Forem: Alan Gleeson 🇺🇦

Looking to Build Your 1st Headless or JamStack site?

Alan Gleeson 🇺🇦 — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 10:28:47 +0000

Are you about to embark on building your first Headless CMS-backed website? If yes, what are some of the things you need to be aware of before setting off?

This short blog outlines some things to consider as you embark on the journey.

Introduction
A growing number of web development agencies are responding to market conditions and are considering headless deployments for the first time. As an agency owner, what are some of the key things you need to think about before you embark on that journey?

The Headless CMS Juggernaut
In recent years, for commercial websites, the category of Headless has emerged as a credible contender to the traditional CMS approach synonymous with the likes of WordPress and Drupal.

The headless approach offers several compelling benefits; ranging from:

enhanced security,
scalability,
flexibility and,
performance improvements.

It is also well suited for omnichannel, and thus B2C companies have led the charge in terms of adoption. VC cash has followed suit, and the market leaders in the headless CMS category have enjoyed significant raises and lofty valuations.

However, for various reasons, adoption amongst agencies has lagged a little.

The number of headless builds represents a mere drop in the ocean compared to traditional CMS-backed sites. After all, the broader CMS market category is large and a vibrant and well-established WordPress ecosystem is incentivised to maintain the status quo. Many are happy to stay with what they know best.

Headless CMS-backed sites are rarely your first starter site and are better suited for growing, and scaling business websites. Hence many agencies have cut their teeth with traditional CMS given they can serve a much broader audience.

Like all new technology adoption, it carries risks. The learning curve to adopting a new approach is not insignificant. Again many agencies have eschewed the headless CMS movement sticking to a lower-risk strategy.

Combined these factors help to explain why starting a headless CMS agency from scratch rather than adding the capability to an existing agency is much more common.

That all said, Headless providers are winning over growing numbers of major logos and thus agencies are beginning to sit up and take notice. This short blog outlines the context for the growth and offers some thoughts to agency owners contemplating a move.

Finally, by way of clarification, multiple CMS use is on the rise, and thus many of those brands moving to Headless will often run a dual CMS strategy where they may run tens if not hundreds of sites, and micro-sites across their global footprint.

Moving to Headless
As an agency owner, a key initial question is whether you plan to offer both WordPress (or Traditional CMS-backed websites) and Headless or ‘just Headless’. There are merits in both approaches.

With the former you get greater coverage and an ability to propose the best-fit solution for the client, with the latter you are focused on a niche area perhaps as a basis for differentiation.

The decision as to which way to go is heavily ‘context-dependent’, and will be influenced in part by the maturity of the business.

Are you a new market entrant looking to carve out a niche or a mature agency looking to move more upmarket? As I mentioned above, in some ways it is more difficult for an existing agency to ‘bolt-on’ a headless capability.

So what are some of the things you need to consider:

1- In House Skills
The skillset for building jamstack or Headless CMS-backed websites is completely different to a traditional CMS build like Wordpress. The latter is very much an all-in-one solution married to a significant plugin ecosystem, whereas the former is a ‘best of breed’ API-led approach. Do you have the requisite in-house skills to deliver a jamstack build e.g. JavaScript frameworks (React, Vue, Angular, etc.), and RESTful and GraphQL APIs?

2- Area of Expertise
If you are an existing agency you may be synonymous with one type of offering - perhaps a WordPress house, or an agency that specializes in websites for local businesses. It comes down to positioning. What is your current positioning and can it be modified to house Headless also? For a new agency startup, they can position as a Headless first agency out of the gate, serving as a differentiated offering in a sea of traditional CMS-focused agencies.

3- Lead Composition
What type of leads have you historically generated? Perhaps your positioning is bringing in more cash-constrained local business prospects looking for something ‘cheap and cheerful’.

Are you able to convince them that paying a premium will be worth it? Do they have the internal capability to manage a more technical setup? Or do they even have the need for a more powerful engine?

