People pick Webflow because it promises websites without code. Then they open the Designer, see the box model, the class panel, the cascade, and quietly go back to templates. I think that filter is the best thing about the tool.
I have been building sites in Webflow for years, my own projects and client work, and the pattern with every new person is the same: the first week feels unfair. You were promised drag and drop and you got CSS with a nicer face. But that is exactly why Webflow output does not look like template soup. The tool is hard where the web is hard: layout, spacing, structure, responsive behavior. It does not hide those problems from you. It makes you solve them visually. Here is what I wish someone had told me at the start.
Learn the box model before you touch anything else
Every element on a web page is a box inside a box. Margin pushes boxes apart on the outside, padding creates room on the inside, and size sets the box itself. That is most of layout, and it is the single highest-leverage thing you can learn before touching the Designer. Once it clicks, half of Webflow's "weirdness" simply disappears, because it was never Webflow being weird. It was CSS all along, and now you can finally see it.
Name classes like a developer, not like a folder on your desktop
"Div 47" and "Heading copy copy" feel harmless on day one and will quietly destroy the project by page three, when you no longer remember which class does what and every change breaks something somewhere else. Pick a naming system, Client-First by Finsweet is a good and well-documented one, and follow it even when you are in a hurry. Especially when you are in a hurry, because the hurried classes are the ones that outlive everything.
Build the style guide page first
Before building any real page, build one page with your headings, paragraphs, buttons, colors, and spacing blocks. It feels like a delay and it is the opposite. Every future page becomes assembly instead of design, the site stays consistent without anyone policing it, and when a client asks for a bit more contrast you change it in one place instead of forty.
Do not fight the cascade, use it
Set your typography on the body tag and let everything inherit from it. Style base classes broadly, then add combo classes for the exceptions. If you find yourself overriding the same property on twenty different elements, stop: the structure is wrong, not the tool, and ten minutes of restructuring will save you hours of whack-a-mole later.
Steal cloneables, then rebuild them
The marketplace is full of free cloneable projects, and cloning one teaches you almost nothing, the same way copying someone's homework teaches you almost nothing. Rebuilding one from scratch, peeking at the original only when you get stuck, teaches you everything: how they structured the classes, why the spacing works, where the tricks are.
The honest part
If you just need a simple page online by tonight, Webflow is the wrong tool and a template on any site builder will get you there faster. Webflow pays off when you care how the thing is built, because you will maintain it, extend it, or hand it to someone else who has to live with your decisions. The learning curve is not a bug in the product. It is the price of output you are not embarrassed by. Webflow does not remove the need to understand the web. It removes the excuse not to.