Webflow

We’re just two months away from Webflow Conf 2024, and we’re so excited to share everything we have planned.

Whether you’ll be joining us virtually from around the world or attending in-person in San Francisco or London, we have so much in store for our attendees this year. From our hallmark keynote where you’ll get a first-hand look at everything we’ve been building, to special product spotlights, inspiring stories from trailblazing web teams, and engaging panels with digital leaders — there’s something for everyone. 

Tailored for you: build your perfect agenda

Whether you’re a marketer, designer, product owner, developer, or agency lead, Webflow Conf sessions will equip you with relevant expert insights, applicable strategies, and the opportunity to connect with folks across industries passionate about building for the web. 

Our full agenda is now live. Below, explore key sessions open to all attendees, curated by role, that we know you won’t want to miss.

For marketing teams

High-performing marketing teams are critical to building powerful websites. Webflow Conf 2024 will feature a number of sessions that will cover topics ranging from the evolving role of marketing teams, what it takes to launch and optimize web campaigns, SEO best practices, and so much more. 

Sessions marketers won’t want to miss: 

For design teams

Your website is your most critical marketing asset, and designers are essential players in bringing them to life. We have several sessions tailored to design teams that will cover how you can create captivating websites that differentiate your brand, what it takes to successfully tackle a rebrand, how to collaborate with cross-functional teams, and how to tap into emerging tech to free up time to focus on your most creative and impactful work.

Sessions designers won’t want to miss: 

For product teams

Product teams are a driving force behind website success. For product managers and owners, we have programming tee’d up that will explore the mission-critical integrations that power your business, the importance of a powerful CMS, how best-in-class teams are implementing best-in-class tools and workflows, and in-depth looks at our latest product developments.

Sessions product teams won’t want to miss: 

For engineering teams

For engineers and developers, we have special sessions that will dive deep into optimizing performance, implementing web best practices, designing workflows that enhance efficiency, and unlocking the power of data and personalization. 

Sessions engineering teams won’t want to miss: 

For agencies

We know how much value agencies unlock for world-class brands. That’s why we’ve tailored breakout sessions just for agencies and service providers that will explore what it takes to deliver standout websites that captivate and convert, how to manage multiple projects with efficiency, tips for building lasting relationships with clients, and strategies for scaling your operations while maintaining the highest quality standards. 

Sessions agency leaders won’t want to miss:

Bring Webflow Conf to your city! 

If you’re planning to tune in remotely and want to connect with local Webflow community members, apply to host or attend a Webflow Conf watch party in your city. To learn more, visit the World Wide Webflow page. 

Register for Webflow Conf today!

We have so much in store for Webflow Conf 2024, and we can’t wait to see you at this year’s event. If you haven’t already, register today to attend the online event, taking place on October 15th & 16th. It’s completely free — and packed with exciting content and programming you won’t want to miss!

To guide readers through your website, you need to place signposts along the way that usher them from one step to the next. Good CTAs do just that, subtly creating a sense of urgency with effective action words and clickable designs.

Leverage CTAs to their fullest by using effective terms and fine-tuning designs for your website. By following fundamental best practices and learning from these examples, you can create CTAs that turn passive website visitors into engaged customers.

What’s a call to action?

A CTA is a short phrase that inspires readers to engage with your website in a meaningful way. Designers often place CTAs in user interface (UI) buttons. These buttons guide readers through an interaction, such as a signup flow or purchase.

Here are a few common CTA examples:

• Sign up: Leads readers to set up an account that gives them access to your product
• Purchase: Offers readers the chance to buy a product or upgrade a subscription
• Register: Indicates that readers need to provide information to attend an event or support a cause
• Subscribe: Adds readers to a list of recipients for newsletters or gives them contingent access to products

5 CTA best practices

Nearly every type of website incorporates CTAs, so it’s no surprise that they appear in many forms. No matter your industry or type of site, a successful CTA should produce consistent conversions and a cohesive user experience. Design your CTAs with the following five traits in mind.

1. Actionable

Use clear directives in your CTAs to indicate a definite action readers should take. For example, “Sign up” and “Subscribe” indicate precise instructions, whereas “Continue” and “Next” are vague and open-ended. A strong verb like “Purchase” conveys exactly what you mean. With a straightforward CTA, readers can safely assume what the action will require and result in.

2. Concise

Use as few words as possible to get your point across. For example, “Subscribe” is more effective and actionable than “Get your free newsletter.” It fits inside an action button better, too. 

One or two-word phrases are also faster to read and interpret, catching the reader’s notice quickly.

3. Relevant

Thoughtfully place CTAs based on their context and phase of the user journey. For example, avoid placing a “Subscribe” button in the middle of a purchasing flow. Instead, save it until after someone’s made a purchase. At that point, the buyer may be more interested in signing up for an additional offering, like a newsletter.

4. Accessible

CTAs only work if they’re legible and understandable. Use tactful color contrast and avoid jargon or other inaccessible language. Also ensure that similar CTAs across your site all function consistently for predictable and intuitive navigation.

5. Uncluttered

CTAs instantly draw the reader’s attention to a specific action, so use them sparingly to avoid distraction from other important site elements, like products and written content. If too many UI features compete for readers’ attention, people may experience cognitive overload. When that happens, they’re more likely to ignore CTAs altogether.

Optimizing CTA designs to drive conversions

With the fundamentals of effective CTAs in mind, you’re set to design buttons that match your website’s unique aesthetic. Consider these design tips to visually optimize your CTAs and encourage engaged user interaction.

Opt for a striking color

Use colors that are bold, eye-catching, and rarely used elsewhere on the site to ensure your CTAs catch a viewer’s attention. These buttons will be more visually significant this way, drawing readers’ focus quickly. Choose colors that complement the page’s palette to avoid unappealing clashing.

Make CTA text larger than body text

Use the same or a similar font as the rest of your site’s copy, but increase the text size so the directive stands out. This way, the reader can quickly identify important buttons like “Sign Up” and “Contact Us” as they navigate the site. 

Leave padding around CTA buttons

If you don’t give your CTA buttons enough space to stand out, they can fade into the background of your landing pages, product descriptions, and articles. Design your buttons to have whitespace around them so they’re unmissable and visually pop on the page.

Create clickable designs

Use shadows and highlights to create a beveled design, indicating a CTA button is clickable. Distinct shapes like ovals and rectangles can also make a button blatantly interactive since these are recognizable signifiers across countless sites. 

Avoid using hyperlinks for CTAs — these are clearly clickable, but they usually signify a path to a new page, not a next step to a specific action.

Strategically position buttons

Place CTA buttons like stepping stones along the reader’s path. Between every CTA, include content that justifies taking the next step on the journey. For example, in a purchase flow, you’d begin with “Start Shopping.” Then, your shopping experience should encourage users to click the “Purchase” button when they find the right product. Situate those two buttons to indicate the beginning and end of that journey, respectively.

Experiment with CTAs

Use analytics tools to analyze heatmaps and engagement metrics. This information reveals how readers use your site, helping you determine which CTAs perform best and where on the page they’re most effective. Try different configurations based on A/B tests and user surveys until you find a design that converts readers consistently. Always monitor your buttons’ performance and continue iterating designs for ongoing improvement.

Optimal CTA placement

Once you’ve chosen your CTA terms and designed your buttons, you need to strategically place them on your page for optimal results. Try these placement options and see what works best for your site.

Above the fold

Keeping CTAs near the top of the page means they’ll appear without readers needing to scroll. The buttons immediately establish a desired action you can then encourage on the rest of the page. 

For example, a product page with the “Purchase” button near the top might describe why readers should buy the product, already having created a sense of urgency to do so. If the content convinces them, they can scroll back up to click the button and make a purchase. You could also place another “Purchase” button at the bottom of the page.

Popup

Everything about a popup element is meant to convince a reader to take a specific action, so including a CTA button is essential. Design your popups with graphics, lead magnets, and lightboxes to focus the reader’s attention directly on the action button and give it some urgency. 

Inline form

Signup and registration forms require users to put in some manual effort, and a well-designed CTA rewards them for it. Place buttons at the bottom of these forms so readers must take a definitive action to complete and submit the form. Short, firm commands like “Finish,” “Submit,” or “Register” effectively communicate that the task is complete.

Sticky header

Especially for long pages that require more scrolling, a sticky header is an excellent way to keep a CTA ever-present as the user reads. These buttons stay at the top of the page like a frozen row to ensure the CTA is always within reach. Give the header a background color that contrasts the rest of the page so it stands out while readers browse product descriptions, view images, and read customer reviews.

Bringing it all together

CTAs are key UI elements that prompt action and guide users across your site, so consistently using them on landing pages, product descriptions, and blog posts is essential to engage users and drive conversions.

‍Webflow lets you create reusable CTA buttons you can add to any page layout. If you need to adjust your pages and button placement for better performance, updating the central component will instantly apply changes across your site. 

Check out Webflow University to learn more about reusable components and other incredible design tools Webflow offers. And to find pre-built options for CTA buttons, explore the Made in Webflow Marketplace, where designers share their creations with the larger design community.

Over the years, business strategy has evolved — and so has the role of websites and the people who build them. Today, top brands are building more robust, engaging websites–and more often than not, they’re seeking innovative partners to lead their teams through these complex, and mission-critical projects.