In some ways, this goes back to a key point about market positioning. The early cohort of headless sites tended to be larger companies looking to scale and grow, enhance security or to future-proof their approach to omnichannel. CMS selection is very much a ‘horses for courses’ selection so if your traditional lead base is primarily lower-budget clients then Headless won’t be an obvious choice/ great fit. However, if your agency is large enough and does attract clients with more bespoke, sophisticated requirements then a headless offering will undoubtedly appeal. Again a brand new agency can start with a blank slate.

So what are some of the other things you need to consider as you transition to Headless?

1- Which Headless CMS?
Which headless CMS to choose is probably one of the biggest challenges you’ll face. The market is pretty crowded (some would argue saturated) and it is not easy to evaluate more than a handful.

Many defer to the market leaders as the least risky decision.

However, the challenge with this is these same leaders have the most complex solutions on the market (take any claims about them being ‘easy to use’ with a grain of salt), with some of them being accused of price gouging. Adding one or two wildcards like Contento to the shortlist helps avoid this trap.

2- Estimating the cost
For mature agencies with several years under their belt, costing most WordPress builds tends to be relatively straightforward. However, that is not always the case for those that are new to Headless CMS builds. Marrying build uncertainty, risk management and reliance on senior devs, can quickly result in proposals that are well beyond the budget for traditional builds. With some initial builds, agencies will often need to take a hit on the budget treating it as part of the learning curve associated with offering a new solution.

3- Repeatability
A common way web development agencies enhance profitability is by ensuring as many of the jobs and processes are repeatable and are thus ones that can be used on other clients. No agency wants to be repeating ‘one-off’ tasks. Up to now Headless CMS has been poor for this, given the bespoke nature of the builds. However, tools like Contento ensure the feature set has strong repeatable elements (be that the use of the starter kits or the library capability).

4- Managing migrations
In many instances, a Headless CMS deployment is a part of a CMS site migration off a legacy CMS like WordPress. This brings added complexity into play and can represent a significant task that adds risk and cost that is not viewed as being a significant value add for clients.

Issues with Headless
Despite the hype around Headless, there is no doubt that there have been lots of teething problems also. The reasons for this are varied and include:

As mentioned, given a site migration is often involved, users of the old CMS are usually keen to reproduce the functionality from their old ways of doing things - all of which come at a cost.

Secondly, given the maturity of WordPress, most agencies have baked in time-savings ‘rinse and repeat’ elements to protect margins, especially when the competition has forced the top-line costs down.

Thirdly many of the headless leaders are already suffering from chronic feature bloat and complexity meaning that only senior devs are sufficiently skilled to manage site builds.

The developer centric nature of the Headless CMS category since inception has meant that the primary user - usually someone in the marketing function, has often struggled with usability issues.

In short, more recent market entrants like Contento, have learned a lot from the initial experiences of both the Headless CMS vendors and agencies building Jamstack sites. These lessons have informed not only the feature set but also the approach to building sites, where the lines are not as distinct. A Headless CMS sits within a site build, and thus the more Headless CMS vendors can help those entrusted with building the sites the better the overall result.

How Contento helps?
Some of the differentiators Contento offers are designed specifically to help close the gap with traditional CMS and to bring the development times down so that overall costs are closer to a traditional build than is currently the case. These features include:

Starter kits to allow devs to repurpose prebuilt elements.

A clean modern UI/ UX with a more modest feature set

Documents and guides pitched at junior dev level making it easier to get started`

Choose from our library of pre-built content models to speed up the build process.

Alongside these specific features, are design choices that have elevated the needs of the main user (often a marketing or content lead) as distinct from the needs of the main buyer (often a technical lead). Contento makes an assumption that it is being used to manage a website, and thus the entire offering is tailored for a user need and context that the category leaders do not cater well for.

Summary
As more and more web development agencies consider Headless it is important to make an informed decision as to the Pro’s and Con’s. It is after all, a very different approach to building and maintaining websites compared to the traditional WordPress lead approach. There is no doubt there is an initial learning curve that impacts not only the developer arm of an agency, but also the commercial arm. Hence the first tranche of website builds are likely to be loss making and need to be viewed through the prism of an investment in learning. However, as this blog has flagged there are lessons to be learned from those who have gone before, and it is also worth considering newer market entrants like Contento, who are thinking beyond just the CMS and are thus designing their applications such that more junior devs can build Headless sites in confidence.

