“If Whalesync didn’t exist, we simply wouldn’t have been able to build some of these products to the same degree of capability nor achieve the same time and efficiency savings that they provide.”
Whalesync client Webflow is bringing development superpowers to everyone by building the world’s most powerful visual development platform. Webflow gives you control of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in a visual canvas so you can publish beautiful, complex websites, without writing code.
The Webflow team wanted to apply logic and transformations to data streams outside of Webflow before syncing them into, or in some cases back into, Webflow’s CMS. They landed on using Airtable to do the heavy lifting on these data transformation exercises.
Specifically, the Webflow team has built out three end-to-end products using Whalesync’s technology:
Product #1: Field Events Platform
The Webflow sales and community teams host small events across the country and needed to build a way to register and manage attendees, as well as share event details on a branded Webflow landing page. Whalesync enabled them to fully utilize Airtable Interfaces as a backend app-like experience to automatically generate landing pages in Webflow. The team leveraged formulas and logic in Airtable and 2-way sync by Whalesync to push information like waitlist status back to the landing pages.
Product #2: Webflow Community Hub
The Webflow community team launched a new site at webflow.com/community where they share all of their marketing outputs (i.e. livestreams, events, podcast episodes, etc.) with their community members. The underlying content and files live in different data sources and need to come together into a single Webflow instance, which Whalesync made seamless by syncing together several different Airtable bases tied to separate workflows.
Product #3: Webflow Resources Hub
Finally, the Webflow Brand team recently updated their previous resources site to combine Webinars, Whitepapers, and Ebooks into a single Resource Hub. This new hub leverages a unique way to display dynamic data, gate content, and manage URLs. To create an efficient workflow for the content team to add new resources to this hub, the Brand team used Whalesync to sync any new resource to a new Airtable base. Within this new Airtable base, the team set up automations to create a matching record in a separate table that is then synced back to Webflow. This way, they could keep Webinars, Whitepapers, and Ebooks in separate CMS collections with content-specific URL paths, while being able to display all types of resources in a single list on the Resources Hub landing page.
“Setup was surprisingly quick and intuitive to do. If Whalesync didn’t exist, we simply wouldn’t have been able to build some of these products to the same degree of capability.” - Corey Moen, Staff Brand Designer, Webflow
Webflow team members exclaimed that they benefitted greatly not only from the capabilities of Whalesync, but also from the error handling available within the product. Whalesync provides a live log of all sync activity that provides detailed information on sync status, so if there is ever an issue, it’s typically straightforward to troubleshoot and understand everything that is happening under the hood.
Webflow’s primary measurable impact for their use of Whalesync has been efficiency and time savings for various internal teams. These teams can more confidently manage multiple streams of data because they trust Whalesync to handle the complexity of ensuring that data is updated across multiple, different live websites.
“For the Field Events platform specifically, the workflow to create and manage events has been drastically improved, which has allowed the team to more quickly implement new features. This setup also enabled us to directly leverage our own product instead of purchasing an external, proprietary product to manage events.” - Corey Moen
As a result of the successes of the three products above, Webflow also plans to utilize Whalesync for other important projects like programmatic SEO and multi-source syncing.
For more about Whalesync’s ability to power end-to-end products like the ones Webflow built, you can get started here.