On Frameworks
Imagine waking up each morning and walking into the backyard to harvest beans from a coffee bean plant. And then milking a cow as you wait for the beans to dry out. Then firing up the roaster. You'd be lucky to brew your first cup by midafternoon.
It's much easier to simply walk into the kitchen and fetch pre-packaged ingredients. This way anyone can, with the right ingredients and a little instruction, consistently prepare a world-class cup of coffee in just minutes. There's no need for everyone to become an expert roaster when so many can benefit from a single roaster's expertise. There's no need for everyone to learn the mechanics of farming when so many can benefit from a single farmer's expertise. There's no need for everyone to own an acre of Italian hillside when we can all benefit from a single harvest.
Like brewing coffee, building websites in Webflow from scratch can be deceptively complicated, and your results can vary wildly. Without specific expertise about CSS inheritance rules or which units work best in which situations, it's easy to build a site that might get you through the day, but that you might not actually want to share with anyone. We've all done it. Any developer who's spent some time in Webflow has built something that they're a little ashamed of.
That's because building a site that's clean and efficient and set up for long-term maintenance and team cooperation is a bit of an art. How do you avoid team members creating multiple classes for the same use? How do you maintain consistency of style and spacing? How do you create a set of utility classes in the correct order such that they override styles as intended? The answers only come with experience.
Knockout is not the equivalent of a Keurig Cup — it's not a template. Instead, it's a set of gourmet ingredients and cooking philosophies that allow you to level up your work and build projects more quickly and efficiently, that are optimized for long-term maintenance, collaboration and client handoff.
The core of Knockout is a set of modular classes for layout (columns, padding, margins, and flexbox), styling (text, colors, and buttons), objects (images, forms, and more), and modifiers (for display types, positioning, and more), along with a very basic set of customizable components. But also included in this documentation are a set of principles and strategies that have guided Webflow development at Edgar Allan for years.
So whether you're brand new to Webflow or a seasoned developer who might be curious about how an agency approaches Webflow development, there's plenty for you here in this documentation. So grab a cup of your favorite blend and keep reading.