This article originally appeared on the Contento website - Guide to Headless

Save Time Building Jamstack / Headless CMS Backed Websites

Alan Gleeson 🇺🇦 — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 10:24:11 +0000

🎉 We've added a new starter kit to our collection at Contento!

The Landing Page starter kit has a selection of handy blocks you'd commonly want to use for this type of page such as a pricing block, call to action block and FAQ block.

Our starter kits are great for getting the foundations of a headless website up and running really quickly. They include both Next.js code you can grab from our github repo and the content models for the site, with minimal styling you can use them as a base and make them your own!

We also have step-by-step instructions in our guides on how to set everything up! Perfect if you're new to headless.

Check out our starter kits for your next headless Jamstack website!

https://www.contento.io/features/starter-kits

Save Time Building Headless / Jamstack Sites

Alan Gleeson 🇺🇦 — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 14:41:17 +0000

Ever get tired of rebuilding your content models over and over again? I know I do. Every time I built a new website I had to rebuild a button, a hero, a navigation link etc...because they're pretty much all the same and it made setting up a new headless Jamstack website a bit tedious!

But not anymore 🎉

Introducing the My Library feature in Contento! We built this to solve this very problem, and now you can save your content models to your library to use in other sites! You can also look at previous sites you've built and import content types from them into your new sites.

It's saved me so much time... and monotony 😁 .

Check out our My Library feature to see if it could help you speed up your headless Jamstack builds.

My Library - Contento

Store your content models in your own personal library to reuse on any new site builds, or use some of our pre build content models from our library.

contento.io

headless #jamstack #contentmodelling #content #marketingwebsite

Learn Headless The Easy Way

Alan Gleeson 🇺🇦 — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 10:35:18 +0000

One of the big challenges with Headless CMS is the steep learning curve. As a result it is primarily senior devs working on Headless CMS websites increasing the overall cost and making the approach less attractive to traditional routes.

At Contento (www.contento.io) we are striving to help junior devs learn Headless by creating sites using Starter Kits. Married to this is a streamlined user interface without the cognitive overload associated with other Headless CMS.

Check out our starter kits now - (free trial / no cc required)

A New Approach to API Docs & Guides

Alan Gleeson 🇺🇦 — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 15:00:23 +0000

Have you ever wondered why API Docs & Guides are the poor relations when it comes to design, management and maintenance?

What if you took a CMS - centric approach to them?

Or going one step further - adding a Headless CMS into the mix.

That is exactly what we did with Teamwork.com's new API docs & guides. And to say they've been impressed is an under statement.

Key Features (Differences from Traditional API management)

Bespoke Design
Customise the design & take full advantage of a full CMS experience. Save time utilizing rich, beautifully designed content blocks across the site.

Built In SEO
Detailed SEO schema, automatically generated on all pages. Ensure all of your developer content is indexed on Google.

Swagger/OpenAPI ingest
Auto generated reference API docs from your Swagger / OpenAPI files. Keep everything in sync with your git repo.

Full Content Management Experience
Unlike other systems based on writing Markdown, you can enjoy a full CMS experience with well structured content modelling.

https://www.helpdocs.com/

Demystifying Headless - Dev Resources

Alan Gleeson 🇺🇦 — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 11:05:16 +0000

Are you a dev looking to understand more about Headless CMS but are not sure where to start?

Despite the explosion of Headless CMS like Contento, Contentful and Strapi to name but a few studies show that a skills gap is commonly cited as a key barrier to further adoption.

Our new video series entitled Demystifying Headless aims to share some high level insights as to why Headless is an important concept for devs to understand.

Alongside the video series, we encourage you to get started for free with Contento. Unlike other Headless CMS we have focused closely on ensuring less senior devs can realise the power of Headless learning by creating starter sites. Our library and starter kits are also available helping to significantly reduce the time it takes to get going.

Get Started

Usability - The Next Key Battleground for CMS

Alan Gleeson 🇺🇦 — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 11:08:11 +0000

The battle between Headless and Traditional Content Management Systems (CMS) is only getting started. In this article, I argue that both sides need to better meet the needs of their users to drive future success. As I’ll argue below, to do that they need to focus more on usability and less on feature enhancements.

