well we need even more leads and these people are even further down the funnel and so it's quite interesting yeah AEO kind of continuing to grow in importance perhaps

49:02Janne Parri: Yeah, I can see that like excitement is reignited somehow. But I also say that a lot of like gripes with SEO has to do with the fuzziness of the whole field. Like it's hard to promise the client the first place on Google and I would say that it's even more hard to promise to be source in ChatGPT, but obviously people want that. And how do you firstly like how do you measure that even nowadays? Like there is not a good way to measure that. Well the tools will give you some sort of some sort of answer. But yeah, and

49:41Dan Foster: It's a bit of a proxy, isn't it? Like these tools often are running their own prompts and checking and going, it looks like you're ranking for these things, but it's not maybe as detailed and specific as you could get from kind of a SEO tool. I think what's interesting as well is how you position that to customers. Like we would never... Maybe we would. Think at least right now we wouldn't promise anything around like you will get to number one, you will do this. But what we can promise is that we're going to set you up with the best foundation and we're going to do all of the best practices that are currently recommended because this stuff shifts to set your site up so it can be machine and bot readable and friendly, right? So it is adding semantic elements. It is using good hierarchy of elements. It is making sure your code is accessible and

50:27Dan Foster: And it is probably adding some schema for good measure, although the debate is out on whether that is the be-all and end-all. I think it's more of an additive rather than the core feature. But yeah, it comes back to the fact that, you know, from what I've seen, from the talks I've attended and the evidence I've seen from our clients, good SEO will get you a long way towards great AEO performance. So yeah, it's good to see SEOs getting the attention and the love they deserve, I think.

50:55Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And many people like know that even if like the metrics are fuzzy you should probably do that, do something about it or pay someone to do that. And then it is just like finding the right partner for that. But what about like those optimization things like do you often use webflow optimize? And do you have other tools for the same like use case? And how do you find those?

51:22Dan Foster: Yeah, we've used a few. We've used Webflow Optimize. We've used OptiBase, which I think is such a great tool, particularly maybe if you're a little bit smaller and maybe not quite at that enterprise tier yet. I think it delivers a lot of value. I think we've also dabbled with tools like VWO and Optimizely as well on some accounts. I think the thing which keeps bringing me back to Webflow Optimize is I like Webflow as a tool and it kind of feels and works like Webflow and it's integrated, which I think for especially maybe slightly less technical clients having everything in one place is quite a nice selling point, it's a nice pitch. And of course they've got features like AI optimise which they say will get you to statistical significance quicker. And I think the way that they built it is really cool. I'm keen to see it continue to evolve because there is a wish list like you were mentioning around, you hosting and stuff. There's things that could be improved and made even better. But it's nice having a

52:15Dan Foster: Everything in one place I think.

52:18Janne Parri: And if the if there is a person who would like to start well let's say with their own site, like do some sort of A B testing or optimization, where would you lead them and what would be their first test to do

52:34Dan Foster: You're gonna test my knowledge now. We gave a talk on this in 2024 I think at Webflow Conf London. So it's out on YouTube somewhere but Tim and I gave this talk and we I'll give you a little bit backstory on the talk and why

52:47Janne Parri: Bring it on.

52:47Dan Foster: We did it and then we'll get to the answer on how to start. But yeah, so were chatting with Webflow and we kind of said we want to do a talk, know, so were trying to submit something really punchy and we go right, let's do 20 ideas to drive traffic. Or to optimise your website in 20 minutes. We were like, that's cool, yeah. What are we gonna do? I don't know, we'll figure it later. Submitted the talk. They said, yeah, sounds good. Firstly, they said, yes, sounds good. So we're like, okay, now we need to figure out the content. Then they also said, instead of 20 minutes, I think we're gonna give you like 40, I guess. Maybe they had a cancellation or something. We were like, that's not quite as snappy, 20 minutes, 20 ideas in 40 minutes. But we gave it a bit more of a rethink. And we realised, even if we did just have the 20 minutes,

