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I gave softr a try

I'm in full blown product-launch hustle of wrapi.io which will release this weekend, so I had like zero time for the product landing page. 🤯

So, I decided.. let's try softr.io? Since I already had all my dynamic data in Airtable, so it should be a piece of cake.

https://twitter.com/wrapi_io/status/1380679236181168129

And it really saved my ass. In terms of a speedy-website-creation.

But some things I like to criticize and maybe they will help a fellow Indiehacker with the decision:

Airtable Integration retrieving dynamic data out of Airtable is good. But at some places I feel like they should fetch even more out of Airtable. Example: They have a FAQ-Block which is predestined to be connected to Airtable, and yet it is filled with static data. Luckily you can recreate it with the default list.

Displaying Data I feel kind of limited by the dataoptions of the Templates. They expect a couple of data-fields which can be linked to columns in Airtable. But you cannot really add more columns to display. Example: You wan't the juicy Star-Rating in a List? Yeah. You just have Title, Subtitle, Description. Imagine you could dynamical add based on your Airtable more fields? I really missed that feature!

Style-Customizer Maybe I'm spoiled by webflow.io but changing the overall look of a softr.io site is very limited. And some Blocks have predefined colors / border you cannot really change. The buttons have shadow on hover, which cannot be removed in the customizer. So you probably have to use some CSS or live with it.

Really bad carbon footprint
I don't know why exactly, but softr.io sites have a really bad carbon footprint? And it is kind of a deal for me because with wrapi.io's Infrastructure I actually had the plan to have a green infrastructure for the APIs and all sites of wrapi.io and advertise with it. Now I have a landingpage which is "dirtier than 92% of web pages tested". meh.

But overall I really enjoyed using it. ✌️ It's really good. But surely could do so much better. Let's see what the future updates do. :)

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    Hey thanks for the feedback, really appreciate it!

    Re: Lists with fixed elements are changing as we speak in a week or so will be different.
    Re: Design flexibility, here we have improvements to do but overall we want to have simpler to use tool than webflow, as not every user is a power-user or designer
    Re: carbon footprint it's pretty refreshing and we need to improve, however website is pretty misleading as we do have things in AWS Frankfurt which is considered green hosting have image optimization going etc... we need to see what's wrong here.

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    Yeah, that's usually the problem with tools like softr that design the templates for you.

    If you want full control of how the landing pages are designed, and you want better page speeds, then you should stick with Webflow. A tool like PowerImporter makes it super easy to connect your Airtable data to the CMS. You'll have full control of what data to pull and how to display it.

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