Since launching the Webflow Experts program in 2017, we’ve seen tens of thousands of companies partner with Experts to reinvent their presence online. From Orangetheory Fitness and their work with Outliant, to Upwork’s partnership with Flow Ninja, and many more.

Today, we’re making some big updates to Webflow’s Partner Program so we can continue to support the freelancers and agencies building in Webflow, and the clients they serve. Here’s what’s new:

• We’re updating the program name to the Certified Partner Program
• Introducing new tiers and ways to grow in the program
• An all-new, in-product experience for Certified Partners
• Updated program benefits and incentives

Webflow Experts Program → Certified Partner Program

First – we are updating the name of the program from Webflow Experts, to the Certified Partner Program. Why? Because Webflow Partners provide so much more than just Webflow expertise. In addition to being some of the most talented designers and developers building for the web–Webflow Partners provide design and branding services, search engine and conversion rate optimization, content marketing strategies, and much more.

Updated tiers and growth opportunities

In addition to updating the branding of the program, we are also evolving how the program’s tiering system works–so high-quality freelancers and agencies have more ways to reach the top-tier of the program. 

New tiers & distinctions

We heard from many of you that the previous tier names did not always accurately represent the service and capabilities offered by you and your teams. So today we are re-structuring the program away from “Professional” and “Enterprise” tiers and introducing all new “Certified” and “Premium” Partner tiers.

These new tiers are designed to recognize Partners based on the overall business you contribute to the Webflow ecosystem–rather than the kinds of site plans your clients purchase.

And in order to ensure Partners specialized in Enterprise builds can continue to market their differentiated services, we are also introducing new distinction badges–which will allow you to highlight proven skill sets and certifications on your profile in addition to your Partner badge. To start, we’ll be launching the “Enterprise” distinction which is awarded after a Partner has demonstrated a history of successfully selling Webflow Enterprise.

Going forward, we envision adding distinctions for all kinds of accolades – including services offered, Webflow Awards, or the number of sites built and launched. 

New ways to level up in the program

We’re also making changes to how Partners advance through the program with a new points-based system (think airline status but simpler). This new system rewards Partners for all site plans their clients purchase–making it possible for a more diverse group of agencies to rise to the top of the program.

This new system also lets us acknowledge and reward Partners for more than just the sites they sell — and we’ll be introducing additional ways to earn points in the coming months for things like participation in alpha & beta feedback programs, resource creation, co-marketing and more.

Points will be earned and reset on an annual basis with the status you are earning in a given year applying immediately upon qualifying, and throughout the next calendar year.

In order to ensure you are always getting credit for the sites you build, we’ve also made it easier for Webflow Partners to track, and receive commissions and points. Now you will automatically receive commission for any site transferred from your account to a clients’ Workspace once a Site plan is added to the site–without needing to manually enter your Partner code in the clients workspace. The same is true for any site that is built and hosted from your own agency Workspace. 

And if you’re building in Guest Mode–you can now add your own Partner referral code to your client’s Workspace without asking them to do it for you. 

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New Global Alliance program

We’re also officially introducing our Global Alliances program–an exclusive, invite-only program for global agencies and systems integrators building for the world’s largest brands. Today, this group includes Price Waterhouse Cooper (PWC), Slalom, BBDO, and more. If you want to learn more about joining this exclusive tier, reach out to our partnerships team today.

New product experience

In addition to our program overhaul, we are excited to introduce major investments in our product experience for Partners. Today we are launching a brand new Partner Hub for all members of the Partner Program–so you can easily track and manage your status and progress in the program.

This new Hub, available via your Dashboard in the Workspace tied to your Partner account, helps centralize all things related to the Partner Program, including:

• Details about your current program tier and benefits 
• An overview of your point progress for the given year, and details about how many more points you need to earn before advancing to the next tier in the program
• Tracking for your commissions and payouts
• Your new Partner badges and assets
• Resources to help you sell Webflow, grow your agency, and stay up to date on the latest launches and enablement opportunities.
• Upcoming Partner specific events and promotions
• Documentation and support for all things related to the program itself

New benefits for Partners

Finally, along with the new tiers and product experience, we’re also rolling out a number of new benefits for Partners ranging from priority support on customer support tickets, to new ways to engage and partner with the Webflow team through the Partner Advisory Board and new annual Partner Summit. You can see the full list of benefits here.

What’s next

If you’re already a member of our Partner Program you’ll receive an email today with all the details you need to access the Partner Hub and get started. 

Partners are incredibly important to our ecosystem and the success of Webflow customers everywhere. As we look toward the future, you can expect even more investments across client management, team collaboration, and programming including:

• Office hours
• Agency specific workflow features
• New Partner specific training & certifications
• Co-marketing opportunities
• Increased discoverability and lead generation programs and more‍

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If you’re not already a member of Webflow’s Partner Program, there has never been a better time to join–start your application here!

Dropdown menus are user interface (UI) elements that let users select from a list of options. These lists are great for streamlining layouts and navigation.

To create appealing dropdowns, you’ll need to understand their use cases, benefits, and how to design and create them. With these fundamentals in mind, you’ll be prepared to implement these interactions in your website design.

Understanding dropdown menu design

Dropdown menus organize information in a hierarchy, which makes website interactions more intuitive. Here are the most common use cases for dropdown boxes.

Forms on websites

When creating an account, subscribing to a service, or making a purchase, users will likely have several form fields to fill out. Some fields, like “How did you hear about us?” work well as dropdown menus because they contain all the possible answers inside one expandable list. 

Having users choose from consistent options streamlines data collection and analysis. In this particular example, you could check the top form response to learn whether Facebook, Google ads, or physical flyers were the best advertising methods for you.

Navigation menus

Dropdown menus are an excellent way to simplify website navigation, especially on complex websites. 

For example, if you’re building an educational website that offers a wide range of courses, you can use expandable lists to organize navigation options under primary categories. This structure allows your visitors to open the relevant category and find what they need without reading all the unrelated options.

Sorting and filtering

When performing an advanced search, you can often choose from numerous sorting and filtering options to refine your results. Categories commonly include phrases like “<30 days old>

Narrowing down searches is especially helpful on platforms that contain a lot of information, such as ecommerce websites or legal databases. Adding filters helps users find more accurate information faster, which improves the overall user experience (UX). 

3 benefits of having a dropdown menu

Here are three of the top reasons to include dropdown menus on your website.

1. Free up UI space

Space comes at a premium in your UI — every string, button, and graphic needs to take up enough room to be useful without dominating the page. 

Using a dropdown menu for selectable options moves them off the page and into a dedicated space. This strategy reduces clutter, making the page easier to read because there aren’t multiple text strings competing for attention.

2. Streamline navigation

Dropdown menus make navigation intuitive by organizing pages into primary categories and presenting options clearly. Whether users click, hover, or use the Tab key to move through options, these lists offer a seamless way to navigate through options and select the appropriate values. 

3. Design responsively

Conserving web page space is even more important on smaller screens, so dropdowns are a great addition to responsive sites. To improve touch navigation, designers can also make mobile-friendly adjustments, such as increasing button sizes. Responsive design allows more people to visit and use your site, improving accessibility, engagement, and UX.

How HTML and CSS work together when creating dropdown menus

To create dropdown menu codes, you can use HTML by itself or combine it with CSS. Using HTML alone can help you create a basic dropdown menu, while adding CSS allows you to create a unique look by customizing hover states, colors, and fonts.

There are two main ways to include CSS on the page where you need the menu. Either write it into a

Video SEO is the optimization of videos to ensure they appear high in search engine results pages (SERPs) and rich snippets. The goal is always to generate the most clicks possible. With a strong video SEO strategy, everything you create adds to a robust collection of authoritative, popular, and traffic-generating content.

To build a successful strategy, you’ll need to learn the fundamentals, video SEO best practices, and metrics that measure video marketing success. Once you lay this foundation, you can begin optimizing videos to climb the search rankings.

The importance of video SEO

Search engines have upped the ante for SEO, covering more content types than ever — like video. Optimizing video content so it ranks well on SERPs improves content visibility and, in turn, increases click-through rates (CTRs). This increased visibility and traffic is essential to outrank competitors sharing similar (but unoptimized) content.

To wrap your head around video SEO, perform a Google search for any topic you want to cover. Notice how in the rich snippet results, Google automatically detects key moments and even produces a video transcript that appears on the search page. Optimizing video SEO rankings involves editing your content to work well with these features. If you can do that consistently, Google will surface your videos in rich snippets more often than your competitors’.

8 video SEO tips

Climbing the search results is challenging for every medium, and video content is no exception. Video SEO comes with its own unique obstacles, but the following eight tips can help you overcome them.

1. Identify relevant topics

Start by choosing topics your audience cares about. Here are a few ways to do so:

• Review documentation like marketing personas and psychographic details to better understand the topics your audience enjoys. 
• Leverage tools like Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs to discover audience-relevant topics.
• Look at what successful competitors are sharing.
• Keep an eye on current trends by frequenting the video content platforms your audience uses most.

2. Make high-quality videos that generate engagement

Search engines use a sophisticated algorithm to determine whether your video offers trustworthy, original content. To meet this criteria, your videos must provide a unique take on their subject, and your channel must consistently perform well to establish trust among search engines. 