53:28Dan Foster: It would be pretty short and sharp. So we made it even more compressed. We did five minutes of ideas and you'll see us rattling through these ideas at the start. And the audience is probably going, what are they doing? They're shouting ideas about traffic engagement and conversion. And then we go, okay, let's just pause for a second. This all sounds great, but like, how do I even know which of these is any good for my website? How do I know which one to start with? And how do you implement this stuff? Okay, fine. Let's take it back to basics. And that was kind of the kind of slightly random intro. Went through our process and our process for anybody starting out was threefold so it was HOP, god I'm really trying to remember now, HOP process and it was start by hunting for ideas so use competitors as a source of inspiration but don't just copy everything they're doing look around to see what other people have done on their website and see whether an idea could be good whether it could be something you want to experiment with you want to try and also ask your team and maybe look at the analytics to

54:24Dan Foster: Understand if there's anywhere that customers are dropping off or pages that aren't getting as much traffic as you think they should do. So hunt for the ideas, then you put them in order. So really important to prioritize. Like we said, there were 20 ideas in this first two minutes of our talk alone. How do you even know where to start? So you prioritize, we use like an ICE framework, impact, complexity and effort. Just score the different ideas and then you pick one, you go right, this is the one we're to go with. And then you prove So you prove them by training the design and putting it out, running an A/B test using a tool like Webflow Optimize or Optibase and then seeing what the results are. Then it's really important to let the experiment run for a while, particularly if you're not getting a lot of traffic on your site, you might have to let it run for maybe weeks, see what the results are and then decide whether you want to keep it on your site and you push that one live or you say, it wasn't actually that good and you cancel it and you say, let's not go with that.

55:17Dan Foster: Version of the experiment and you repeat the process again. You go back to the list, you pick a new experiment and you go again. So that kind of HOP framework is how we talk about optimisation a lot with our customers. But there's loads of different frameworks and processes. But I think that idea of not just going, I'm going to change the button colour because that's what everybody does. Amazon did it once. Yeah, it's going like, let's actually look

55:33Janne Parri: Yeah, that's the classic. Yeah.

55:38Dan Foster: Outside and see what ideas are out there, see if there's anything really cool that we can experiment with. Put it in order alongside many other ideas I'm sure then prove it's working with experimentation and I think yeah the prove it bit that I always forget it's really important to come up with a hypothesis for experiments so you're saying we're gonna put this variant of the button on the home page our hypothesis is that it's gonna drive more clicks than the old blue button by five percent and we're gonna try it for a month and see what happens so you've got to have a hypothesis that you can prove or disprove because if you're just going let's just see how it goes it's a bit wishy-washy

56:11Dan Foster: That's our usual process and might be a good place to get started and the whole video is on YouTube if you want to go watch us talk about the random ideas as well

56:19Janne Parri: Yeah, and did I see those ideas on MakeBuild's website too?

56:25Dan Foster: Yeah, yeah, so we built kind of a library of ideas and I think there's probably... There must be 30 or 40 ideas in there now where we've gone here is here are the kind of the classic B2B marketing site type ideas, but they apply to other parts of the web as well. Here are the ideas and the experiments that we're seeing our customers run with and have success with and we've been implementing. So why not share that? So you can go on our website. I think you pop in your email address and then you get access to the full list and it's a nice starting point. Again, I don't think you should just look at the list and grab one and just implement it straight away. If you actually want to do experiments.

56:59Dan Foster: It's about looking for inspiration, putting them in an order and then deciding which one to run with. But yeah, hopefully it's a starting point.

57:08Janne Parri: Yeah. That's so cool. And I'll be definitely checking out those. I just have a so so long to do list with my own own site that I should just like revamp it altogether and then

57:22Dan Foster: Have you done any experiments on your own website? Have you ever dabbled with an A/B test or something like that to see if the button colour needs to change? It doesn't have to be the button colour, I just always come back to that one.

57:34Janne Parri: I yeah, yeah. I used to used to try out like Optibase some year back, but then my traffic was just so low that I haven't tried it since then. But I could take another look. But as I said, I'm still in the process of like revamping, redesigning my site, so that's like the first thing. But I wonder has the AI like changed this optimization thing? You mentioned that Webflow Optimize has this AI feature that kind of like optimizes it without like strictly a B testing and so on. So do you have any experiences with that and is that a good feature or just cool, thing to say when you market the product?

