Keeping content consistent across your digital channels can be a hassle. Contentful is a great way to manage it all from one easy-to-use platform.
Ever redone your website? My first replatform took over two years of planning, followed by six months of fixing bugs after it went live. When our web developer started talking about the next redesign, our team was not amused. Aside from the drain on mental health of major website updates, the technical aspects can be grueling.
Traditional websites are built as monoliths. The pieces are so intertwined that changing one thing can easily break another, requiring long development and testing cycles to ensure everything works properly before going live.
In a world where the web constantly gallops toward the next big thing, a two-to-three-year development cycle leaves a company lagging behind competitors. And in the meantime, frustration reigns over content creators waiting to push new content and developers fixing the same glitch for the fourth time this month.
And for most of us, our website isn’t the only way we engage with customers online. Apps, social channels, ecommerce platforms, chatbots, authentication sites, analytics, and everything else piles on complexity for developers and content managers. Trying to maintain consistency across all of these channels for multiple brands? Forget it. The human brain was not meant to keep track of so much.
The Solution: A Composable Digital Experience Platform
This is why modern companies have moved away from traditional website tools and architecture in favor of composable Digital Experience Platforms (DXP). Instead of hardwiring all tools into a website, we recommend creating stacks that can talk to each other but run independently. If something breaks or you want to upgrade, say, your analytics tool, you don’t have to change the code for everything else.
Many companies, especially those with multiple brands or online presences, have found a headless solution to be the best fit. This allows a company to easily use and reuse content across all digital channels through a central content platform, such as Contentful.
How Contentful Does This
As stated in Contentful’s Modern Website Strategy Guide, “The best websites are engaging, personalized digital experiences that are driven by data and enhanced by new technologies like artificial intelligence or machine learning. And context is key, because people now experience content on a wider range of connected devices than ever before.”
Contentful is one of the fastest growing content platforms that uses a headless design. It is designed to integrate with today’s top tools but also allow you to thoroughly customize your user interface, automation, and other ways the platform works for your business. So whether you need to connect ecommerce and authentication tools, or build a new UI through the platform, Contentful has you covered and allows digital teams to build quickly.
Contentful makes it easy to push content to multiple sites, apps, channels, etc. from one centralized location. It can serve as the hub of your composable DXP, allowing you to ensure your customer’s experience is unified across channels without keeping tabs on each one. But instead of being built on a backend code the size of Alaska, your Contentful platform only requires configuration during set up; after that, the overall structure won’t need much updating. Once developers have configured what customers will see for each application (such as events, news, social posts, etc.), content creators can put out new posts without their input, keeping their work flowing and allowing developers to focus on the next best thing.
Contentful integrates with many technologies and tools. This ensures that your content works seamlessly with other tools across your stack, from ecommerce to site search and translation management. As a best-of-breed solution with an industry-leading app framework, Contentful allows you to use your favorite tools and quickly pivot when a new or better fit becomes available, so you can scale quickly.
Getting Started
Once your Contentful platform is set up, content updates are easy, but for that to happen, the interface must be tailored to your needs. In addition to actually configuring the software, this involves strategic planning to ensure your platform is easy to use and supports your goals. We can help you build a platform around Contentful that works for you and your customers. Contact us to get started, or learn more about Contentful.