3. Optimize your title and description

The title and description in your video’s listing and structured data provide critical information that helps search engines determine what the video covers. Select trending keywords and phrases for your title and description to encourage search engines to display your video in a rich snippet. If you need help finding the best terms to include, check out a keyword research tool like Semrush or Ahrefs.

4. Bookmark Google’s video SEO guide

Google provides a complete video SEO guide in its search documentation, which details a wealth of technical guidelines you should follow. Among these guidelines are:

• Formatting requirements. Always use an appropriate HTML tag like
• Hosting considerations. Ensure your video hosting platform allows Google to fetch video files for indexing.
• Indexing requirements. Provide structured data around your video to ensure Google learns enough about it to consider it trustworthy.
• Feature expectations. Mark your videos with chapters and key moments to tell Google which timestamp to send searchers.

5. Upload a transcript

Most video platforms like YouTube and Vimeo allow you to add transcripts of your content. While search engines can auto-generate video transcripts when they index a file, a manual transcript is often more reliable and delivers better search results. To save time, use the auto-generated transcript as a rough draft and touch it up as needed.

6. Create eye-catching thumbnails

Search engines look for high-resolution thumbnail images with low transparency that are correctly referenced in the HTML, sitemap, and structured data. They use these thumbnails to create search results that take up more real estate on the SERP and therefore draw more attention from users, leading to an increase in your traffic.

7. Build website authority

Search engines evaluate the performance of all the videos on your website to determine your site’s overall authority. So, each video you publish must positively contribute to your content library. If any video generates negative impressions or fails to rank well, remove it to prevent it from harming your website’s standing. 

Here are a few ways search engines evaluate video performance:

• Engagement metrics like watch time, CTR, and shares
• User behavior, like whether a viewer spends more time on your site to explore other content after watching your video
• Backlinks, so if other authoritative sites link to your video

8. Embed your videos on relevant web pages

The broader your videos’ online reach is, the more authority and views they produce. Choose relevant web pages where you can add your video content to ensure it finds the widest possible audience. For example, if you’re publishing a video series on how to use InDesign, put it on your own website, YouTube, and Skillshare. And to optimize your videos’ load times and track useful metrics, consider using a video hosting service like Vidzflow that can help you host and manage your videos online.

How to measure your video SEO strategy

Video hosting platforms like YouTube and Vidzflow track valuable metrics showcasing your website content’s performance so you can optimize it to drive more traffic and generate more conversions. Here are the primary analytics you should keep an eye on.

Keyword performance

Hosting platforms track the keywords that led viewers to your videos so they know which terms to associate with your content. Your platform will display this information in your analytics dashboard. For example, YouTube stores the data in your Reach Report, filed under Traffic Sources. Monitor these reports to determine which keywords you should lean into.

Click-through rate (CTR)

Every video hosting platform measures CTR to determine a video’s click potential when they appear in SERPs or video suggestions. You can find your CTRs in the analytics dashboard for your channel. For example, on YouTube, it’s calculated under the name “impressions click-through rate.”

Audience retention

Audience retention measures how many people watch your video content from beginning to end. Videos that retain their viewers throughout appear higher in search results. If you’re experiencing low audience retention, try the following tactics:

• Begin with a cold open. Start your video with a candid moment that makes the audience laugh or subverts their expectations in exciting ways.
• Cut it in half. After you write a script, try editing it down to reduce the word count by half. Remove instances where you reiterate ideas unnecessarily or dwell on one topic too long.
• Remove dead space. As you edit your videos, remove as much dead space as possible without making the flow feel choppy. As a general rule of thumb, cut any moment of silence that lasts longer than three seconds.

Re-watches

If viewers are re-watching specific parts of your video, you know you did something right. Find the moments people are revisiting and add chapters and timestamps so search engines can spot them, highlighting them directly in video search results.

Video engagement 

Your engagement metric tracks the number of people who shared, liked, or commented on the content, revealing the impressions you’ve generated. To build engagement, encourage people to “like and subscribe” during your video and remind them to leave a comment to add to the conversation. 

Support your video content with Webflow

As video content increases in popularity, so does the importance of optimizing your videos to make sure they reach your target audience — no matter what channel they’re on. 

With Webflow, you have access to powerful video integrations to make the most of video content on your website. Webflow’s visual-first web development environment also enables you to build responsive, seamless site experiences that align with your video strategy.

Check out Webflow University’s guide to adding videos to your website to learn more.

Many companies focus on client acquisition through broad marketing strategies, like widespread social media campaigns, extensive email lists, and paid ads.

Account management takes a different approach, emphasizing retention by building on existing high-value customer relationships through personalized methods. Instead of casting a wide net, you focus on nurturing a few select accounts, ensuring these customers receive the dedicated attention and solutions they need to thrive.

Discover account management best practices for building long-lasting, successful partnerships. 

What’s account management?

Account management is the process of nurturing relationships with your most valuable customers and clients. It typically involves providing dedicated personnel and resources that cater to these select clients — and building mutually beneficial relationships. 

Over time, effective account management strategies improve your critical client relationships. Treating your customers with special care helps them achieve their goals and increases their loyalty to your company. 

When clients receive tailored solutions and proactive support, they can optimize their operations, reduce costs, and improve their own customer satisfaction metrics. These successes translate to a positive return on investment, making them more likely to continue their partnership with you.

What does an account manager do?

Account managers are the primary point of contact between your customer and your company. They’re responsible for understanding the customer’s pain points and ensuring the company delivers the best solutions to meet and exceed expectations. They perform several crucial roles, including:

• Client retention: Retaining existing clients is as important as acquiring new ones. A personalized account management approach leads to higher retention rates and lifetime customer value.
• Revenue growth: Account managers find opportunities to sell additional products and services to existing clients. If you’re an account manager for a software company, you might recommend upgrading to a more feature-rich plan as your client’s company scales. Cross-selling and upselling incrementally increase the revenue generated from every account and expand your market share for each offering.
• Competitive advantage: Effective account management differentiates your brand from competitors by providing superior service, personalized solutions, and proactive support. Delivering exceptional value and building strong relationships garners a positive reputation and attracts more clients to your brand.
• Customer insights: Account managers are liaisons for companies and clients. They gather feedback, uncover pain points, and identify opportunities for improvement. These insights help your company refine the products and services you offer to better meet customer needs.

Types of account management in marketing

Account management offers short and long-term strategies to build lasting client relationships. Here are the primary approaches.

Key account management

Key account management (KAM) focuses on strengthening relationships with a select group of high-value clients who contribute significantly to the organization’s bottom line. KAM managers work closely with these clients to understand their preferences, anticipate future requirements, and ensure they meet those demands. They typically create personalized strategies to maximize the value delivered to key accounts.

Consider an online communication platform like Slack. Its key account managers might focus on enterprise customers who rely heavily on the platform for daily operations, like coordinating between remote teams and managing projects. These managers oversee personalized solutions, such as custom integrations with a customer’s existing tools, priority support, and regular updates.

Sales account management

This type focuses on increasing revenue by managing a broader portfolio of clients. Sales account managers nurture existing customer relationships and explore opportunities to expand business within their assigned accounts. They regularly contact current customers to understand their evolving needs, proposing additional services through upselling and cross-selling to generate more revenue.

A digital marketing enterprise, for instance, engages with diverse clientele — including small businesses, startups, and larger enterprises — to understand their website needs. Sales account managers pitch their organization’s customizable web design solutions, close deals, and build long-term relationships to increase the company’s bottom line.

Territory and industry-specific account management

For this type, account managers serve clients within specific geographic locations or industry verticals. They’re well-versed in particular sectors and understand the unique challenges, trends, and regulations impacting clients within their designated industries.

For example, account managers who specialize in the cloud storage industry have in-depth market expertise. They know how to use tools like Google Ads and Google Analytics to create specific and relevant customer demographics and offer personalized ads to these audiences.

5 tips for successful account management

A well-crafted account management strategy equally benefits your company and clientele. Here are five best practices in account management for successful, lasting partnerships.

1. Understand your clients

First, understand your clients’ businesses, goals, and challenges. Use customer relationship management (CRM) tools to record client interactions and tailor your products and services to align with each account’s needs.

For instance, a client in the communication space might prioritize real-time collaboration features, while a client in finance might focus on compliance and data integrity. Both will likely value privacy and security, but their specific needs might differ.

2. Anticipate needs 

Proactively predict client needs based on industry trends and your understanding of the client’s business. Take the initiative to solve potential issues before they arise to demonstrate your value as a strategic partner and trusted advisor.

For example, if an enterprise client is planning a large-scale product launch, they might need additional support in the days leading up to the event. An account manager could provide a customized communication plan to ensure seamless coordination and execution during launch.

3. Be reliable

Gain client trust by consistently delivering quality products, services, and support and being responsive to their needs. Transparency and reliability are crucial to trust-building in account management. This also means you must be honest about challenges and limitations and work together to find mutually beneficial solutions that satisfy customers’ needs while driving revenue and growth for your company

For example, if a client’s website might need downtime to address performance issues, clearly communicate about developments and ensure minimal disruption to their usual operations.

4. Share resources and knowledge

Promote company and client teamwork by encouraging open communication, constructive criticism, and shared decision-making with your customers. An environment with mutual respect positions you as a mature advisor who receives feedback well but makes crucial, independent decisions when necessary. 

