Transitioning from Semplice to framer

I have been a very happy Semplice customer since its early days. Being built on top of WordPress, it is very easy to set up, maintain and rely on. However, I realized how limiting Semplice was getting for me the moment they released the blog feature which builds on top of WordPress's blog engine. My lack of enthusiasm toward the poor user experience (contrary to how awesome Semplice is) made me give up on that ecosystem altogether and search for alternatives. Between Webflow and Framer, I picked Framer as my new shiny tool for building my portfolio and blog. Here are a few observations of my 5-day marathon of transitioning my work to Framer, which you are experiencing right now.

Framer requires effort

Although Framer does brag about having a Figma plugin, it doesn't completely replace designing in Framer. After a successful import, I realized the website was not built for responsiveness, and fixing that made me introduce a lot of visual inconsistencies for different pages. I am not complaining about having to design in a portfolio, but I generally winged most of the responsive headache in Semplice. Apart from that, there are two design systems to maintain. It would be cool if the Framer could also be able to import the components/tokens.

Framer requires one to understand CSS layouts

I am a strong advocate for designers especially working closely with engineers to understand basic layouts with CSS grids and Flexbox. Framer takes this to a whole new level by keeping the layout terms closer to how they are in code. With my own CSS chops getting rusty, it took me a while to get used to it. Once understood, it was an absolute beast of a tool to work with.

Framer is a beast of a tool with a vibrant community

Being a portfolio tool and blog CMS, I am fairly impressed with how much Framer has evolved from being an open-source library I used to love back in the day. There are so many resources to learn from and remix with, I don't think I have more than scratched the surface of what is possible with Framer.

Thats it for now, lets's see what more I can build with Framer now that I am past the basics.