Web Accelerator: Remove Roadblocks On the Path to Headless CMS

If your business is looking for a modern technology solution for your website and digital presence, you’re likely already considering headless.

Moving from a traditional web platform to a headless content management system (CMS) offers enormous advantages for reducing complexity, improving efficiency, and enhancing security, compliance, and performance.

The WHY is clear. The HOW can stop a project in its tracks.

No matter how you spin it, building or rebuilding a website is a significant undertaking.

And when you’re moving from a familiar platform (traditional CMS) to something less familiar (headless), you may get bombarded with questions from business leaders, marketing, and your tech team.

How long is this going to take to build?
Will it work with our other systems?
How long will it take our teams to learn?
How will our processes have to change?
Will our teams even want to use it?

Good news: We can help you make moving to a headless CMS faster, more approachable—and less risky.

Get Answers to Your Big Headless CMS Questions

For a deeper dive into the topics this post covers, we invite you to view our webinar Ease the Transition to Headless CMS for Tech and Marketing—presented with our partners at Storyblok. Click here to watch the recorded webinar.

Headless CMS Challenges: Real and Perceived

A headless CMS reduces cost and risk—and insulates you against future expenses and resource stresses—by simplifying:

Technology stack
Content management
Future site migrations, builds, and integrations

A typical headless CMS interface is a blank slate for users.

Sounds great! But…

As your teams dig in, you may see that headless could potentially have a long project ramp-up period—and also include some risk.

The most glaring issue is that it's a new technology.

When you open up the interface, it literally looks like a blank slate.

From a certain perspective, that blank slate is amazing, right? You can build whatever you want!

But your stakeholders probably don’t see it that way.

That empty space is actually terrifying. What's the best practice for setting up a content model? What's the best way to organize your assets? How do you establish guardrails for things like brand consistency, workflows, and accessibility?

Even worse: What if we get it wrong?

Building a CMS on Common Ground

Over the past four years, we’ve built over 15 websites in Storyblok—a truly leading-edge headless CMS that gives us the power to create pretty much any site, integration, content, design, and tech solution that our clients want.

As we worked with our clients, we started to realize some important things:

Most common website components are similar across all sites.
All sites require some custom components.
No headless CMS includes all the features and controls that marketing and tech teams expect.

We also realized something else: There was a better way for us to share our learned Storyblok experience with our clients.

The result of this epiphany was our Web Accelerator solution.

The Roadblocks on the Path to Headless Are Real.

Let’s Go Around Them.

When we first began evaluating headless CMS solutions, we saw organizations spending a lot of their time, resources, and budget during the very earliest stages of their web projects. Just to evaluate a solution, they needed to learn it and build a working model so that their teams could decide whether it would work for them.

That early-learning-curve stuff is a massive drag on a website project. But for most organizations, it’s unavoidable.

The reason we were able to move our clients into headless solutions faster was that we already knew how it worked—and what best practices would get them the outcomes they needed.

Our Web Accelerator for Storyblok essentially lets organizations LEAP over that first set of hurdles.

It’s a complete, pre-built website solution—ready for you to style with your brand and migrate in your content. So although moving to new technology always has a learning curve, you can start with a usable interface and baked-in headless best practices.

Roadblock

We have to build our content modeling and blocks before we start.

Solution

50+ pre-built panels, widgets, embeds, and content types help you build pages quickly and are fully customizable to your brand.

Roadblock

Editing tools need to be user-friendly, but in tech-driven initiatives, editors seem to be an afterthought.

Solution

We’ve taken an editor-first approach to our content model and component design, carefully augmenting the standard Storyblok panels and Visual Editor to make them easier to use.

Roadblock

Many CMS features essential for marketing and content editors are missing in most headless solutions.

Solution

We considered the entire lifecycle of your content and added enhanced features such as page aliasing, 301 redirects, alternate URLs, sitemap and search controls, search index controls, protected content, role-based security, and enhanced AI search.

Now, instead of a blank slate, you open up your Storyblok interface and see all you need for a website—ready to go.

Need to meet accessibility mandates? Good news there too.

Recently, we've partnered with an accessibility solution provider, ReciteMe, to pre-validate the Web Accelerator starter site for web accessibility compliance. So any team using this solution can be confident that the core HTML in our panels and components is WCAG 2.2 AA compliant—right out of the gate. Learn about our Accessibility Solution.

Take a Massive Leap Forward in Your Website Initiative

Moving to a new CMS can be a challenge, especially when each team has unique priorities for building with new technology. With a solid foundation already in place, you can help them envision the possibilities that headless offers—while ensuring easy usability and adherence to technical needs.

We’ve already had several clients use the Web Accelerator solution—and each site is absolutely a unique expression of the clients’ brand, story, and experience. Take a look.

Then talk to us about how to accelerate your next website project.