By encouraging your team to pool knowledge and resources, you can deliver value-added services and provide exceptional support to your clients.

5. Think long term

Look beyond short-term gains and build partnerships that create value over time. Changing market trends and client preferences can pose challenges but also bring growth opportunities.

For instance, if you offer enterprise-grade web development services and your client wants to expand their website to reach a global audience, you can advise them to implement localization and content delivery networks (CDNs) to allow the site to handle incoming traffic and a diverse audience.

Outline a long-term plan that includes regular website audits, performance monitoring, and iterative improvements to ensure your client’s site remains competitive. A proactive perspective shows you have an eye on scalability — something that goes beyond revenue concerns and shows you’re invested in a mutually successful partnership with your client.

Nurture customer connections with Webflow

Retaining your best customers is essential for long-term success. By understanding their needs, anticipating challenges, and consistently delivering value, you establish yourself as a reliable name to partner with.

But to win clients in the first place, you’ll need a strong online presence that highlights your unique value proposition. With Webflow, you can build visually appealing enterprise-grade websites without relying on developers. Create pages that convert new leads, monitor your account management marketing endeavors with integrated analytics tools, and bring your team together under one roof with our robust content management system. 

Grow your online presence with Webflow.

Every project requires regular checks and adjustments to remain on track. With so many moving pieces, from development to design to marketing, knowing what to monitor when is challenging without a clear framework.

Setting project milestones lets you keep tabs on crucial progress markers, identify problems early on, and intervene to avoid setbacks. Read on to learn how to adopt a proactive project approach.

What are project milestones?

Milestones in project management signal the completion of critical tasks or phases within a project’s lifecycle. They’re checkpoints to help monitor progress and ensure your project is on schedule and aligned with its goals.

Milestones aren’t the same as regular tasks. Instead, they represent essential achievements your team must reach before moving forward. Setting these during project initiation allows all parties involved to see the big picture. These milestones are a framework for measuring progress, proactively identifying potential delays or issues, and giving stakeholders a transparent view of the project timeline.

Why are project milestones important?

Milestones are checkpoints that guide your projects from inception to completion. Here are the primary benefits of setting milestones:

• Planning and organization. Milestones break complex projects into manageable segments, letting you plan and organize road maps more efficiently. For website projects, this means creating separate phases for development, design, and launch. A structured approach to the project ensures thorough planning for smoother execution.
• Resource allocation. Setting milestones helps you allocate resources, including time, budgets, and personnel, to different project phases. This way, you can avoid overburdening your team while maximizing your assets.
• Accountability and monitoring. Each milestone serves as a deadline for meeting specific objectives, which allows you to track whether a project is on schedule and within budget. These goalposts make it simple for all stakeholders to assess the project’s progress.
• Risk mitigation. Milestones provide opportunities to identify potential issues early in the project lifecycle. A proactive approach to problem-solving helps you make adjustments before issues escalate. For development teams, this might mean catching bugs during testing, while marketers might change a campaign’s messaging based on early performance metrics.

Project milestone examples

While you’ll choose some unique milestones, here are a few standard ones involved in most projects.

Conducting a project kickoff meeting

The kickoff meeting is typically the first milestone, and it involves all stakeholders gathering to establish a shared understanding of project deliverables, goals, timelines, and budgets. For example, a marketing team might organize a kickoff meeting to overhaul the company website. This meeting sets the stage by defining the vision and roles for the redesign implementation plan to ensure alignment from the outset.

Obtaining key partnerships and collaborations

After establishing the project scope, the next step is finding and collaborating with partners or external teams. For instance, as part of the website redesign, the marketing team might need to secure a partnership with an external user experience (UX) design company. They might also hire freelance designers or contractors to create content.

Completing a design review

A design review is a milestone to assess whether a product or design meets project requirements. This review confirms that earlier work aligns with the project’s vision and uncovers any issues that need to be resolved before moving on. You can also reprioritize upcoming tasks if necessary.

In our website redesign example, this might include checking interface designs to ensure they match brand guidelines and accessibility standards before proceeding with development.

Conducting user testing or feedback sessions

Before launching a new product, you’ll likely conduct user testing and collect feedback from a pilot group or target audience. This milestone allows you to make adjustments based on real-world use.

Our example marketing team could implement A/B testing by providing two versions of their redesigned website and making changes to improve the final user experience.

Launching a marketing campaign

Marketing boosts brand and product awareness. During this project phase, you must create effective marketing campaigns across multiple channels to spread your reach as far as possible.

A milestone for the marketing team redesigning their website might be launching a campaign that coincides with a significant step in the project, like releasing a new feature or a beta version of the website.

How to identify and set project milestones: 5 best practices

Strategic planning and teamwork help establish effective project milestones. Here are five practical tips to help you identify and set them.

1. Define clear project objectives

Before starting a project, ensure your team fully understands its objectives. Having a well-defined project scope from the outset helps you prioritize milestones and resource allocation. It also informs each team member of their responsibilities and makes it easier to lead the project.

For example, if you want to launch a marketing automation tool, a milestone could be to achieve a stable beta version with company branding and the latest security patches. Then, assign roles, set a project schedule, and allocate resources to kick-start the project.

Not every milestone influences a project the same way. Some (like securing a key partnership) significantly impact project outcomes, while others (like regular design review meetings) are necessary to keep the ball rolling but have less immediate impact. Keep this in mind when defining objectives.

You can also use a workback schedule to establish goals in reverse order. Instead of starting from the first deliverable, you map out tasks, roles, and resources and work your way back from the final milestone.

2. Break down the project scope

Divide the project into small, manageable chunks to identify potential milestones. As you break it down, you’ll see opportunities to group similar tasks and create divisions between them for clarity.

For instance, if you’re scoping a new website project, separate the design and development processes into modules like customer portals, content delivery, and data analytics. Milestones like “Complete authentication module” and “Set up content delivery network” help track step-by-step progress.

3. Engage stakeholders in milestone planning

Invite key stakeholders to participate in milestone meetings so they’re aware of the project’s critical accomplishments. This creates a sense of ownership and provides an external perspective on matters. Plus, it allows you to make changes based on collective input.

For example, including sales and support teams in milestone discussions can highlight customer-facing issues.

4. Use SMART criteria for milestones

Follow the SMART framework for a structured approach to setting milestones:

• Specific. Clearly define each milestone’s objective. For example, “Release a new customer onboarding module” is specific enough to clarify what’s required.
• Measurable. Establish metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) to track progress, like increasing the sign-up rate by 20%.
• Achievable. Set realistic milestones you can achieve within the project’s scope and resources. For instance, “Develop a feature-complete website prototype within 60 days” is a feasible milestone for enterprise-level project plans.
• Relevant. Ensure each milestone aligns with stakeholder expectations and the organization’s overarching operational objectives.
• Time-bound. Set deadlines for each milestone to maintain urgency and keep the project on schedule. For example, “Complete testing and debugging by the end of Q2” is well-constrained to ensure your team completes this step without delaying other parts of the project.

5. Monitor progress and stay flexible

A common misconception is that reaching a milestone marks the end of a task or phase. In reality, milestones are checkpoints indicating progress. They’re reference points for gauging if a project is moving in the right direction, and they help you assess your current state and decide on next steps.

And once established, milestones shouldn’t be immutable or rigid. Project requirements evolve, and milestones must adapt to changes in scope, priorities, and unforeseen challenges. This is why design reviews exist — they allow you to reassess and adjust milestones to better reflect new realities.

Conducting design reviews also reduces discrepancies between planned checkpoints and actual progress. For instance, if user testing reveals that certain features need refinement, you can adjust timelines to ensure you don’t compromise on quality. When you pivot, loop external stakeholders and team members in to avoid wasted work and misunderstandings.

The right platform to manage your website projects

Setting project milestones motivates your team to hit these markers. Milestones define moments when your team can feel accomplished and celebrate small wins that lead to successful project outcomes.

When managing website projects, having a centralized ecosystem of tools and features lightens your team’s load. With a collaborative design environment, marketing strategy guides, and a flexible content management system, Webflow Enterprise offers every resource your team needs to meet your project goals.

Design creatively with Webflow and achieve your project milestones.

Produced in partnership with Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures, the Forbes Cloud 100 is a highly competitive list that includes the world’s top tech companies, from OpenAI and CoreWeave to Canva, Rippling, Plaid, Anthropic, and Stripe. 

Webflow empowers marketing teams to visually create, manage, and optimize websites that drive business results. Over 300,000 top companies, including The New York Times, Dropbox, TED, and IDEO, use Webflow to bring their web ideas, projects, and strategy to life —  culminating in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

Speed to market matters, and with Webflow, marketing teams are able to manage enterprise-grade websites in a fraction of the time using our Website Experience Platform. At our product’s core is our visual Designer and our visual, composable CMS, which empower teams to create beautiful and performant websites. With our recent acquisition of Intellimize, we’ve also added powerful personalization capabilities to our platform, enabling continuous optimization through AI-powered personalized experiences that drive conversions and growth.

It’s especially exciting that many of the Forbes Cloud 100 are built on Webflow – including Scale AI, Attentive, Ramp, Fivetran, Flock Safety, Vanta, and Harness. As we celebrate this achievement, we remain focused on the future. We’re committed to continuing our innovation journey, enhancing our Website Experience Platform, and supporting our partners and customers. 

