Content is the core of digital experience and, as companies look to differentiate themselves with digital, it no longer makes sense to use a traditional, one-size-fits-all content management system (CMS) that locks you into a limited set of capabilities, templates, and ways of working. 

For a while, when this type of old-school CMS suite was the only option on the market, it made sense for companies that were leading the way in digital to create homebrew solutions to fit unique industry needs or business strategies. As the scope of digital experience grows, however, even companies with excellent homebrew solutions for the web of five years ago are finding that customer needs, and their own digital ambitions, have scaled beyond what they want to handle in-house. 

Luckily, the software market has rapidly evolved over the last decade and there is a new generation of CMS platforms built with the understanding that businesses can’t afford to be limited to a strict set of features, rigid frontend templates, and clunky plugins.  

A next-generation content solution, like Hygraph headless CMS, offers a set of core capabilities designed and maintained by a dedicated team of content experts. With an API-first architecture that gives you the flexibility to customize these capabilities and use them as a foundation to build the truly differentiating features your business needs.

#Your homebrew CMS Is holding you back

The capability challenge  

Building your own content solution can be a way to get unique features that aren’t available off-the-shelf, but it means you also have to build all the core capabilities of a typical CMS. 
 This includes handling infrastructure elements like data structure, security, server setup, caching and delivery, and API management. As well as the usability features that users expect from business tools like testing environments, versioning, workflows, roles and permissions, and the editing user interface (UI). Not to mention making sure that everything is well documented and that it’s easy to onboard new users to the system. 

To do this you need a team with expertise in a very diverse range of development and design. Even with the right skill set, the time it takes to build all of these components from scratch means that homebrew solutions often have to make compromises across the developer, editor, and customer experience. 

The maintenance challenge  

With a homebrew CMS your team also takes on the responsibility of maintaining all the moving pieces required to keep the system healthy. This includes duties like performance testing, security updates, site backups, and continuous monitoring. Along with ensuring that your solution stays compatible with any changes to the other platforms and services you depend on. 

You also have to make sure the system performs as you business scales. Quick fixes might work in the beginning, but over time homebrew solutions tend to get so complex that making any change risks a waterfall of errors and requires a long testing process. 

Many teams with homebrew solutions end up dedicating so much of their resources to fighting fires and maintaining the status quo that they have very little time, or budget, left to innovate. 

#Introducing a product-based, headless approach to Content Management

Digital experience is too dynamic to treat any part of your tech stack like a project with an end date. Every system needs to be thought of as an ongoing product with a team dedicated to improving and maintaining it. Most companies don’t have the resources, or desire, to take on every part of their ecosystem in-house and need to be strategic about choosing vendor solutions that fit their current needs and future ambitions 

Here are 4 ways that partnering with a modern, headless CMS vendor can bring more efficiency to your team today, and set your business up for long-term digital success.  


1. Reusable, modular content 

Headless CMS was designed for omnichannel. In a headless system like Hygraph, content is stored as highly structured data that is completely independent of frontend presentation (the “head”). This makes it possible to reuse the same content, and the logic behind that content, on a variety of channels. 

Instead of thinking about content as living on a particular page, a headless approach breaks content down into modular components that can be reused across the experience. 

This modular structure is very efficient: 

• The same content can be presented differently on web, mobile, apps, kiosks, and other touchpoints with the freedom to use the best frontend framework for each channel. 
• Content creators can update a component in one place and push that update everywhere. 
• Developers can reuse the underlying structure of sites and apps to quickly spin up new regional, brand, and campaign experiences.

2. Your vendor handles maintenance 

Many headless CMS platforms are offered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) which means that the vendor is responsible for infrastructure maintenance, including cloud hosting, security updates, performance monitoring, and API compatibility. As well as ensuring the platform works smoothly with any major changes in cloud platforms, programming languages, web browsers, and other key technologies. 

A SaaS model also means that rolling updates can be delivered through the cloud, removing the need for versioning and lengthy manual updates. So, the platform constantly evolves with best practices, and if there is an issue, fixes can be pushed quickly. 

Ultimately, partnering with the right vendor means you have a team of experts continuously monitoring and improving site performance and service functionality. Freeing up your teams to focus on building the capabilities that are unique to your business. 

User expectations change constantly and your digital architecture must be built for extensibility and adaptation. We build with the user in mind, not given software features.

3. Long-term growth 

With content and logic organized as reusable, modular components in a headless CMS makes it easy to scale the digital experience. Exploring new channels, markets, and digital business models doesn’t require a rewire of the whole system. Instead, teams can repurpose existing components to get live quickly and can then gradually add and customize components to tailor the experience to each audience. 

Working with a CMS vendor also means you have a team of content experts in your corner who are staying on top of trends and proactively building a roadmap of features that you can use to continuously level up digital business.

I love the idea of pure content data in the headless CMS. All applications – and who knows what we will come up with –simply retrieve content via GraphQL and serve it the way we need to at the different touchpoints. Tomorrow we could build an Alexa skill with the existing content structure we already have in place.

4. Facilitates innovation 

An enterprise-level headless CMS will give both developers and business users the tools they need to try out new ideas at top speed. 

Technology teams have access to testing environments, software development kits (SDKs), and well designed and documented APIs so they can build and launch capabilities quickly. The highly-structured nature of headless content also lets developers efficiently connect data from various systems and use it in flexible ways across different channels. 

Content teams have a user interface (UI) that lets them manage modular content, sourced from multiple systems and published across many channels, all in one place. With editing tools, workflows, and advanced roles and permissions that let creators and editors work autonomously.

Seeing the site progress from a standard static site to a more flexible, nuanced machine enables our team to think a little more outside of the box in terms of content and sparking new ideas. In the marketing world you have to move quickly and progress rather than taking things as the status quo. Hygraph certainly helps with that.

#Flexible foundation for building custom content experiences

A next-generation headless CMS not only uses APIs to deliver content to any frontend, but has built all the functionality of the platform to be API-enabled from the ground up. This gives businesses an incredible amount of flexibility in how they leverage and extend these services to create their own unique flavor of experience. 

Hygraph CMS offers core infrastructure and usability tools out-of-the-box so teams can hit the ground running, and an API architecture that lets businesses create the developer, user, and customer experience on their terms. 

Content Modeling  

The power of a headless approach comes down to well structured content. To fully benefit, teams have to be able to break out of the page-builder mindset and embrace a modular strategy that breaks content down into reusable blocks of information.  

Hygraph’s content modeling capabilities make it easy for developers and business users to define and visualize what types of content models are used across the system, what data is needed for these models, and how the models relate to one another.

Hygraph’s low-code schema builder lets teams structure content in minutes. With support for a wide variety of data types, validation, localization, and the freedom to customize and extend as needed. 

Content models help get new ideas to market quickly. Developers can spin up sites, apps, and presentation layers without having to start from scratch, while content creators can use dynamic models to create their own content layouts without technical assistance. 

My eyes lit up at how intuitive content modeling is. Hygraph gives unlimited possibilities of what we can connect and build.

Integrations  

Hygraph shares all data and functionality via APIs which makes it especially easy to integrate with the other tools in your tech stack. Allowing business to bring together the capabilities of many services into one content workflow. 

The Hygraph Marketplace offers prebuilt integrations for a growing list of ecosystem partners, with step-by-step installation guides to get up and running quickly. 

The most notable outcome was by breaking down the design into a component led content model structure. We now have essentially a box of lego blocks where we can create rich content pages quickly and easily and enable our content team to lean into their creativity.

Content Federation 

Content Federation is Hygraph’s novel way of fetching data from all the remote sources in your system and delivering it to any frontend with a single GraphQL API. Data continues to live in the original source, with Hygraph fetching the most up-to-date information whenever it’s requested by an internal application, customer frontend, or automated system. 

With Content Federation: 

• Developers get a low-code approach to API maintenance that lets them work with many different services and data types without complex middleware or expensive data migrations. 
• Content teams can manage all content from a single user interface (UI) where they can edit assets, define workflows, set permissions, and more. 
• Customers get up-to-date, consistent information at every part of the journey. 

Extensible App Framework 

A next-generation CMS lets businesses work exactly the way they need. Teams should never have to limit strategies to out-of-the-box capabilities, but should be able to easily extend the platform to support diverse and innovative ideas.

The Hygraph App Framework makes it easy to build custom applications on top of the core content platform to extend functionality, connect external systems, automate workflows, and more. 

Common use cases of the App Framework include:

Add custom fields to content models

• Create fields to handle unique data types and business logic.

Customize the editing UI

• Add buttons to the content editing sidebar to let users perform key actions with a click. 


Create app-specific page views

• Simplify the editing experience with custom page views to manage the actions of different apps. 


Fetch data from third-party systems

• Fetch data from any API or web service and show it within the Hygraph UI. 

Trigger actions in third-party systems

• Use webhooks and user actions to activate processes in other systems.

#A composable future 

Digital experience is too business critical to be stuck with a one-size-fits-all platform, and it’s too large and changes too quickly to take on every part of it in-house. 

Increasingly, companies are taking advantage of the growing marketplace of vendor solutions that focus on delivering outstanding capabilities in one area of business and are designed to easily integrate with other tools and services. These next-generation software solutions take care of foundational infrastructure, functionality, and usability so businesses can focus on building the truly differentiating parts of their digital experience.

Creating this type of composable digital experience architecture, where best-fit tools for different parts of business are all connected via APIs, also allows businesses to scale and evolve at top speed. 

Technologies can be quickly added or removed from a composable architecture, the services of different composable platforms can be mix-and-matched to solve new problems, and composable content can be reused to quickly support new channels and experiences. 

#About Hygraph

Hygraph is the first GraphQL-native Headless Content Platform, enabling teams across the world to rapidly build and deliver tomorrow’s multi-channel digital experiences at scale.

It was designed for removing traditional content management pain points by using the power of GraphQL, and take the idea of a Headless CMS to the next level. Hygraph integrates with any frontend technology, such as React, Vue and Svelte.

Get started with Hygraph by creating a free account, learn how our customers are solving real-world problems, gather information about next-generation CMS from our resources or academy, or learn more about the applications of Hygraph.

To discuss how Hygraph can help you transform your digital projects, reach out to us.