58:24Dan Foster: I think the way that we're seeing AI in the world of website optimisation is interesting. There's the AI optimised feature that Webflow has that think will direct and shift the traffic patterns that are coming to your website into variant A or variant B so that you can get to statistical significance quicker, but you're still creating those variants, right? So there's that. But I think on a wider level, what we're seeing is a lot of our customers are more excited than ever to try cool stuff. It's quicker than ever to build cool

58:55Dan Foster: Stuff. So some of our customers, yeah, B2B SaaS type clients, they are saying we're going to redo our pricing page and that might have been something in the past that maybe it's weeks and months of thinking and design and really make sure we're really happy with the variant before we push it live. Whereas now they go well we could just use maybe Claude Code via MCP or dabble with some experiments and we'll have a few different ones and we'll try them and see if it works and if it doesn't we can it. So I think that speed at which you can develop now and it's always been faster than traditional development in Webflow. The AI-powered development is even quicker than kind of dragging and dropping divs on a page, right? So what we're seeing in the world of optimization is our customers are even more excited than ever to try new stuff, try new widgets, new bold ideas, things that maybe would have taken ages and maybe animator to create some kind of elaborate sequence are now like somebody's afternoon in lovable or something.

59:51Dan Foster: That they then extract and drop into a code embed. It's interesting the way that they're using AI power development to get to the experiment that they want to put forward quicker. So as well as, you can use it to optimize the source of traffic and whatever, they're using it to actually change what they're creating and they can do that quickly. So it means you can go through more cycles. So really cool.

1:00:13Janne Parri: Yeah. I haven't thought this but a thought came to mind kind of a similar thing but a different thing. Do you think that customers are like more comfortable with not so polished things going live because of AI? Like they just wanna do a multitude of different things and it's fine if it's not too polished or it looks a bit like AI, but let's just figure out it later, push live and see what it brings.

1:00:43Dan Foster: Yeah, I think, yeah, yeah, we do see that. Think there's, especially... Companies with a really strong brand and design guidelines and all that kind of stuff, it's still important that they've got that level of polish. But I think because of AI and because it's so quick, particularly maybe for their competitors to move and iterate, they are also feeling like, we need to move and iterate quickly as well. So maybe there's less of that final 5 % of polish needed for that first iteration. Let's just get the experiment out there. Let's just get that new landing page out. And if it performs, then we can kind of layer on the finishing.

1:01:16Dan Foster: Touches but yeah we're seeing that I think it's a helping people move quicker because they want to but they're facing the pressure from you know from up top or from their competitors also moving quickly so they're going yeah let's just get it out even if it's not 100 % there it's good enough to get some data that we can then use to iterate and polish the next version.

1:01:36Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. That's interesting. What about MakeBuild? What are you like testing out or planning for the future? What we'll be seeing from you guys?

1:01:47Dan Foster: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, we're focused, as always, on delivering really great work with our customers. We're pushing them and they're pushing us to experiment and try new tools and implement new features, which is really great. I think tools like Webflow Cloud, again, are giving us the latitude and the ability to do more than ever as a team. Because with AI power Development and Webflow Cloud, you can now build these kind of rich web apps. So could see us doing more of that in the future. Kind of extending marketing sites to become kind of living breathing applications almost. And I think you'll continue to see us talking about and banging the drum for great design because kind of, as we said, there is a pressure sometimes to move more quickly, to just put it out there as a kind of a good enough. And while there are circumstances where I think that works and if you're running experiments and you're testing it with a small portion of your audience and you just want to get a bit of data and then move on fine, but we'll still be hammering

1:02:42Dan Foster: Home, the importance of really great design, not just the visual, what it looks like, but how it feels, what the interactions are like, the user journeys, the persona mapping, all of that kind of real design thinking type design, because that's been mine and Tim's background from when we started. Really great design permeates everything and whether or not the AI and the new iteration of Webflow are going to completely change how we build the thing. Having that strategic design, quality, craft, sort taste, know, all the buzzwords here. Still top of mind, I think is I think is more important than ever. So you'll still see us talking about that even if we are experimenting with cool AI tools.