Thank you to our incredible team, partners, and customers for making this possible. Here’s to many more years of innovation, collaboration, and success!

Faceted navigation allows you to filter and refine content on websites, helping you find what you’re looking for more quickly. But without proper implementation, this tactic can lead to search engine optimization (SEO) issues like duplicate content and ineffective crawling.

To create a win-win situation, you must craft a user-friendly and search engine-friendly website. Read on to learn how to identify and resolve issues with best practices for a positive all-around site experience.

What’s faceted navigation?

Faceted navigation is a website feature that lets you refine and filter listings or results on category, search, and product pages based on attributes called facets.

For example, you can filter your search on a software solutions website by categories like product type, features, pricing, and user reviews. Each filter represents a facet, and these facets allow you to narrow your search results based on specific needs and preferences.

This navigation method improves UX and is an effective way to find information without sifting through irrelevant content. Faceted navigation is useful for various site types, including:

• Ecommerce sites. Customers can filter products by categories like price, brand, and color to find exactly what they want.
• Publishers. Visitors can narrow articles down by topics, authors, and publication dates.
• Travel platforms. Travelers can search for accommodation by location, price, and guest ratings to choose the best options for their budget and needs.
• Online directories. People can filter listings by industry, location, services, and customer reviews to find the right business or service provider.
• Job portals. Applicants can refine their search by job type, experience level, location, and salary range to find suitable opportunities.

How faceted navigation works

Faceted navigation lets users filter search results according to various attributes. Here’s what might occur when choosing an attribute, depending on the site:

• The listings immediately update without reloading the page.
• The page reloads and the listings update.
• The website doesn’t provide feedback or reload the page after you choose specific filters — until you select an apply button to trigger the update or reload.
• A new page loads in a separate tab to show the updated results.

If people will likely choose multiple filters, it’s best to ensure the functionality waits until the visitor clicks the apply button to update listings. Otherwise, the site keeps reloading, wasting time and frustrating visitors.

As you apply each filter, the page URL should append parameters to reflect the selected filters. For example, filters for “Price: Low to High” and “Category: Project Management Software” might change the URL to:

example.com/software?category=project-management&sort=price-asc

You can continue to add more filters, like “Features: Time Tracking” or “Rating: 4 Stars and Above.” Each new filter refines the search results and updates the URL accordingly. With the added filters, the browser address would change to:

example.com/software?category=project-management&sort=price-asc&features=time-tracking&rating=4-up

As you add each filter, the page shows you precisely what you want based on the selected criteria. This instant on-page feedback helps you quickly find what you’re looking for.

SEO-related faceted navigation issues

While faceted navigation improves the user experience, the multiple unique URLs it creates can cause the following SEO-related problems:

• Duplicate content. Faceted navigation results in multiple URLs with similar or identical content, and search engines might view these URLs as duplicate pages. This might mean the original page isn’t accurately crawled, indexed, and ranked.
• Diluted link equity. Link equity, or link juice, is the value and authority that passes from one webpage to another through hyperlinks. It influences the receiving page’s ranking potential, with more authoritative pages ranking higher on search engines. When faceted navigation creates multiple URLs with similar content, the link equity initially concentrated on a single page is spread across several URLs, diluting its value.
• Crawl waste. Search engines have limited crawl budgets for each website. With multiple URLs, they might index duplicate or low-value pages but leave high-value pages unindexed. For example, a website with numerous filters can generate hundreds of URLs for the same filtered results, causing search engines to spend time crawling these variations instead of the primary content.
• Crawl trap. A crawl trap occurs when search engines are stuck in a never-ending loop of faceted navigation-generated URLs. When this happens, search engines waste budget and potentially miss out on crawling important pages. If a website allows near-infinite filter combinations without restrictions, search engines might endlessly crawl each URL variation and dilute rankings.

How to conduct an SEO audit for faceted navigation

Conducting an SEO audit helps you identify and resolve these potential SEO issues. Here are a few auditing tips:

• Create a facet list. Start by listing all the areas of your website that have faceted navigation, such as the blog, category pages, resource pages, and product pages. Then, list all the facets within these areas, like price, category, industry, etc. Understanding how visitors filter content can help assess faceted navigation’s impact on SEO. Create a comprehensive list of all filtering options and their combinations to see how many unique URLs they can generate.
• Identify traffic, crawl waste, and search demand. Determine which faceted pages receive significant traffic and which consume crawl budgets without adding value. You can use SEO tools to analyze traffic patterns and find high-performing faceted pages.
• Execute a site search. Use Google to perform a site search using the format “site:example.com” followed by faceted terms and keywords to see how many faceted URLs Google indexes. Review the search results for unnecessary or duplicate pages and choose which ones to deindex or manage differently.‍
• Validate with Google Search Console (GSC). GSC provides insights into how Googlebot crawls and indexes your site, including issues related to faceted navigation. You can check GSC’s performance reports to find faceted URLs causing issues.

How to prevent and fix faceted navigation issues: 6 steps

Here are six faceted navigation best practices to ensure your website maintains a healthy SEO profile.

1. Set up faceted navigation on your website

Ensure you’ve properly set up faceted navigation on your website before optimizing it. Create a hierarchical order for adding facets to the URL and limit the number and types of facets visitors can apply simultaneously to avoid endless combinations. Define which pages should be indexed to prevent Google from crawling low-value pages.

For example, you can structure facets on a job portal site with “Job category” being the first facet added to the URL, followed by “Location” and then “Experience level.” The URL would be example.com/jobs/category/engineering?location=new-york&experience=mid-level. Restrict each URL to three to four facets to avoid excessive combinations and ensure search engines index pages with 10 or more job listings to maintain a healthy SEO performance.

2. Optimize search engine indexing

Ensure search engines only crawl and index primary or valuable pages to avoid duplicate content. You can fix this in HTML by using a noindex meta tag on low-value faceted pages you don’t want Google to index. For example, add to faceted pages with minimal unique content.

3. Use nofollow tags and remove internal links to faceted URLs

Nofollow tags instruct search engines not to follow or pass equity through certain links, allowing specific webpages to maintain authority and rankings on search engine results pages. Add the rel=”nofollow” tag to internal links that point to faceted URLs.

You can also remove or reduce the number of internal links to these URLs. For example, you could only link to primary category pages in your website’s navigation menu.

4. Fix crawling with robots.txt files

A robots.txt file tells search engines which parts of your website they can and can’t crawl. Configuring this file prevents search engines from indexing low-value faceted pages and allows you to manage your crawl budget.

Regularly review and update your robots.txt file to reflect your website’s current structure. While you can prevent search engines from crawling and indexing low-value faceted URLs, you can also allow them to prioritize crawling pages that provide significant value to improve your search ranking.

5. Use canonical tags

Canonical tags help search engines understand which webpage version has primary content or which version you prefer when multiple URLs have similar content. The primary page should have a self-referencing canonical tag indicating that it’s the original, most important version. For example, if example.com/main-page is your primary page, the tag on this page should point back to itself.

On the other hand, duplicate faceted pages should have a tag pointing to the primary page. This tells search engines to prioritize the primary page in search results to avoid confusion and improve SEO.

6. Provide alternate crawl paths to primary pages

Create clear, straightforward crawl paths to ensure search engines can quickly access and prioritize these pages. Use a sitemap (a list of webpages describing a site’s content and the relationship between those pages) and internal linking strategies to guide crawlers to pages efficiently. For example, ensure your homepage or main category pages link directly to high-value pages to avoid crawl traps.

Fine-tune your site’s SEO with Webflow

By implementing SEO best practices and optimizing your faceted navigation strategy, you can improve the user experience without compromising SEO performance. But web development languages can be complex and time-consuming, especially for websites with hundreds of pages.

With Webflow, you can use a dedicated, visual-first design environment to create high-value webpages with authoritative content — with or without coding. Plus, the built-in SEO features help keep your site well-ranked and visible.

Drive more traffic to your website with Webflow.

Every year, dozens of our community leaders and ambassadors host localized World Wide Webflow events in their hometowns.

Here are just a few of the creative ways the Webflow community gathered together in 2023:

• Watch parties from Nigeria to Manila to Minneapolis 
• A pre-conference brunch in London
• A developer meetup in New York City
• A pizza party in Copenhagen
• A yoga-themed “Watch, Code, & Flow” in Virginia
• Morning 5K walk in San Francisco (before the in-person main event)

Some events go all out, with supplemental workshops, local speakers, photo booths, and killer swag (leave it to the Parisians community to design branded popcorn buckets!). Other hosts keep things simple with a livestream of the conference and time for discussion. 

Either way, building a local community and enjoying the camaraderie are what World Wide Webflow is all about. And if you want to host your own local event this year, we’re here to help.

Grow your local Webflow community

Hosting a World Wide Webflow event is an ideal way to attract and engage web development enthusiasts in your own community — but you don’t have to take our word for it. Here are some insights directly from a few of the Global Leaders who hosted standout events last year. 