Usability — Why The Next Generation of CMS Need to Be More User Friendly?

In the red corner, you’ve got Traditional (or monolithic CMS) like WordPress, in the blue corner a modern CMS like Headless e.g. Contento.

The 800lb gorilla is of course the 20-year-old WordPress with hundreds of millions of installs and a vast ecosystem of developers and entrepreneurs getting rich on its coattails. In the other corner, you’ve got the “new approach”: Headless, one that offers significant benefits but is up against a fairly entrenched incumbent.

However, as this blog attempts to illustrate, the battle is more than just about the CMS but about a way of working — with usability lying right at the core.

Traditional v Headless CMS

A traditional CMS like WordPress is an all-in-one solution, in that it consists of content management as well as the front-end design (template or otherwise). The capability of the core WordPress offering is extended by a myriad of Plug-in’s, after all, it started life as a blogging platform.

The key selling points are that it is relatively cheap to get going, and you can pick a theme from a template gallery to get started quickly. WordPress agencies and developers are ten a penny so it is also easy to get support for any issue that you encounter (increasingly from a YouTube video).

What is there not to like?

Well a lot, if viewed through the lens of the primary user who has to navigate an increasingly challenging WordPress interface which has had 20 years of upgrades, enhancements, and feature releases on top of an ever expanding array of plugins. As one of the most mature SaaS categories on the market it is particularly susceptible to feature creep — and I believe WordPress has already passed the point of no return.

To compound matters, in many instances it is a junior marketing person entrusted to manage the site themselves in-house (assisted by external freelancers on retainer in rare situations). The typical junior marketer will have a broad range of delivery responsibilities, with many of these taking place away from a CMS.

Can they really be expected to manage a live website, as well as all the other marketing applications alongside the myriad of tasks they will likely be responsible for?

A bloated interface married to an overworked generalist junior marketer is a recipe for disaster.

On the other side, you have a Headless CMS like Contento which is decoupled — meaning the front-end and back-end are separated.

The Headless CMS is the back-end content repository where you manage content, whereas the front-end design is managed elsewhere. It is an API-lead approach and based on a best-of-breed Lego block approach in stark contrast to the all-in-one approach of WordPress. With a Headless CMS you get a stripped back interface, but also an understanding that the “jobs to be done” are specialized and that you need a front end dev working alongside a marketing person to deliver success.

This is a key distinction — in the majority of cases, a Headless deployment takes design and other front end tasks away from the junior marketer.

Which Route Do I Choose?

There are undoubtedly Pro’s and Con’s to the two approaches, and understanding some of the differences is crucial because your CMS decision is very much a “horses for courses” one. The context surrounding your decision is multifaceted and knowing the various benefits of each approach will help you make the right decision.

Of course, the sheer range of variables can confuse especially when each camp will argue their case.

Take performance as a key decision point.

Most Headless CMS vendors will argue that a Headless architecture will deliver much faster speeds given the use of a Static site generator (SSG) and Content Delivery Network (CDN) whereas some WordPress vendors will argue that with the right hosting and image optimization you can get a similar performance. What gives?

The following represent some other key factors that you’ll need to consider:

Security — Headless will argue they win here
Cost — Traditional will argue they are more cost-effective
Scalable — Headless will argue that they are better for scaling
Performance — Headless wins hands down here
Design — Headless is usually a bespoke design and offers more design flexibility
Omnichannel — Headless is designed to feed multiple heads and thus is optimal here
Resourcing — If you are resource constrained, and lack a full time in-house front end dev, it will be harder to deliver with Headless.
Usability — As I argue below the importance of this factor is usually overlooked

However, many of these factors relate to the initial purchase decision.

And having clarity on these various criteria will help ensure you pick the optimum route. There is a nuance here to also consider. In many instances the technology lead dictates the choice of CMS, yet many of these factors are marketing factors and thus it is vital the CMS decision is not taken in isolation.

Which leads on to a key point here — the CMS buyer is and the user are rarely one and the same person.

