Key takeaways
Several Ava Labs marketers edited the same Webflow instance, and changes to shared classes and components on one page kept breaking others.
Beqi became the team's single Webflow owner: it designed and built about ten sites from rough wireframes, moved the blog off Medium and managed the flagship site in Ava Labs' Slack.
The flagship site passed 50,000 page views a month and kept growing, and moving the blog brought tens of thousands of extra views to Avalanche's own site.
The Challenge
Ava Labs needed websites fast. Its Webflow setup could not keep up.
Ava Labs builds the Avalanche blockchain, the platform other companies use to build financial and real-world asset products. Its marketing team runs the Avalanche brand: socials with more than 1.5 million followers, campaigns, and the websites those campaigns send people to.
Several marketers worked in the same Webflow instance. They moved things around in the CMS, and an edit to a shared class on one page changed other pages without them knowing. There was no single owner who understood how the components fit together, and the sites drifted out of shape.
Requests came with short deadlines, often at the last minute. The usual answer was to hire freelancers, and each one meant a brief, a contract and invoicing, even for a small job. Meanwhile, the Avalanche blog lived on Medium: it had a large following, but its readers and its search value went to Medium, not to Avalanche's own site.
"It takes something that might be an eight-hour project, and now you've got six people on the back end dealing with all this invoicing just to get this person onboarded." - Simon Jones
Why Beqi
When Simon joined Ava Labs and was asked to get several sites live, he looked for a Webflow-certified partner. Beqi could take a designer's rough direction, turn it into finished UI and get it live in Webflow, quickly.
"They could understand what we were after, and I could rely on them to build out our vision." - Simon Jones
The Solution
Beqi became Ava Labs' Webflow team: designing and building new sites from rough wireframes, and keeping the existing ones clean.
- Campaign sites from rough wireframes. For Avaissance, Avalanche's NFT and digital art initiative with an artist-in-residence program for 50 creators, Ava Labs handed over a loose wireframe split into sections. Beqi designed the UI and built the site in Webflow.
- The blog, moved off Medium. Beqi built the blog and its CMS on Avalanche's own website, so new posts, their readers and their search traffic landed on Avalanche instead of Medium.
- One owner for Webflow. Beqi became the single source of truth for components, classes and CMS structure, so one team's edit no longer broke another team's page.
- The flagship site after launch. Beqi didn't build Ava Labs' flagship site, but took it over after launch: changes, new pages and fixes.
- UX recommendations. When a wireframe's user path or CTA was unlikely to work, Beqi recommended a better one and designed it.
Team, timeline and collaboration
- Design. Ava Labs supplied rough wireframes and its brand guidelines. Beqi designed the UI and UX and built it in Webflow.
- Development. About ten websites over 3+ years, plus ongoing work on the flagship site.
- One Slack. Beqi worked inside Ava Labs' Slack. A broken card or a misused class was one message away.
- Ongoing partnership. On the subscription, requests weren't priced one by one, so small changes didn't need a quote.
- Short deadlines. Full websites and web packages were often turned around in several days.
"Having you in our Slack environment, just being able to say, hey, this card isn't displaying right, or I screwed up a content class, can you guys just come in and take a look. Having that reliability and availability without having to jump through the hoops for every single web task was a huge boon." - Simon Jones
The Results
Ava Labs got a Webflow team that shipped in days, kept its sites clean and brought its audience home.
- About ten websites, often turned around in several days. A standing partnership meant no new brief, onboarding or quote for each request.
- 50,000+ monthly page views on the flagship site, and growing. Beqi managed the site after launch, keeping it clean and up to date as traffic rose.
- Tens of thousands of extra blog views on Avalanche's own site. Moving the blog from Medium to a Webflow CMS brought readers, and the search value of every post, back to Avalanche.
- Thousands of users converted by Avaissance. Beqi turned a rough wireframe into a campaign site people wanted to be part of, and applications for the residency poured in.
"Take it from this really rudimentary wireframe and make an excellent front-end user experience that converted thousands of users. I don't think I would have been able to do that on my own." - Simon Jones
The Webflow CMS was also easy for the wider team to use. People who work mostly in social media could find and edit the content they needed and publish it themselves.