Nerding out in Amsterdam

“During the Webflow Conf on the 5th of October, we gathered around 40 enthusiastic no-coders at the iconic Adam Tower in Amsterdam for the World Wide Webflow event. The Skybox venue offered a breathtaking view of the Amsterdam skyline, providing an inspiring backdrop for the party. We organized a Webflow Conf Watch Party, where we all nerded out over the exciting new features announced.” – Rick Bossenbroek, Global Leader of our Amsterdam, NL community chapter

‍

Connecting in Hamburg

“We had a blast last year watching the Conf with our team, everyone was there and we had a really good time. It was so amazing to connect with the local Webflow community and we saw many new faces. We learned a lot from each other and had so many mind opening discussions about new features and projects.” – Cedrik Dudek, Global Leader of our Hamburg community chapter

Partying in Paris

“These moments enabled us to create meaningful connections by sharing wonderful experiences centered around our common passion.” – Thibaut Legrand, Global Leader of our Paris community chapter

“In less than two years, it’s amazing to see the boost and energy this program has given to the Webflow community.” – Florian Bodelat, Global Leader of our Paris community chapter

We know our community is full of talented and driven professionals, and World Wide Webflow is a great opportunity to bring your local Webflow enthusiasts together. We can’t wait to see the creative events you come up with in 2024. 

Host your own World Wide Webflow event

This year, Webflow Conf happens on October 15-16 in San Francisco (and online), and on October 21-22 in London. You can host a World Wide Webflow meetup leading up to, during, or after the main events. 

Once you have your plan in place, just create an event listing on a platform like Meetup or Eventbrite, and submit your event to World Wide Webflow. 

Assuming everything looks solid, we’ll get your event listing approved and published on our official World Wide Webflow landing page to help local community members find and attend your event. 

Webflow Conf is just over two months away, and we can’t wait to see what all of the amazing global programming our incredible community organizes this year!

Delivering project success involves analyzing past data, prioritizing current requirements, and considering future timelines instead of making decisions along the way.

To accomplish this, you’ll need a strategic plan to optimize your resources and achieve your goals. Resource forecasting prepares you to tackle unforeseen challenges and pivot mid-project to stay on track. This proactivity reduces your team’s workload and positions them for maximum productivity and optimal results.

Read on for actionable tips and learn how to implement resource forecasting for your next project.

What’s resource forecasting in project management?

Resource forecasting is the process of predicting a project’s asset requirements. When forecasting, you estimate the personnel, equipment, time, and budget necessary to complete the initiative.

Proactively anticipating these needs lets you plan more effectively and avoid resource shortages or overallocation. By maximizing your available assets, you can ensure tasks are executed smoothly and projects stay on track.

How resource forecasting works: A step-by-step example

Say an enterprise is undergoing a website redesign. The project manager can use resource forecasting to ensure all contributors complete the project on time and within budget by considering these factors:

• Project scope and timeline. Start by defining the project’s deliverables and establishing a time frame. For example, marketing campaign and promotional assets must be created within 1-3 months (at which time the site must also be ready to launch).
• Historical data analysis. Review data from similar past projects to estimate the requirements for each phase, like market research, design, development, testing, feedback, and launch.
• Resource identification. Then, determine the resources needed based on the project’s scope, including:some text
  • Personnel: Two user experience (UX) designers, three front-end developers, two back-end developers, a project manager, a quality assurance tester, and three marketing professionals.
  • Resource forecasting tools: Licenses for design software, hardware equipment, change management tools, and marketing platforms.
  • Budget: Project forecasting software costs, third-party vendor payments, and additional tools or services.
• Future requirements. After identifying current project needs, consider potential roadblocks or scope changes that might shift needs. For instance, the marketing phase might demand a higher budget for paid advertisements if initial campaigns underperform.
• Allocation and scheduling. Use your forecast to allocate resources efficiently by assigning tasks to ensure the schedule meets milestones without overwhelming team members.
• Monitoring and adapting. After kick-starting the project, continuously monitor resource use against the forecast and make adjustments as necessary.

By accurately forecasting the initiative’s needs and tactfully leading the team, you can avoid delays, stay within budget, and deliver high-quality outcomes on time.

Resource forecasting vs. resource planning

Forecasting and planning are closely related but separate processes. Resource forecasting involves predicting future needs based on historical data and current goals. It estimates the personnel, equipment, time, and budget required for a project.

Resource planning organizes these predictions into actionable steps. It involves allocating the necessary resources to ensure they’re available when needed. The plan outlines how to use these resources to meet deadlines and stay within budget.

With project forecasting, you might identify a need for additional marketers during a campaign’s peak traffic phase. With a project plan, you’d assign specific tasks to the marketers, schedule their work, and ensure they have the necessary tools and support to complete their tasks.

How to improve resource forecasting: 5 best practices

By following these best practices, you can optimize allocation, avoid bottlenecks, and drive project success. Here are five tips to effectively forecast.

1. Know your personnel resources

To make accurate predictions about your human resources, you must first understand what skills and expertise you can maximize. This involves assessing each team member’s skills, experience, and performance levels. Knowing who excels at specific tasks helps you better assign roles, improve productivity, and reduce learning curves and delays.

For example, if your team includes someone who excels in website development but is not as strong at creating graphic and visual assets, you can assign them website building tasks while delegating graphic design tasks to another member stronger in that area. This approach maximizes each person’s potential to ensure high-quality output from your team members.

2. Understand project requirements and address skill gaps

Successfully completing a project depends on meeting its skill requirements. Identifying these allows you to ensure your team has the necessary prowess. You’ll also know when to source additional expertise.

If a project calls for proficiency in data visualization tools like Google Analytics, for instance, you’ll verify whether any team member has prior experience and competence. If not, consider hiring freelancers or investing in upskilling current members through training programs.

3. Learn from past successes and failures

Examine previous projects to improve future forecasting. By identifying what worked and what didn’t, you can refine your approach to avoid past mistakes and repeat successful strategies.

For instance, if a previous marketing campaign experienced delays due to misjudged budgets, you can adjust forecasts to allocate more time and funds to future projects. A proactive adjustment helps you set realistic timelines without overburdening team members or facing resource shortages.

4. Directly communicate with stakeholders

Engage stakeholders regularly and update them on project progress, challenges, and requirements. Being transparent and aligning stakeholders allows you to promptly address issues and consider multiple perspectives for informed operational decisions.

If a project is falling behind schedule, for example, you can immediately alert stakeholders like executives and team members and discuss potential solutions, such as reallocating resources or adjusting the project scope. Open dialogue ensures all parties know the current situation and can contribute to resolving issues.

5. Plan effective resource allocation

Allocating assets effectively involves linking them to tasks based on availability and project priorities. This means the most critical tasks receive attention, and it helps prevent overallocation and burnout.

For example, in an enterprise-level website redesign, you might allocate back-end development resources to the most experienced developers to ensure site functionality. You can assign less urgent tasks, like content updates, to team members with less experience.

Proactively forecast and plan with Webflow

Resource forecasting is a key element under the umbrella of enterprise performance management. It helps your team weather the hurdles and maximize assets for successful project outcomes.

With Webflow Enterprise, you can elevate your business by accessing best-in-class design features, plus onboarding training and support to manage your project lifecycle from start to finish. You’ll improve cross-functional collaboration, manage site content, and streamline your business processes.

Take the next step toward project success with Webflow today.

Launching a brand campaign is an exciting moment for any leader. As someone who journeyed from marketer to product leader to CEO, I have always firmly believed the best products win, and when they do, everyone knows about them. What makes me especially excited about launching this campaign is while Webflow is already winning with modern marketers, I truly believe Webflow is the best kept secret in tech.  

Before becoming Webflow’s CEO earlier this summer, I worked alongside our founder and now Chief Innovation Officer, Vlad Magdalin, as COO & President for two years. When I first met Vlad, I had never heard of Webflow. We became fast friends over many coffees and we talked about Webflow and his vision of unlocking the opportunity to touch billions of people and democratize technology through an easy-to-use visual development interface. I was captivated — and over so many more conversations with Vlad where we geeked out about Webflow and its potential, I quickly understood why Webflow is so incredibly special: this platform brings development superpowers to everyone. 

I was stunned to discover CMOs, marketing teams, designers, and the agencies that support them are using Webflow to build and manage their most important websites in ways that were previously impossible. Some of the best companies in the world — from The New York Times to Dropbox, Away, Clear, Vice, TED, IDEO, and Orangetheory Fitness are powered by Webflow.

Webflow is unleashing the superpowers of modern marketing teams to visually create stunning web experiences and drive business results. This is a game changer for the modern CMO, who is expected to own the brand and the bottom line, because with Webflow, they can actually do it.

Together, designers and marketers, along with engineers, can build sites that typically take 6-9 months in a fraction of the time, sometimes just weeks. This saves precious time and allows marketing teams to focus on what generates revenue: optimizing, crafting, and launching more campaigns to drive the business forward.

Today over 300,000 of the best companies in the world have trusted Webflow to help tell their stories, and now, it’s time for Webflow to tell ours.

I am so proud of this team, and we are so grateful for our community. As we continue to tell our story, we will do it in the only way that feels true to who we are: by showcasing the stories of our community of companies, CMOs, and Webflow developers who are building and designing the future of the web. 

We’re just getting started. Come experience a better way to build for the web.

Your landing pages are often the first — and sometimes only — touchpoints a visitor has with your website and brand. A well-optimized landing page is your chance to make a lasting impression on potential customers, and can be the difference between a bounced visit or a new lead.

What is landing page optimization?

