Why a value-driven web agency and the JAMStack go hand in hand

As a web agency you are obsessed with creating value for your customers. The longer the relationship with the customer, the more value you need to bring to that customer. Value comes through the creativity you bring to projects, the speed of delivery and the ownership costs of the project. Beyond the essential creativity part, the success of each project is depending on the technology choices made. Most web agencies have abandoned in-house custom built Content Management Systems (CMS) and have opted for third-party developed, mostly open source CMS System, i.e. Wordpress or Drupal or Concrete5 to name a few. The most popular and the most widely used (it powers +30% of all websites in the world) is Wordpress. It has a solid foundation, a large community of developers and an ecosystem that is bursting with solutions, paid and free.

So why bother, go with the winner and you will be able to have the right technology platform to give out all your creative ideas as an agency into work. Or not? What goes against going with the winner

• Wordpress is OLD, and although there is innovation, the platform has been around for more than 10 years
• Wordpress is SLOW, and yes you can cache and optimize but you need to know how and it comes at a cost
• Wordpress is not secure, and yes you can avoid being hacked but at what cost
• Wordpress has too many options and features and plugins. Yes, you do not need to to use them, but they are part of the platform, you can ignore them, not delete them
• Wordpress is a monolithic system, handling template, content and database in one gigantic DO-it-ALL platform

So if you want to have a super fast, secure, scalable and custom made Wordpress site, it is going to affect the cost of ownership for your customer. And be of less value to your customers compared to newer technology Stack like the JAMStack.

Let’s dig a bit deeper

• JAMStack websites, and sites build on Gatsby more particular (https://gatsbyjs.org) will win against any Wordpress hosting cost. The hosting is more secure, and simpler to use. It scales much better. This new way of doing things makes the JAMStack faster, better and more cost effective.
• Break-fix happens less, and it solves faster - a core value service of your agency is break-fix, you get a monthly retainer for that. Spending days fixing plugin bugs on Wordpress will eat in your margins. Not so with the JAMStack, as there is no database to make things complex.
• Freemium third party services are cheaper then pay-per-year Wordpress plugins - Wordpress plugin software vendors have discovered the value of their software and have come to realize that the cost of servicing thousands of customers is much higher than expected. Third party service with the same functionality as plugins have generous Free tiers and require zero maintenance.

New technology stacks create new challenges though. You will need access to skilled Javascript (React or Vue to name a couple of popular platforms) developers and developers skilled in implementing API’s, maintaining API’s and developers accustomed to the whole API ecosystem. The CMS system that editors will use is completely detached from the template engine, and the content model used in the CMS is custom made for your website or web application. Lastly, you will need access to devop skills associated with hosting and maintaining Jamstack websites and applications. For small to medium sized creative or digital marketing agencies, acquiring, training and maintaining those technical skills is not a trivial task. Outsourcing the development tasks to freelancers requires a basic understanding of how the stack works and does not solve the devops or maintenance issues associated with projects.

At WebriQ, we have invested heavily in building a Jamstack application for creating, building, content updating, maintaining and hosting Jamstack websites. You can go and test run this on http://app.webriq.com/account/create — just create a FREE account and hack away.

The WebriQ Jamstack application is a combination of following tools;

• A Static Site Generator, in our case Gatsbyjs (https://gatsbyjs.org) . A SSG built on React with super fast download speeds
• A GIT based CMS systems, WebriQ CMS - Content is stored in your Git repository alongside your code for easier versioning, multi-channel publishing, and the option to handle updates directly in Git.
• A hybrid Headless CMS system, Sanity (https://sanity.io). It contains an open source collaborative content element built in Reactjs and a real-time data storage element for content integration and distribution through GraphQL API.

Seeing and using is believing

We have worked very hard in the last months, to give writers, editors, and basically anyone that is involved in updating and managing content on a website the chance to experience a Content Management System (CMS) for the JAMstack.

Go to WebriQ Sandbox invite. You will receive an email with all the login details for your WebriQ Sandbox account. The Sandbox account is an exact replica of what a live website will look like, and it is an exact replica of how you will be able to manage, update and publish content on your website. All this without the stress of breaking the code or breaking the bank. Just write away, and let us know what you think.