# Webflow Essentials: Beginner's Guide to Building Beautiful Websites - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/webflow-essentials-beginners-guide-to-building-beautiful-websites/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Tech & Coding · Deep dive · Rated 7 /10 # Webflow Essentials: Beginner's Guide to Building Beautiful Websites By Gareth B. Davies · Updated August 2026 Daniel Scott · Adobe Certified Trainer Beginner · 1031 min A fast-talking, hands-on 17-hour Webflow crash course that goes from zero to a working e-commerce site, if you can tolerate the pace. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fwebflow-essentials-beginners-guide-to-building-beautiful-websites%2F1819360849) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. ## What the course actually covers This is a long, linear crash course that takes a total beginner from an empty Webflow account to a published site with a nav menu, a CMS-backed content section, and a working e-commerce store. It opens with several short framing videos: what Webflow is, how it compares to WordPress, how its pricing tiers work, and whether clients can edit a site themselves once handed over. Only after that groundwork does it move into hands-on building, starting with a single-page site and working up through containers, sections, and the class system that underpins everything in Webflow. The middle stretch is where the real teaching happens. Lessons walk through creating CSS classes, adding images with margin control, overlaying text on background images, building buttons with hover states, and constructing a custom navigation bar that collapses into a mobile hamburger menu. A dedicated lesson on combo classes versus global classes is a genuine highlight: it uses a concrete button example, showing how a combo class handles size variants while a global class handles shared properties like background color, so a client's brand color change propagates everywhere at once. The typography lesson on rems, pixels, and ems is similarly concrete, demonstrating in the browser how rem-based fonts respond to a user's accessibility settings while pixel-based fonts stay frozen. ## Structure, pacing, and projects The course is built around two assigned class projects, a personal brief and a club page, plus a full e-commerce build near the end that students are asked to replicate with their own product and branding. This project-based spine is the course's strongest structural choice: rather than passively watching feature demos, learners are pushed to apply combo classes, CMS collections, and cart customization to their own content, which is what actually cements the skills. Pacing is uneven. Early videos over-explain basic setup and pricing tiers in a way that will frustrate anyone who just wants to start building, while later CMS and e-commerce sections move quickly through steps like collection filtering, item limits, and connecting dynamic fields to a testimonial list, occasionally leaving gaps a true beginner might need to rewind and replay. The instructor's delivery is fast and conversational, complete with acknowledgment that he talks quickly and a suggestion to slow the playback speed, which is a fair warning rather than a flaw, but it does mean the course rewards patience over quick skimming. ## Where it delivers and where it thins out Where the course succeeds is in demystifying Webflow's core mental model, the class-based styling system, the CMS collection structure, and the divide between the designer view and the client-facing editor. These are the concepts that trip up most Webflow beginners, and the course spends real time on each one with live, corrected mistakes left in rather than edited out, which makes the debugging process itself instructive. Where it thins out is depth on e-commerce specifics like payment gateway configuration and advanced CMS relationships, which get less rigorous treatment than the layout and typography fundamentals. Anyone hoping to launch a serious commercial store from this course alone will likely need supplementary resources. As an on-ramp into Webflow's visual, no-code paradigm, though, it accomplishes what it sets out to do. The standout The rem-versus-pixel lesson, which demonstrates live in Chrome how pixel-based fonts ignore a user's browser accessibility settings while rem-based fonts scale correctly, making a strong practical case for a habit most beginners skip. ## What you will learn - · Core Webflow concepts: containers vs sections, CSS classes, combo classes, and global classes - · Building responsive layouts and a mobile-friendly hamburger nav menu - · Styling techniques: hover states on buttons, background image overlays, custom navs, and anchor links - · Using rems vs pixels vs ems for accessible, scalable typography - · Setting up a CMS-driven collection list (e.g., testimonials) with filtering, sorting, and item limits - · Building and styling an e-commerce store with products, variants, and a customized cart Best for: Complete beginners to web design who want a visual, no-code way to build a real portfolio, small business, or client site without touching code. Skip it if: Anyone who already codes HTML/CSS fluently, dislikes a fast, informal speaking style, or wants deep e-commerce/CMS mastery rather than an introductory pass. Engaging Teacher Clarity of Instruction Helpful Examples Audio & Video Quality [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fwebflow-essentials-beginners-guide-to-building-beautiful-websites%2F1819360849)