Landing Page Optimization (LPO) is the practice of improving landing page elements to enhance performance and increase conversions.

Landing pages are commonly dedicated web pages built outside of an organization’s core website architecture. Integrated campaigns, such as paid advertising and events, use these pages with the goal of an immediate conversion. Organizations typically create landing pages on an as-needed basis and for a specified time.

LPO is closely linked to conversion rate optimization (CRO) as both focus on optimizing content, layout, graphics, and other elements to create more conversions. The main difference is that conversion rate optimization focuses on a company’s entire website, whereas landing page optimization focuses on dedicated landing pages generally outside of the core website. 

Landing page optimization usually involves two main types of optimization: 

• A/B testing identifies the optimal landing page for the most conversions. 
• Rules-based personalization customizes a landing page for a specific audience or industry with the goal of increasing conversions.

Why is landing page optimization important?

A landing page might be the first web page visitors see when engaging with a brand. Visitors often follow a call-to-action (CTA) from a referral site or click on a digital or pay-per-click (PPC) ad that takes them directly to a dedicated landing page to perform a desired action. Landing pages actions can include a variety of responses, such as: 

• Requesting a demo
• Starting a free trial
• Signing up for a webinar
• Purchasing a product 

The goal of a landing page optimization strategy is to collect as many conversions as possible in order to help the overall business reach its revenue goals. 

Effective landing page optimization can lead to increased customer engagement and lower customer acquisition cost (CAC).

The difference between landing page optimization and website optimization

Landing page optimization and website optimization both have a goal of increasing conversions, but differ based on the page they’re applied to. 

Website optimization focuses on a brand’s entire website and individual web pages within the website’s architecture. Landing page optimization, on the other hand, optimizes a specific destination with the goal of converting from that page. Landing pages may be part of an organization’s greater web presence, but the focus of a landing page is to convert leads, while the greater website may have multiple goals and calls-to-action. 

An effective landing page optimization strategy has a direct effect on conversions, so linking these two metrics can be beneficial when analyzing the wider digital marketing strategy. Landing page optimization is a sub-strategy of CRO and can be helpful in identifying how many conversions come from a landing page as opposed to elsewhere on the website. 

Types of landing page optimization

There are three main types of landing page optimization: 

Associative content targeting

Marketers tailor landing page content based on parameters such as visitors’ locations, search keywords, industry, and other demographic information. This process helps marketers optimize a landing page based on a specific target audience with different consumer characteristics.

Predictive content targeting

A more active methodology involves adapting web page content based on known information about the visitor, including their purchase and browsing histories. This information predicts future consumer behavior and enables marketing teams to be more effective in retargeting and other marketing campaigns.

Consumer-directed targeting

The most transparent of the three types, this LPO method involves using publicly available information such as reviews and ratings, often referred to as social proof, to create page content that relates to a prospective customer’s sentiments.

Components of effective landing page optimization

An effective landing page optimization strategy should include the following key elements:  

Clean landing page design

Generally, a landing page uses simpler and more concise language than a standard website to streamline the user experience (UX). The goal is to set a clear call-to-action so visitors convert on that page visit. Don’t forget that quality landing page design includes optimizing for mobile devices.

A clear value proposition

Marketers should showcase how their solution solves problems for their target audience. Leveraging social proof, customer testimonials, and any relevant case studies are simple ways to ensure you’re building a high-converting landing page.

Effective calls to action

Your CTA should provide a clear (but short!) description of what the user will get if they click the button. Experiment with different messages and make sure the copy accurately describes what the user will receive if they take the action. Clear and optimized messaging will boost both click-through and lead capture rates on your landing page forms.

5 steps to get started with landing page optimization

Here are a few tips to get started with your landing page optimization strategy.

1. Research your target persona 

Before building a landing page, identify the target audience the page is meant for and adapt the content and page elements specifically for that target audience. Ask yourself: 

• Am I clearly communicating my value proposition in a way that resonates with this audience? 
• What questions do they have about my solution? 
• What solution is most interesting to them? 
• What would get them to sign up for my service or for more information? 

Knowing these answers will help you create an experience that keeps potential customers on the page and encourages them to take action.

2. Set clear measurement goals 

What metrics are you tracking to consider your optimization efforts successful? Outline conversion goals with your digital marketing team or other partners and ensure alignment on any industry standard conversion rate benchmarks you’re aiming to hit.

3. Keep the sales cycle in mind 

Consider where potential customers are in the overall sales cycle. The content and messaging you use on landing page forms should differ based on where someone is in their buying journey. Consider a progressive form if the visitors are already in your database to limit what types of contact information you collect upon lead capture.‍

4. Take stock of your competitors’ strategies 

What are your competitors doing to attract the same target audience? Not only will this data help you ensure you’re following industry standard landing page optimization best practices, it can also provide insight into how to differentiate your strategy from your competition. 

5. Adopt an always-on testing approach 

When launching landing pages, you should keep continuous optimization in mind. Optimization tools can be useful at this stage, where there’s no shortage of elements to test. Continually experimenting with elements such as landing page copy, contrasting colors, form fields and form placement, CTA button (size, shape, color, etc.) can all contribute to optimizing landing page performance.

How AI can help with landing page optimization

Landing page optimization is an effective way to increase conversion rates across digital marketing campaigns. Coordinating efforts across SEO and ensuring the most important elements of your landing page serve the needs of your target audience, LPO ensures a more personalized and relevant experience to your website visitors.

If you’re stuck on how to get started with landing page optimization, AI can be a helpful part of your optimization tool arsenal.

Learn more about using AI to scale landing page optimization and your website personalization program by getting in touch with our team today.

Breakpoints are predefined points in a website’s code where the design and layout change to accommodate different screen sizes and orientations.

Use breakpoints to create responsive designs, so that your website looks consistent and functions evenly across devices, from small smartphone screens to big desktop monitors. Strategically setting breakpoints ensures your site is both accessible and visually appealing while allowing people with any device to enjoy the intended user experience.

In web design, you can manage breakpoints through CSS and media queries. CSS breakpoints use CSS properties to define how a layout should adjust to specific screen widths. For instance, you can specify that a two-column layout should switch to a single-column layout at a width of 768 pixels.

Media query breakpoints are even more specific, allowing you to apply CSS rules based on the conditions set within a query, like the screen’s width, height, resolution, and orientation, for more granular control. For example, a website’s standard breakpoint value might be 1024 pixels. When a device’s screen width is less than 1024 pixels, the website automatically shifts from a three-column layout to a two-column one to maintain readability. 

You can use media queries to apply CSS rules conditionally and define this transition, ensuring the content adapts fluidly to various screen sizes and orientations for highly responsive designs.

Common responsive breakpoints

Understanding the most common breakpoints lets you create responsive designs that meet any use case. Here are the most-used breakpoints across today’s devices and screen sizes.

Extra-small breakpoints

• 320 pixels. A 320-pixel density is typically used for smaller mobile device screens like older smartphones. This breakpoint ensures that content remains accessible and legible, even on the smallest screens. Key adjustments include adding breakpoints that enlarge buttons and load content vertically to improve usability.
• 480 pixels. At this breakpoint, the design adjusts to suit slightly larger mobile screens. Font sizes, images, padding, and margins increase to take advantage of the available space for better readability.

Small breakpoints

• 768 pixels. This is typically used for large smartphones and tablets. Layout changes include switching from a single-column layout to a two-column layout to use the additional screen space without compromising readability and navigation.
• 1024 pixels. At 1024 pixels, this breakpoint bridges the gap between handheld devices and smaller desktop screens. The design maximizes the increased real estate, often transitioning to a multicolumn layout that spreads content horizontally across the screen.

Medium breakpoints

• 1280 pixels. This breakpoint is on the most common laptop and desktop screen sizes. A 1280-pixel design can include a more complex layout, like multiple columns, sidebars, and navigation bars. These larger screens provide content-rich, feature-packed user experiences and make full use of every pixel.
• 1440 pixels. This is optimal for large desktop monitors and high-resolution displays. Because it’s increasingly roomy, you can include more white space on the page and add elements like extra sidebars, larger images, and more detailed navigation.

Large breakpoints

• 1920 pixels and above. Breakpoints of 1920 pixels and higher are for wide screens and state-of-the-art setups with ultra-high-definition resolutions. Designs have highly detailed, expansive layouts that provide a visually stunning and immersive browsing experience. You can include extensive grids, full-size images, and multiple content sections side by side.

How to choose the right breakpoints

There are two types of breakpoints to consider when creating websites: device-based and content-based. Depending on your content and audience, combining both might yield the best results.

Device-based breakpoints

Device-based breakpoints adapt to the screen sizes of common devices like smartphones, tablets, and computers. This approach optimizes your website for the most widely used devices to provide a consistent experience for most people.

A common device-based breakpoint might be 768, 1024, and 1280 pixels to accommodate large smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops, respectively. For example, a smartphone’s 768-pixel layout can switch from a single panel to a two-column format to maximize the available screen space on tablets. You need to customize breakpoints for different devices.

When to use: Opt for device-based breakpoints to ensure compatibility and a consistent viewing experience across multiple devices, especially if your site has a large audience using a specific range of phone or computer dimensions.

