JAMstack for Web Marketers: What You Should Know

JAM stands for JavaScript, APIs, and Markup.

It's essentially a modern way for a web marketer to build a website containing static HTML files.

As a marketer, you are familiar with the 4 Ps and the marketing mix.

The term Marketing Mix was developed by Neil Borden, who first started using the phrase in 1949. "An executive is a mixer of ingredients, who sometimes follows a recipe as he goes along, sometimes adapts a recipe to the ingredients immediately available, and sometimes experiments with or invents ingredients no one else has tried." (Culliton, J. 1948)

E. Jerome McCarthy (McCarthy, J. 1960) was the first person to suggest the four Ps of marketing – price, promotion, product, and place (distribution). These constitute the most common variables used in constructing a marketing mix. According to McCarthy, the marketers essentially have these four variables which they can use while crafting a marketing strategy and writing a marketing plan.

All these basic concepts have evolved, and now some marketing gurus are talking about the 6 Ps, the two new ones being Process and People.

The way we build websites, the way viewers consume websites, and what they expect from a website have evolved. For a marketer, a website needs to quickly grab a viewer's attention and lead them to start interacting with the website.

And as websites may not have the long tradition and history of the marketing mix, building one has its credos. Instead of the 4 Ps, we call it the 4 S (speed, security, stability, and scalability).

While the 4 S are essential to web developers and websites, they are crucial to marketers. Speed and better performance mean better site engagement and better SEO. Improved security means a better chance that you will reach your online marketing goals because there is no chance your site will be down or hacked.

Moving Away from Monolithic CMS and Plugins

Building a marketing website with well-known platforms like WordPress or Drupal that offer plugins, add-ons, and other easy wins for marketers has been a great idea for many years.

Sometimes it is a great idea. But too many times, performance is seriously lagging, and the only real solution is to start over and build something that is suited to your specific needs, without all of the extra bloats.

Hacked-up themes, page builders, and plugins for all things can wreak havoc with site performance if you have a dynamic site powered by a monolithic CMS. This has a knock-on effect on the user experience, SEO, and overall effectiveness of your website.

Site performance and site speed is an increasingly important ranking factor. Not only that, all of the top-ranking factors these days are related to on-site engagement, which also suffers if you haven't got a site that performs.

Ditching the plugin concept and opting for a JAMstack site that is "just HTML" doesn't mean you have to give up functionality or suddenly need to know how to code like a frontend developer to manage a site and its content.

You can still achieve the same results with an ecosystem of tools and services tailored specifically for you. Yes, it takes some development up-front (let's be real, so does any website) - but the payoff is huge!

Moving to the JAMstack

If you are looking to move your website to the JAMstack, here are the boxes you should tick:

1. Look for a Team with Strong Javascript and API Skills

For brands looking to move over to the JAMstack, the in-house or outsourced web development team should be well-versed in the JavaScript and API ecosystem. We're talking about front-end-centric development here.

2. The Choice of a Headless CMS

WebriQ vendor of choice - Sanity is a headless, real-time CMS where the editor is an open-source React-based construction kit, and the backend is a graph-oriented cloud datastore with a globally distributed CDN. The Sanity Studio is an open-source CMS built with React.js.

It offers rapid configuration and free-form customization. As long as it speaks HTTP, you can connect your services, frontends, apps, scripts, or devices to Sanity APIs. Query your content with GROQ or GraphQL. You can do real-time mutations and patches with powerful write APIs.

Sanity offers the following functionalities:

• Complete structured content model
• Access control
• Version Control
• Document Management
• Rich Text Editor
• Multi-language Support
• WYSIWYG Editor
• Drag and Drop Editor
• Content Blocks
• Live preview & editing

3. Choose a Suitable Website Creation Tool

We here at Webriq make full use of the Jamstack technology to meet and even exceed the expectations of our clients. We bring static pages to frontend stacks, leveraging client-side JavaScript, reusable APIs, and prebuilt Markup. We provide an easy-to-use solution that creates a SPA (Single Page Application) with React.js, Webpack, modern JavaScript, GraphQL, CSS, and more.

We can also pull only the critical HTML, CSS, data, and JavaScript that's needed for your business so that your site can deploy as fast as possible, even offline. We utilize a rich data plugin ecosystem that lets a site pull data from various sources, including headless CMSs, SaaS services, APIs, databases, file systems, and more.

The Jamstack technology is a different and more efficient way of making a website, and it has a wide range of applications and is a solid choice for sites that need to utilize data from many sources.

The scope of this technology is limitless, and with several unique new features, and ways of doing things don't be surprised if adoption continued to skyrocket in 2022, and likely beyond!

WebriQ has over 100 projects under its belt and we are gearing to make even more sites live in the coming year.

4. Why WebriQ for your Jamstack website

If this is all a bit overwhelming and you need help in choosing all the building blocks, your in-house capabilities are just not up to the job, Webriq's DXP Studio might be a good option to consider.

At WebriQ, we have developed a very opinionated way of implementing websites, eCommerce carts, and web apps, and we ultimately moved away from a monolithic, legacy, and centralized approach. We believe in a decentralized system whereby each software component is chosen for it is best in class, but at the same time replaceable with a newer best in class if needed.

We can not find a best-in-class critical functionality that is open-sourced, we develop it ourselves, i.e. WebriQ Forms, WebriQ Gated Content, Jamstack Page builder. These are all no code or low code solutions for your website that can be easily managed by a web marketer with no coding experience.

Of particular interest to web marketers is, once again, our DXP Studio. What is it exactly?

What is DXP Studio?

Webriq's DXP Studio is a powerful and flexible landing page builder and content management system in one.

If you think it is hard to use, then all you have to do is give it a try and you'll know just how easy it is to use. All you have to do is choose the website components you like and put them together to build the website that fits your needs.

No codes to learn and memorize. This landing page builder based on the Jamstack technology makes website design and creation way more accessible.

Webriq's DXP Studio is a no-code tool for building landing pages or even microsites on the Jamstack. Although it is a Software as a Service (SaaS) tool, the entire code is open-sourced. Prepopulated templates and components can be added, changed, and deleted.

WebriQ Forms and WebriQ Analytics are available, and all your data can be moved to wherever you want.

Want to know more? Send us a message today.