In the vast majority of cases, the technical lead (CTO or similar) is the buyer. One need only take a look at the home pages of most CMS vendors to validate this point. They are heavily involved in the build and set-up, but their involvement peters out over time.

Hence, the marketing users criteria need to be baked into the decision. There is little point buying the most cutting-edge tech solution to find that the marketing function are not able to use it to manage the site.

What is often lost in the conversation is the fact that the primary user will invariably be in the marketing function, and their requirements are rarely heard when it comes to decisions as to CMS selection.

Where Headless Differs?

The two approaches represent different philosophies.

As I mentioned previously, Headless is a more modern best-of-breed approach, Traditional (WordPress) an all-in-one approach where plugins can extend the functionality of the core platform.

Underneath these headlines sit some important considerations.

As I touched upon above, when it comes to a traditional CMS, a common use case is that the marketing or content person manages the site (beyond just the content creation). With Headless there is a clear delineation of duties — front-end developers are needed to manage the design, and the ‘plumbing’ whereas the marketing team is primarily responsible for content management — be that content creation or edits.

With the likes of WordPress, someone in the marketing function will invariably be responsible for ‘the website’ and all that entails.

For mature websites entrusting the entire site to a marketing person is increasingly risky without running a WordPress developer on a retainer in parallel — just to keep the lights on.

With Headless, as a more technical setup, having access to a developer is a prerequisite, whereas with WordPress too many companies rely on someone in the team managing it effectively.

Afterall, WordPress sits on the other side of the pricing continuum to Headless (as a bespoke development requiring senior development input it is usually a more expensive build).

Despite Claims to the Contrary WordPress is Not User Friendly

When it comes to usability, the complexity of WordPress is “off the charts” for non-devs. To claim otherwise is a blatant misrepresentation. Yet you often see the claim that WordPress is ‘easy to use’ as a key selling point as to the benefits of WordPress.

For time-pressed marketing practitioners, juggling lots of balls, WordPress is an absolute nightmare when it comes to management and maintenance. Again for clarity, most commercial sites have a theme, several plugins in place, and are thus not straightforward.

That said given it’s market dominance it is the CMS most marketing people will have been exposed to and thus a “better the devil we know” attitude can prevail. Ironically, marketing team members can push for it as it is simply all they know.

Headless CMS Need to Improve Usability Also

Similarly, most headless CMS from the market leaders also suffer from usability challenges. Again this is from the perspective of the marketing user, rather than the buyer (often the developer). And herein lies one of the biggest issues with all CMS. The buyer is usually technical, but the main user is generally not. Hence, their needs are often neglected (arguably both Squarespace and Wix represent outliers that do offer genuinely intuitive interfaces for non technical users).

It is more than just this of course.

The same issues that affect traditional CMS are being repeated with Headless, where the market leaders flush with VC cash engage in a feature war. As each year goes by the list of features continues to explode, with an inverse correlation to usability.

Contento and Usability

Usability is one of the key areas we have focused a lot of attention on with Contento. We want to elevate the importance of the marketing user when it comes to website management. If anything the category of Headless has gone in the other direction with the majority of Headless vendors focusing exclusively on the needs of the primary buyer ICP (the tech lead).

At Contento we have endeavoured to close the gap and have made the experience a lot less daunting for the typical non technical user.

We’ve looked to do that via a stripped-back interface and by not exposing them to areas that are outside of their likely area of expertise.

For some the above image of the interface may look a little basic. But that’s exactly the point, all the other more ‘technical tasks’ are elsewhere, and only accessible by those with the requisite skills.

We passionately believe this needs to be the direction of travel. Headless CMS need to avoid trying to reproduce the traditional CMS experience within their Headless application.

Recommendations for Change

All of which leads to some key changes that need to happen:

1- Headless CMS vendors need to pay a lot more attention to the primary user and not just the primary buyer.

2- Marketing users need to be included in conversations related to CMS selection, to ensure a overly complex CMS is not foisted upon them.

3- As a mature software category it is particularly vulnerable to feature bloat. 20 years plus of updates, and new features leads to Frankensteins’s monster. Taking a “less is more” to product roadmaps will help with this.