1:03:21Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. We have been talking about a lot of like technical stuff, but yeah. The design is obviously the other part and it's fascinating to like compare how does AI affect like the development and the design. So how do you see how do you see has AI help you or your team on the design side and are there any practical things that you can mention that how has it like helped?

1:03:49Dan Foster: Yeah, yeah, and I mean, getting into the weeds of every bit of workflow on design team, you'll probably have to get Tim on the show from a creative director perspective to talk about that. He's a little bit closer to the awesome work that our designers are doing. What I've seen that's actually really interesting, again, back to that point around, sorry, I'm really about to development, but being able to develop and build stuff, even our designers, maybe a bit less technical, are now spinning up tools and creating little applications that allow them to generate moving background for a website, for instance, and play with the parameters and decide what the pattern should look like. Or one of our designers created a tool to help in the discovery kind of strategic part of design, where you extract all of the pages from a site into kind of a visual site map, which is really cool. And that was a designer saying, well, this would be helpful to me, rather than have to buy a tool

1:04:41Dan Foster: Or map out manually. That's the first stage of design often, like getting a lay of the land, understanding how big this site is, I'm going to spin up a quick tool that does it for me. I was like, that's awesome. So definitely looking for opportunities to improve the efficiency of everything we do across the studio and create little apps that solve problems. And that's not just the dev team, that's also designers and the PMs and marketing as well.

1:05:06Janne Parri: Yeah. Have you have you heard about this new role? Was it like design engineer the idea of being like someone who can do basically the both things. I remember at one point there was talk about this wool full stack designer who could do all sorts of things, including developing a website and now it's there's the design engineer. So what do you think of that kind of new role spinning up from the internet?

1:05:36Dan Foster: Yeah, it's a good question. Think it's been bubbling for a while, hasn't it? The idea of the design engineer and I'm seeing the marketing engineer is the next big thing, right? I think Profound released it recently or starts pushing it. Think in the design engineer world, actually with the world of Webflow, I think a lot of us who have been building and creating websites with Webflow have kind of always been in that space, right? Because you're kind of a designer first or maybe you got into the world of websites who've been able to do designs in Figma or Sketch or whatever other tool and Webflow finally gave you the ability to express that through code and web and production. So in a way we've kind of always as Webflow'ers has been straddling the worlds of design and dev, I think, is really exciting. I mean, yeah, call it design engineer. We were there first, right? We've been there for a while as Webflowers.

1:06:23Dan Foster: But yeah, it'll be interesting to see as Webflow continues to get more. AI first and maybe leans more into the code side of the platform, how Webflowers, who maybe started off more in the design world, continue to transition and extend their skillset. What was your background? Were you more in the design world or did you come into Webflow more as a developer or how did you get into it?

1:06:46Janne Parri: I actually have a like marketing background and maybe a bit more like design on the side. So that's my like background. But I'm like wondering if this goes further, will we have more of these like generalist roles that do all sorts of things with the help of AI and will there be place for like peer specialists. I would say that at least at this point there will definitely be a place for those about what if like AI can be trusted, like properly trusted in the future,

1:07:25Janne Parri: Will we all be doing like multiple jobs at that point? What do you think?

1:07:29Dan Foster: The question's for me. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, maybe. I mean, look, the idea of like, I'm wearing multiple hats and... Carrying out multiple roles. I think for most people in the agency world, even if you're, whether you're a sole trader and you're running a small studio or you're a slightly bigger agency or you're a massive, you know, hundreds, thousands of persons agency, even if you are a specialist, like you're probably wearing a few hats, especially in the smaller scale agencies, right? We've, like I said, we've got designers who are also building tools, got developers who are talking to clients about optimization and AEO. And we've got directors like us who are doing podcasts and,

