All work is teamwork in 2021

You’ve probably heard this phrase a thousand times over the past year: the nature of work is changing. 

Cliché as it may be by now, it’s true. With the sudden switch to remote work becoming the norm rather than the exception, we’ve needed to invent new ways to communicate and collaborate.

In this rapid evolution, collaborative software has played a central role in pushing work forward. Finding a tool that makes teamwork easy (and perhaps even enjoyable) is a crucial starting point. 

The collaborative nature of websites

In the world of websites, collaboration is especially important. Websites are a focal point for so many different types of contributors and stakeholders. Developers, designers, marketing teams, content strategists — it seems like everyone has a role to play in the creation and evolution of a website. 

We see this clearly in how our customers work, with so many different types of teams. From boutique agencies working with small businesses to major enterprises working across multiple departments, easy, improved team workflows are absolutely crucial to helping them move and experiment faster.

With all this in mind, building on the release of Webflow Enterprise in December, we’ve been making some massive investments in how teams of all sizes can work together in Webflow, and we’re excited to share some major updates to the product today for all customers.

And the best part? This is only the beginning. Check out the end of this post for more about what’s on the horizon.

Teamwork improvements launching today

Here’s a quick list of the improvements we’re launching today, with more detail on each below:

1. Edit content in the Designer while your teammate builds
2. Smooth handover between teammates in the Designer
3. Live syncing of content changes between teammate sessions
4. Improved visibility of where your teammates are working

Edit content in the Designer while your teammate builds

Being able to make progress on projects in parallel to your teammates is a crucial element of collaboration — essentially enabling you to move twice as fast. Today, we’re taking a big step forward on this front, introducing a new way for multiple teammates to work together in the Designer at the same time. 

Now, when you open the Designer and another teammate is already working in the project, you (and all your other teammates) won’t be locked out — you’ll be able to edit content while they’re building. 

Here’s what “editing content” includes:

• Edit copy and images. Edit text and images right on the canvas.
• Edit CMS content. Add, edit, and publish new Collection Items in the Collections panel.
• Manage ecommerce. Add, edit, and publish new products, categories, and discounts.
• Edit SEO and Open Graph metadata. Tweak SEO metadata and Open Graph details.
• Upload, download, and organize assets. Add new assets, grab the links to existing assets, and manage image alt attributes.
• Import and export CMS content and products. Upload content and ecommerce products via CSV, or download it to migrate content between sites.

Pablo Gonzalez from MURAL, who’s been testing this new workflow out in beta, can attest:

“We're super excited about these updates at MURAL – after trying them out in beta with our team, it's clear they're going to allow us to run more smoothly, while streamlining collaboration between designers and marketers.”

-Pablo González Day, Web Lead, MURAL

Politely hand over control from one teammate to another

Now that multiple people can be inside the Designer together, we’ve also introduced a new workflow that lets teammates politely request control of the Designer from one another. Once a teammate requests control of the Designer, the teammate with design control has 30 seconds to accept or deny the request. 

Once you grant control to their teammate, you can stay in the Designer and continue to edit content, as detailed above — but you’re no longer able to edit styles or build new pages until you request and take control again. This new handover flow also ensures you won’t lose work when opening the Designer across multiple devices, or in the case that a teammate forgets to close their Designer session before leaving their desk.

As Lucas Ballasy, Chief Experience Officer at Barrel describes these updates:

“Being able to work together inside the Designer is such a leap forward for how our team uses Webflow. It's not only made it easier to collaborate and build together, but we're able to move even faster than before on our client work.”

-Lucas Ballasy, CXO, Barrel

With multiple teammates working at the same time in the same project comes a greater need for visibility to ensure nobody’s stepping on each other’s toes. On this front, we’ve made a couple big updates that make collaborating smoother.

Live syncing of content changes between teammate sessions

For starters, all content changes you or your teammates make now immediately sync to all live sessions. This means if you’re changing the homepage layout and your teammate hops in and changes the page headline, you’ll immediately see that change in your session of the Designer. Changes that teammates make in the Editor will also sync live to all open Designer sessions.

See where other teammates are working in the project

The last update we’re making allows you to better see where your teammates are working across both the Designer and the Editor. Now, at the top of the Designer, you can see who else is working in the project, and most crucially, who is currently working on the same page as you. Having this visibility and transparency provides greater confidence when multiple teammates are involved in making changes.

What’s coming next

As previewed during No-Code Conference, there’s a lot more to come on the teamwork front in 2022 and beyond. Here’s a recap of what's coming next.

New “Workspaces” to simplify team growth

To make creating, growing, and modifying your team within Webflow smoother, we’ll be consolidating individual and team account plans into a unified “Workspace” plan that lets you seamlessly grow from a team of 1 to any size you need. 

This means that everyone new to Webflow starts out in a free Workspace, and can upgrade that Workspace and add teammates as needed. That means there’s no need to create a separate team account and move projects over or deal with time-consuming account setup as you’re scaling adoption of Webflow.

New billing and publishing permissions

Aside from simplicity and scalability, one of the big improvements that Workspaces will introduce are brand new roles and permissions. These will allow you to control who can do what within your account, and even within individual projects. 

Some of the new controls to look forward to include:

• Restricted publishing in the Designer. Control what teammates can publish any given project to more tightly regulate who pushes what to production.
• Restrict publishing in the Editor. Control which collaborators and clients invited to add content in the Editor are able to publish the entire website.
• Billing access controls. Ensure only designated team admins can manage account-level settings like billing and team members.

Additional quality of life improvements

As part of the introduction of Workspaces, we’ll also be making a handful of improvements that should make your quality of life a bit smoother. 

Here’s what else to look forward to:

• Improved teammate management settings. See all your Workspace teammates and individual site guest editors in one place under your team account settings.
• Clone sites to your team or individual Workspace. No more need to transfer cloned projects out of your individual account into your team account — simply choose which Workspace you want to clone your site into and get back to work.
• Improved project transfer flow. When you transfer projects to someone they’ll be able to choose which Workspace they want the project to end up in.‍
• Purchase templates for teams. In the past you haven’t been able to buy templates for Team accounts. Which is obviously not ideal. The switch to Workspaces will make this an issue of the past!

Release timeline

Workspaces and the new roles and permissions that come with them will be rolling out in phases to new and existing customers in early 2022.

We’ll be sharing more updates on future features as we get closer to launch. In the meantime, we hope today’s releases make collaboration a bit smoother for you and your team! Let us know what you’re most excited about in the comments.