What is next in content management and digital experience design
Whether you’re a business leader, marketer, or IT professional, delivering a great customer experience is now key to building a successful brand. When developing these great customer experiences, the right content management technology is vital. Businesses must choose technologies that help bundle data, distribute content and deliver services across an ever-wider variety of customer touch points. At the same time, customer expectations are rising, with today’s enterprises being expected to deliver high-quality, personalized content, quickly and at scale.
Despite this rising interest, however, there remains a lot of confusion about the use of headless technologies — both among marketers and IT teams. The absence of a visual user interface has made marketers particularly reluctant to adopt headless CMSs, feeling that they cannot visually create and manage content in the way that they’re accustomed to.
Digital Experiences are driving the push to Headless CMS
For business owners, IT executives, and marketers, customer experiences, and more particularly Digital Experiences (DXP) is the key driver to adopt new technologies in general, and Headless CMS in particular.
IT professionals identify the adoption of new technologies, automation of processes, and linking IT to their business’s bottom line as key in the year ahead. For business owners and marketers, linking their efforts to the bottom line was also a clear priority, along with providing accurate, targeted personalization and increasing the speed at which campaigns are launched.
Traditional or Monolithic CMS systems no longer deliver
Whether it is WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Concrete 5, or any other traditional monolithic, most business and IT executives find that these systems are no longer matching their business nees or their customer's expectations.
While these systems may do the job for small content websites or websites that do not require regular content updates, they cause larger and more content-rich organizations to struggle while trying to fulfill their digital experience goals. For those looking to manage content across tens of different platforms or hundreds of different pages, manually editing this level of content simply is no longer a feasible option to consider.
Traditional CMSs have become a point of frustration, lacking the speed, flexibility, and support these organizations now require. In fact, only 14% of organizations that have a significant volume of content to manage are happy with their current CMS platform. As organizations produce ever more content, targeted across a greater variety of platforms, interest in headless technologies and Headless CMS has inevitably risen.
Where do Traditional Monolithic CMS fall short in Organizations?
Headless CMSs allow IT teams to be fast and flexible
Headless CMSs provide IT teams with a secure backend infrastructure, while offering the flexibility to choose a front-end framework that is right for them. Of IT professionals who have completed their transition to a headless CMS, 99% agree that their businesses have seen the benefits. Of these, more than half say that they can now offer greater flexibility and have been able to increase the speed at which they develop and publish content.
Headless CMS makes marketing faster
While fewer marketers have instigated the switch to a headless CMS, those who have quickly recognized the benefits. Marketers have been able to increase the speed at which they publish content and create new experiences for their customers. Marketers also feel that they’re less reliant on IT since making the switch.
This said, many marketers are still unsure about the move, with only 1 in 3 finding the headless architecture easier to use than their traditional CMS. More often than not, this comes down to not having a visual interface, which causes significant confusion for marketers.
The Headless Confusion
While both marketing and IT teams are interested in the potential benefits of headless CMSs, there remains a lot of confusion around this technology. While 82% of marketers are confident in their understanding and use of a traditional CMS, this drops to only 42% for headless CMSs. This is due to the lack of a clear, visual frontend, making it harder for marketers to visualize exactly how their content will appear once published.
Much of the confusion around headless tech comes down to usability. For marketers, the most vital consideration for a CMS is that it’s easy to use. This is closely followed by the need to support cross-channel campaigns and to be able to rapidly develop and launch new content. For IT teams, ease of use is also a top priority, along with the need for strong security and flexibility. While the need to create cross-channel content is driving the adoption of headless CMSs, the heavy focus on ease of use is a serious sticking point for purely headless technologies. In fact, only 1 in 3 marketers find their headless architecture easier to use than a traditional CMS. This is why many brands are now turning to more visual, hybrid solutions, as marketers find it both challenging and time-consuming to produce content without a visual interface.
WebriQ Studio and Plasmic – Headless and Visual Editor capabilities
Headless CMSs offer a fantastic opportunity to improve processes and meet your long-term digital experience goals. By allowing marketers to manage content centrally they will save time on content creation and re-use of content blocks.
At the same time however, the lack of a visual user interface to preview content and design is proving a significant challenge for marketers. Brands want the flexibility offered by a headless CMS, but they don’t want to lose control over their content’s final appearance. They need a “best of both worlds” approach.
WebriQ Studio offers all the capabilities, and advantages of a headless CMS combined with an out-of-the-box content preview capability.
The content schema is prebuilt and serves as the core of the publishing tool and as the only UI that users need to learn and understand. For each page you build, you can choose from 20 different components and each component has 5 different variables. Examples of pre-configured components are Navigation, Header, Footer, Text, Call to action, Testimonial, Portfolio, FAQs, Blog, and more. Each page with a distinct URL can be populated with one or multiple components. All components can be reused on other pages and all components that are uniquely tagged are updated throughout all pages when content updates are done to that component. All components can be uniquely designed and branded through a Windtail CSS library. All pages can be previewed before publishing. SEO settings can be done on all pages separately and an SEO preview functionality is embedded.
Discover how this works from a USER EXPERIENCE. Pages 23 and 24 are dealing with the real-time preview experience and pages 25 to 29 are dealing with reusable content components.
WebriQ Studio uses the Tailwind CSS framework to implement styling and interface customization on built landing pages.
The integration of WebriQ Studio and Plasmic visual editor for React components offers developers and marketers the best of both worlds. On the one hand, a headless CMS that takes care of all your content needs and a Visual editor that gives developers and marketers access to a visual editor that meets the most demanding applications. The visual editor is built for humans rather than needing you to learn all the complexities and legacy of CSS layout. And it gives you full layout control, without the need to understand all the ins and outs of Tailwind CSS.
Lower your entry barrier to Headless and Headless CMS with WebriQ and WebriQ Studio
WebriQ is a Top-of-the-line Headless Competence Center
- A group of dedicated designers proficient in all aspects of modern designing and design to code implementation
- A group of developers highly specialized in NextJS, GatsbyJS, React, GraphQL development, microservices, and edge functionality
- Expertise in headless CMS ( Sanity and Strapi) and headless eCommerce (Bigcommerce, Swell, and Medusa)
- Expertise in serverless functionality such as web forms, payment forms, gated content, and paywalls.
- Strong API expertise with applications such as Stripe, Zapier, Bigcommerce, AWS Serverless, and Hasura amongst others
- In-house project management
- In-house Level 1 and 2 Support
There are a wide variety of excellent reasons why you should get on the Headless bandwagon, sooner than later. Not only will this free up your hands so you can devote more time to other important aspects of your business, but you will also have access to experts who can go above and beyond for your cause.
Of course, make sure to partner with the right headless experts for your needs. At WebriQ, we are mad about designing and developing top-notch content and transactional websites for our clients. Request a DEMO of StackShift and learn how we can take your content management to new heights.