4- Finally, those working in companies where the website is a primary driver of growth need to invest adequate resources in the team tasked with managing and maintaining the site. Entrusting a junior marketer to manage everything is a recipe for disaster.

Summary

When it comes to CMS selection, traditional CMS continues to dominate. However, a growing cohort of early adopters are gaining a better understanding of the benefits of Headless and are increasingly migrating to it. The factors at play range from dissatisfaction with the performance of monolithic solutions to concerns around perceived security vulnerabilities with WordPress. Alongside these are some of the pull factors outlined above.

However, usability remains a key problem in the broader CMS ecosystem. The needs of the developer side of the fence are well met, whereas the needs of the marketer are sorely neglected. “Easy-to-use” appears universally on all CMS vendor websites — in many instances, it could not be further from the truth. At Contento, by seeking to address these unmet needs we are hoping that marketers can finally use a CMS without fearing one false move could bring the whole site crashing down.

This article originally appeared on Medium

If Headless is To Go Mainstream we Need to Dumb it Down

Alan Gleeson 🇺🇦 — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 15:37:03 +0000

Introduction

In recent years we've seen an increase in the number of Headless Content Management System (CMS) vendors entering the market. Most of the leading CMS solutions have raised significant funding, and analysts are bullish about the growth trajectory for the sector. But as this article will argue, for Headless to go "mainstream" developers and tech leaders need to do a better job of articulating the value proposition in non-technical terms.

Emergence of Headless

Headless has emerged in recent years as an attractive alternative to traditional monolithic (or legacy) CMS like WordPress. As a more bespoke and technical approach to all-in-one website builders, early adopters have tended to be larger companies with sufficient resources to deploy a more technical solution.

There have also been push and pull factors driving adoption. Issues with WordPress are well known; and range from performance issues to security vulnerabilities, to usability (clunky interface). On the other side, the benefits of moving to Headless include the ability to create a beautiful bespoke website using modern technologies and frameworks, improved performance, enhanced security and to enjoy the resultant benefits from the the omnichannel capability of the architecture.

However, it is very much a "horses for courses" discussion when it comes to CMS selection. For the more budget-constrained company, a website builder will likely suffice, as the bespoke nature of a Headless CMS-backed website pushes the overall cost up.

The key question is whether Headless can appeal to a more mass-market audience beyond Fortune 500, and B2C brands with complex requirements.

It is after all a very different way to run a website, and some may fall into it blind- unaware that the CMS is just the "content management" element. Part of this goes back to the confusing name for the category- "Headless" but also the fact that as a concept it is (a) simply not widely known, nor (b) easily understood.

Similarly - for the non-tech user, images like the one below do little to educate them as to the differences between the two approaches - not to mention how these differences generate business value.

Fig 1 - Differences Between Traditional and Headless CMS

Developer Centric Nature

For someone coming at this from the marketing side of the fence, the gap is all too stark. The adoption of headless has very much been developer-led to date, and as I argue herein, more widespread adoption can best be achieved by educating a non-tech audience as to the values of the approach.

Visit any of the websites of the leading Headless vendors and the language, messaging, and graphic choices are almost exclusively focused on developers. Even the social proof (case studies and testimonials) is primarily from those in highly technical roles.

Of course, this all makes sense, as developers represent the primary buyer persona. However, my argument is that in plenty of other contexts, the marketing leader is the primary decision-maker when it comes to site upgrades (and if they are not, as stakeholders may be influencers) and more generally is much closer to the ongoing users than the Dev team.

As a former Chief Marketing Officer myself it is all too easy to stick with WordPress.

Firstly, it is the only CMS your peers in the C-Suite are likely to have heard of.
Secondly, there is every chance your marketing team will be comfortable using it, after all, many of them will have encountered it on their journey up the marketing ladder.
Thirdly, given the size and strength of the WordPress ecosystem, you'll have plenty of people championing it as the best option.
Finally, you may feel overwhelmed by choice and default to "doing nothing".

If you do decide to raise your head above the parapet and check out a Headless website you'll likely backtrack quickly - overwhelmed by messaging that doesn't resonate. However, these reasons for choosing WordPress, quickly fall away for those in the know. WordPress has its place - but powering scaling businesses is not one of those. Thus the key point then becomes:

How can headless vendors do a better job of educating time-pressed marketing leaders that headless represents an attractive option to future-proof their website with a cutting-edge tech stack?

