Riley Hennigh's client edits a coded site with Claude instead of staying on Webflow or Framer

On a recent sales call, a prospect told me what scares her about a custom-coded website:

"Eventually we will not have a team like you guys to go in and make edits."

I hear some version of this on most calls, and for years I agreed. We used to build every site in Webflow or Framer because they were supposed to be easier for marketers to maintain. In practice, my advice was to keep a Webflow/Framer developer on retainer forever. (Even though we don't sell a retainer service ourselves.)

One of our clients went the other way. We built their site in code a few months ago. Their marketing team had never touched code. Since then they have:

- Replaced the whole hero animation to feature a different part of the product
- Added pages we never built, using templated sections we set up
- Done it by describing what they wanted to Claude

It looks as good as what we would have done ourselves. Except it didn't require a traditional design role or working with an agency.

That only works well because the design rules are in the code, set by our designers. The agent knows which type styles and colors exist and doesn't make up new ones.

If you stay on a platform because "it's easier to maintain" -- it's worth checking who will actually maintain it.