Content-based breakpoints

Instead of focusing on specific device sizes, content-based breakpoints consider your website’s layout and content requirements. These breakpoints are set where the content or visual structure naturally requires adjustment to maintain usability and aesthetics based on the space available.

Suppose your website has a multicolumn layout that appears cramped in certain areas on a desktop monitor. A content-based breakpoint at 1024 pixels allows the site to transition smoothly from three to two columns, ensuring text and images remain clear and visually appealing.

When to use: Choose content-based breakpoints to maintain your content’s readability and appearance, regardless of device. This approach is ideal for content-heavy websites with custom brand elements where preserving the user experience is essential.

5 best practices for responsive breakpoints

Implementing responsive breakpoints improves website performance across devices. Follow these best practices to ease the implementation process.

1. Set your breakpoints

Use data visualization tools to identify the most common screen sizes accessing your site. You can also track activity with heatmaps to gauge your audience’s engagement levels and specific behavior patterns on each page. Then, tailor breakpoints to these quantifiable metrics and optimize your site for the devices your audience uses most.

For example, if the analytics reveal that a large percentage of your audience uses devices with screen widths between 768 and 1024 pixels, set breakpoints at these widths to ensure optimal functionality for this segment.

2. Create mobile-first designs

Start by designing breakpoints for the smallest screen size and work your way up. This means creating layouts for mobile phones first. By prioritizing essential features for smaller screens, you’ll create a strong foundation for the content and find the transition to larger screens smoother without sacrificing performance.

For instance, you might design a single-column layout for smartphone screens. Progress to a two-column layout for tablets and add more content with extra features like sidebars and navigation menus as the screen size increases and more space becomes available.

3. Optimize layouts to reduce friction

A streamlined design includes fast loading times, smooth interactions, and quick responses to user input. Faster pages lead to better PageSpeed Insights speed scores and search engine optimization (SEO) rankings, which drive traffic to your website.

Use fewer large images, complex animations, and other heavy content that can slow down your site. When optimizing images, convert them into a WebP format to maintain high resolutions with smaller file sizes. You can also implement lazy loading for multimedia below the fold to reduce initial load times, meaning visuals only appear once visitors scroll to them.

4. Use responsive typography

Responsive typography ensures your website’s text appears legible and aesthetically pleasing across devices. It also involves leaving ample white space so the layout looks spacious. Use web design-friendly fonts that adjust the size based on screen width and balance readability with visual impact.

5. Test across real devices

Test your breakpoint-enabled designs on real devices rather than solely relying on browser resizing tools. This way, you can identify and address issues that might not be evident in a simulated environment. It also ensures your site performs well in the real-world scenarios your target audience experiences daily.

Check breakpoint functionality on a variety of devices, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, and different desktop monitors. This hands-on approach can reveal response issues on touch-enabled devices, text readability problems, and transition smoothness.

Build responsive designs with Webflow

By understanding what breakpoints are and best practices for implementing them, you can provide a cohesive user experience for your site across all devices.

With Webflow, you don’t need to rely on web development languages like HTML and CSS to code breakpoints into your design. Instead, Webflow’s visual design environment allows you to customize your site for different screen sizes using built-in responsive breakpoints. Deliver a consistent browsing experience, regardless of content or device, and boost your reach today.

In an age of high bandwidth connections, low latency, and lightning-quick response times, users have come to expect responsive experiences on all their devices. According to a 2023 Statista survey, 26% of website visitors will leave a site if it takes more than five seconds to load. To gain and retain consumers, you must meet or exceed their expectations.

Even if your users aren’t picky about page speeds, quicker load time gives you an edge over your competition. That’s because website load times affect your user experience and engagement, conversion rates, bounce rates, search engine optimization (SEO), and search engine rankings.

To get ahead of your competition, you’ll need to learn average website load times so you have a benchmark to start with. Then, you can use website testing tools and essential optimization strategies to improve your page speeds.

What’s a fast website load time?

Website load time is the time it takes for a web page to fully load. It’s measured in seconds or milliseconds. Several factors contribute to website load time, including server response, page size, and resource optimization.

There’s no one measurement that defines a fast load time — evaluating and optimizing your site’s speed involves various metrics. It isn’t just about how quickly the whole page appears. Even if the entire page hasn’t loaded yet, users can often peruse its content to find what they want.

The following are the most common metrics for testing page load times. This list is organized by how far into the load time they measure. The averages listed are for desktops, and you can double them for mobile.

• Time to first byte (TTFB): How quickly the web server responds to your request
  • Good: 0–800 milliseconds
  • Okay: 800 milliseconds to 1.8 seconds‍
  • Poor:>1.8 seconds

• First contentful paint (FCP): How long it takes for the first text or image to appear on the pages
  • Good: 0–1.8 seconds
  • Okay: 1.8–3 seconds
  • Poor: >3 seconds

• Largest contentful paint (LCP): How soon the largest element of the page loads, such as a video or hero image
  • Good: 0–2.5 seconds
  • Okay: 2.5–4 seconds
  • Poor: >4 seconds

• Visually complete: When the page design has fully loaded and appears complete
  • Good: 0–5 seconds
  • Okay: 5–7 seconds
  • Poor: >7 seconds

• Interaction to next paint (INP): How long user interface (UI) elements take to respond to user interaction
  • Good: 0–200 milliseconds
  • Okay: 200–500 milliseconds
  • Poor: 500 milliseconds

Checking your page load time

Here are a few tools that you can use to discover your website speed times:

• Google PageSpeed Insights is a free online tool that measures all the metrics listed above for any URL you input.
• YSlow is an open-source tool that uses a browser plugin to test website performance for free.
• Pingdom provides free website speed tests, plus premium tiers that come at a fair price.
• WebPageTest is a premium product from Catchpoint, a website performance analysis tool. Although WebPageTest does offer free vitals, you’ll need to subscribe to access all of its features.
• GTmetrix is another premium tool that grants free core web vitals tests as well as website monitoring and an application programming interface (API) integration if you sign up.

Improving your website load time: 6 tips and strategies

Shaving even a single second off your page speed can significantly improve your site’s user experience, resulting in better retention and more traffic. It can also significantly impact your SEO score because page speed is a primary factor that Google uses to determine your site’s search ranking.

Here are six strategies for improving your website load time.

1. Optimize code

If your page speeds are slow, start by examining your code to find unnecessary complexity that’s holding up page loads. Here are a few typical code issues to watch for:

• elements

  are typical for styling components, but using too many can cause a drop in page speed. Instead, use CSS to create all the styling classes you need.

• Embedded content is a popular way to add interactive elements like maps, but adding more than a couple to a page can significantly delay the page speed.
• Bulky code happens when your code contains too much white space, comments, and other nonessential elements. Minify your code to reduce these instances.
• Unused fonts and scripts can add to your load times — even if they aren’t used on a page. When you stop using a font, script, or plugin, take it out of the code, too.

2. Upgrade hosting

The web server’s quality and proximity determine the page load speeds more than any other factor. If you’re confident your code is optimized but are still experiencing slow load times, examine your web hosting platform to determine if it’s the culprit. Ensure you’re signed up for a tier offering enough bandwidth and traffic. Some services provide automatic traffic scaling but only at certain subscription levels.

While you’re at it, look for the option to use a content delivery network (CDN), which distributes servers around the globe to ensure your content can reach a broad audience quickly.

3. Optimize files and media

Whenever you use an HTML element with a src attribute, you send another request to the web server. Loading a single page with no media is quick, but loading that page and then calling other directories to find and serve other files takes time. If possible, remove any unnecessary file references on the page or break it into smaller pages that link to one another.

Also, compress images and videos to reduce their file sizes. For logos, use the SVG format because it scales well and produces a small file. For other images, use WebP format whenever possible because they offer the best quality and the smallest file sizes. In Webflow, you can use the built-in WebP conversion tool to compress existing image assets. For video, MP4 is standard due to its small size and high resolution as well as codec flexibility.

4. Implement caching

Caching enables web browsers to store common assets like icons, text, and images and reuse them when you load a new page. This significantly improves page speed, but you must set it up first.

If you’re using Webflow, you can enable caching in your settings. But if you’re writing and hosting the site yourself, you need to set up caching manually. You can optimize your settings for efficiency by establishing expiration times and tailoring cache headers to reduce redundant data retrieval.

5. Reduce redirects

When one page redirects to another, the browser must load at least some of the first page before discovering the need to redirect to the next. That requires sending an extra request to the web server that isn’t necessary. Treat redirects as temporary solutions. Audit your site regularly to update old links and remove the need for redirects.

6. Leverage lazy loading

Lazy loading means images only load once users scroll to them. Don’t enable this for images at the top of the page, since you want these to load immediately. But enable it for images further down to decrease your site’s loading time.

Some web design platforms, like Webflow, enable you to mark images for lazy loading. To mark an image to lazy load yourself, add “loading=lazy” to your image tags.

Maximize site speed with Webflow

While most page speed optimizations occur at the server level, you can perform some by refining your code. But if you want to avoid digging into code, Webflow can help.

With Webflow’s visual-first web design platform, you have creative control and flexibility with your page designs — while Webflow generates clean, semantic code for you in the background. Learn more about how to optimize your pages on Webflow University’s detailed website performance guide.

Take advantage of Webflow’s intuitive interface, built-in performance optimization features, and responsive design capabilities. Create optimized, high-quality websites with Webflow today.