1:08:07Dan Foster: Whatever else we do. So yeah. I think so, yeah. To that point, being able to wear multiple hats as a designer, I think has always been a core skill. It's something we look for, an interest in that world of code and AI. And even if you're not necessarily a full stack designer with dev experience right now, knowing that you've got some interest in that area, I think will put you in good stead for the future. How do you feel about it? Do you feel like a pressure to move more into that development world, to learn more about kind of coding and building stuff or is kind of the Webflow and designer marketing which is a really good combo by the way, is that is that your story and you're kind of happy with that yeah

1:08:46Janne Parri: Yeah, that's right now that is, but I feel pressure to do all sorts of things. Like the more the better. Like in a sense I feel pressure to dive deeper into the development side, but also it would be helpful to be a better designer. A copywriting would be a nice added skill. Well I think that I

1:09:09Dan Foster: Yeah, ugh.

1:09:11Janne Parri: I do some of that, but just being able to like within this same hat, same seat, spot like bad copy and maybe like do little edits that in itself would be good. Then there's obviously this content creation thing, videos, text content. Well that's in a way copywriting. But anyways like my mind is like very mixed and going to all the places. And at the same time I kind of like the idea that you could do just one thing properly, but I'm not sure if that's possible. Even if you would be a specialist, as you said, you are probably handling couple more things on the side, so yeah.

1:09:52Dan Foster: Hmm. I think the thing is, you know... Neither of us. Nobody really knows the ways that AI is going to impact our role in a year, five years, 10 years, who knows, whether we'll even have websites. Don't know. But I think building kind of that T-shaped skill set of like me and my core thing is I do Webflow sites. I'm a Webflow builder or whatever. But you've also got these other areas of expertise. Like you can make content, you can write copy, you can advise on AEO. Like having even just a little

1:10:24Dan Foster: Bit of experience along the full stack I think is so helpful because then as things shift you can kind of shift with them and to your point before that's kind of how we've built MakeBuild right we built a core competency around creating good design work and turning that into a website and we've kind of evolved on that as the webflow platform has evolved and we'll continue to shift and pivot and move where our customers need us to go I think yeah.

1:10:50Janne Parri: But that's the thing that when you are trying to like broaden your expertise, you obviously like check out the experts on that one topic. Like you see all the specialists and it like it's easy to see a world where you should be like very proficient with all the things, but that's obviously

1:11:09Dan Foster: Riot.

1:11:10Janne Parri: Not possible. So yeah. Again this social media bubble thing.

1:11:14Dan Foster: Right. It's, you know what, it's actually one of the things I quite like about like the Webflow, like community side of things, particularly here in London is that it's a chance to get together face to face and kind of cut through some of the LinkedIn chatter about, you know, a year ago was download my NAN workflow and now it's download my Claude Code, whatever. And it's just like, okay, but we're in reality, how are we doing on the ground guys? Like running agencies, like trying to do good work and make a name for ourselves. Alright yeah, you're wearing many hats. Me too, like, you didn't get to try out that new

1:11:47Dan Foster: Claude thing yet? No, me neither. And that's okay I think, yeah.

1:11:51Janne Parri: Totally. Okay, at one at some point we have to land this plane, but there was one thing kind of bringing us back to the first topic about that re architecturing thing. Let's say that Webflow pulls that off, we get a new better whatever platform. It's kind of like open the build part of the process is on par with all the other tools and let's say that it's open in a sense that you can import export things and that

1:12:25Dan Foster: Hmm.

1:12:25Janne Parri: Might not be the biggest differentiating factor anymore. Well it's not right now and it wouldn't be for the future. So where do you think that Webflow will like provide the value in the future if it's not that like build part?