Buyer v User Personas

In part, this goes back to the distinction between the buyer and the user. From my experience, the user is rarely a factor in the upfront decision to select a CMS. When it comes to Headless the "job to be done" for the Dev lead is to select a CMS and to get a website live. They are rarely worried about what happens afterwards. It is the same when agencies are brought in. Often the engagement is transactional and relates to a specific project and launch date - "getting a new site live". But commercial sites are not one-off build, "launch and forget" deliverables. Sites need to be managed and maintained - and usually, it is the marketing function which is entrusted to manage a site after launch.

When it comes to the likes of WordPress retainers are common - having a dedicated freelancer or agency to manage updates and to keep the site from falling over. With a Headless CMS-backed website, it is important to have access to a Front-End dev (ideally in situ in the marketing team).

Most Headless CMS solutions have missed a trick though in failing to address non-technical stakeholders (be that as users or influencers). This starts with on-site messaging, but it also filters through to the feature set and user interface. There are some attempts to recognise the distinct personas (often in onboarding set-up flows), but despite this, the reality is that more needs to be done to close the gap.

Contento CMS Interface

Fig 2 - The Contento interface - designed to be intuitive for non-technical users

By way of an example to illustrate the point - if you compare the pricing page of a website builder like Squarespace and a Headless CMS like Contentful, you'll feel you are looking at completely different solutions, even though ultimately they are both CMS.

Making Headless More Accessible

So what can be done?

1/ As CMS vendors, it is incumbent on us all to better articulate the value of moving to headless in terms that non-tech stakeholders can understand. This means clearly outlining the value in business terms (while also ensuring the drawbacks are also explained).

2/ Graphics, illustrations and videos need to be "less technical" and they need to illustrate how a Headless backed site is a better fit for clients in terms that can be understood.

3/ The product leaders of Headless CMS solutions need to better understand the needs of ongoing website management and maintenance ensuring that "the main jobs to be done" are easy to accomplish (ideally without a developer dependency).

4/ Finally, we must all take lessons learned from the early headless adopters so that new converts don't make the same mistakes e.g.

Ensuring they are aware of the need to have access to a front-end developer on an ongoing basis
Ensuring that content modelling is done properly at the start
Ensuring that appropriate guard rails are put in place to deliver on the value proposition (e.g. site performance is a key benefit of Headless, so anyone uploading excessively large images, animations or videos should be red-flagged).

Summary

While WordPress continues to dominate the global CMS market, the category of Headless has emerged in recent years as a credible alternative in certain commercial use cases. Up to now, the category has been primarily associated with major brands who understand the value and can successfully deploy a Headless backed website.

However, for the sector to "cross the chasm" towards more widespread adoption, it has to do a better job of communicating to a non-technical audience. All Headless vendors have a collective responsibility here - otherwise, the legacy monolithic approach will continue to dominate, despite the limitations.

About the Author

Alan Gleeson is the CEO and Co-Founder of Contento, a modern Headless CMS focused 100% on websites.

How are Headless CMS website builds going?

Alan Gleeson 🇺🇦 — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 11:59:10 +0000

We've built a new Headless CMS called Contento which is the only Headless CMS focused 100% on websites. This simple assumption makes a huge difference in terms of feature set, workflows, UI, product roadmap etc.

Pretty much all the others are omnichannel or "head agnostic" - after all the key point of Headless is that the content can be fed to multiple heads via an API. However, the benefits of Headless for websites is significant (even if you don't need to send content to multiple heads).

The Dev dependency for a Headless / Jamstack site build is high but based on several conversations we've had with agencies they are struggling a little. Moving from churning out traditional CMS based sites like WordPress to the more bespoke world of Headless seems a major jump that is throwing up lots of issues.

I'd welcome any thoughts as to how agencies looking to offer Headless CMS backed websites can do so more profitably (than currently seems to be the case)? All ideas/ thoughts welcomed. Thanks in advance.

PS For those not familiar with how a traditional CMS differs from a Headless CMS see the image below: