(2018-10-04) Delivering Modern Website Experiences The Journey To A Content Mesh

Delivering Modern Website Experiences: The Journey to a Content Mesh. Over time, the feature landscape broadened — key areas like search, analytics, payments, personalization, and e-commerce emerged. In each category, specialized tools improved rapidly, while the quality of monolithic enterprise CMS applications like Adobe Experience Manager and Sitecore has stayed roughly the same.

Teams are adopting these services because each is tailored to a specific use-case; the generic enterprise CMS alternative is often optimized for none.

This is the first post in a series, Journey to the Content Mesh, intended to explain the emergence of a “content mesh” — the infrastructure layer for a decoupled website. The content mesh stitches together content systems in a modern development environment while optimizing website delivery for performance. (Gatsby)

best-of-breed solutions, tailored to specific use-cases like e-commerce or blogging; it provides a modern framework for rapid iteration and it generates lightning fast websites out of the box.

best-of-breed services without the pain of manual integration.

empowers developers while preserving content creators’ workflows

Change is being spurred by the confluence of three revolutions in how we create and consume content:

• Content management. Monolithic CMS applications are being replaced by modular, specialized content systems.
• Development techniques. Modern UI frameworks like React are becoming essential to rich user experiences.
• Performance. As mobile surpasses 50% of internet traffic, high-performance is becoming a must-have, not a nice-to-have.

Each change primarily affects a different stakeholder --- marketing, development/IT, and the end user, respectively.

The key challenge is that without a content mesh, integrating these systems together is a lot of work. Forrester titled one of their report sections: “Warning: HeadlessCMS Is For Do-It-Yourself Shops.” But with a content mesh, all of these systems can be brought together in a unified, low-cost, low-defect whole.

Journey to the Content Mesh Conclusion: Creating Compelling Content Experiences

Website teams moving to this space have to plan four steps — one for each category, plus integration.

First, choose content systems.

their choice of:

• A spreadsheet and text files (for extremely simple sites).
• Specialized systems tailored to their use case, such as Shopify + Salsify + Bazaarvoice for an e-commerce site.
• A headless cloud CMS with rich content modelling capabilities, such as Contentful.

Second, pick a UI development library

React

rich community ecosystems to address website-specific concerns like:

• SEO
• Routing
• Accessibility
• i18n

Third, choose a performance strategy

There are two main approaches to performance — payload optimization and delivery optimization. Payload optimization involves performance-enhancing development practices. Delivery optimization means compiling websites to static files that can be served from a global CDN, rather than running servers and databases.

Fourth, choose your content mesh

Content Mesh Alternatives

consider:

• utilizing vendor integrations
• assorted JAMStack solutions
• Gatsby