1:12:42Dan Foster: Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. And I think we're already seeing this with how they're moving from how they talk about the platform as a no code builder, like bring your ideas to life. Yeah, great. But they're also now talking about the website, you know, the agentic web platform, whatever. And it's a loop and it's about building and creating your ideas and then testing it and optimizing and personalizing the site for users and making sure that you're optimizing it for AI traffic as well. And this I've done a bad job of explaining. But I think going beyond the core kind of design and build a website and thinking about how you manage and maintain it long term is probably where they're gonna continue moving right? That's what they've been releasing over the last few months and a couple of years these tools to not only launch a website but Optimize and grow

1:13:28Dan Foster: It and drive business value and whatever else into the long term So I think we'll continue to see them play in that space. Yeah

1:13:36Janne Parri: Totally. And I believe they did this follow up article where they explained that okay, the build part is one thing, and then there's the maintenance and all that stuff that comes after the publish. And obviously if you do like let's say you build a static site with all the new tools, that's one thing, but you still have to host it somewhere. You probably need some sort of CMS. So there's already two separate platforms, maybe some sort of localization thing, analytics or the optimization thing. So just like bundling all those things it has value in itself. And if they work well together, that's obviously even better. There's so much things in the Webflow like I'm

1:14:20Janne Parri: Many times I'm like puzzled how do you all of this like work together? Like it's it's becoming quite complex platform.

1:14:28Dan Foster: Yeah, it's really deep and like even some of those things around you mentioned localization, they've been working on localization for a number of years and even last month they got some big improvements and updates and it's using even better models to do the actual machine translation now and each of these areas probably has a whole team of incredible designers and devs and product people in Webflow working on them, thinking about them as pure products. It's crazy. To think we say, yeah, we're full of other got a few bits here. There's whole teams of people pushing each of those tranches forward. So yeah, it's really exciting to see what they've created and how that will evolve, I think.

1:15:07Janne Parri: Yeah, totally. We'll see. Okay Dan, there's one more thing. Do you have any ideas what that might be? No.

1:15:16Dan Foster: No, no idea.

1:15:17Janne Parri: Beautiful. So this comes as a surprise. So this is a last segment for the episodes for the podcast. And it is this weird little finish section at the end. So what follows is that I will give you a Finnish saying, I will translate that to English and your job is to guess or somehow know what that means. Is that clear?

1:15:40Dan Foster: Okay, yes, I'm ready.

1:15:41Janne Parri: And do not feel bad if you don't get it. Like there have not been too many guests that have actually guessed that right. Or it has been like super simple. So your saying, firstly in Finnish is pitkin hampain. And translated to English, it means with long teeth. And the way someone would use this is that you are doing something. With long teeth. So I could for example say that I am building this website with long teeth. So how am I doing the site?

1:16:18Dan Foster: Good question. Long teeth. There's something in English like long in the tooth, isn't there? There's a phrase long in the tooth. I don't know what it means though. It's one of those things that I've heard before. I actually don't know what it means. Long in the tooth. I feel like it's more of a negative thing. A bit long in the tooth. I'm going to find it something really offensive now. I have no idea. What is it? Put me out of my misery. What does it mean?

1:16:38Janne Parri: Give me one one guess, something, just random.

1:16:44Dan Foster: One guess? Okay, long in the tooth. Sorry, with long teeth. I think maybe it means... You're build this for us up with long teeth. Like you're really experienced, you've done it for years, but almost maybe you're a bit past it, like maybe you're no longer on the cutting edge. There's a pun there with cutting and teeth. Yeah, something like you're a bit past it, like you're gonna try your best, but you're doing it with long teeth. I don't even know if this is still the best way to build anymore, something like that.

1:17:10Janne Parri: Yeah, that's kind of like to the right direction. So I would

1:17:14Dan Foster: You're being generous.

1:17:17Janne Parri: So I would translate that to like with reluctance, like I do not feel do not do not want to do this, but I still have to do this, so I will do the do yeah. I will do it with long teeth. So yeah. I do not know where that comes from. Is there any sort of logic behind that but for some reason there's a saying in Finnish. Pitkin

1:17:38Dan Foster: Yeah, okay. I learned something new. Can you say it again in Finnish? Can you say it again?

1:17:43Janne Parri: Hampain. So if I would say that I will do this website with long teeth. Minä teen tämän nettisivun pitkin hampain.

1:17:51Dan Foster: Reluctantly, okay, good to know. I'll remember that for when I have to cook dinner for my girlfriend and I later, yeah.

1:17:59Janne Parri: Okay then, this has been a blast and for all the listeners, watchers, we'll see you in the next one. Bye.