Why your legacy website is putting your digital media brand at risk and how to fix it
If you’re in digital media, whether it be journalism, travel, academia, or any kind of online publishing, content is your primary commodity. And if that’s the case, your website is your most valuable asset.
Your website should be a platform upon which to build new and innovative ways to connect with your audience. But if you are experiencing any of the following challenges, you’re likely spending most of your time and money scrambling just to keep up with demand:
Common website challenges in digital publishing
- You have decades of stale website content baked into single-use page templates, unadaptable and frozen in time.
- Your content management system is a minefield of broken plugins and confusing fields which frustrate you team, causing valuable employees to leave.
- Overloaded agency-managed servers causing downtime and expensive hosting fees.
- Migrating or even refreshing your website is a monumental, year-long disruption that fills you with dread.
As former Creative Digital Director in the Travel Media sector, I know these challenges well. I also know how to solve them.
The world is changing fast, but digital publishers are often the last to innovate. Not for lack of vision, but because of their sheer quantity of content wrapped up in a single system that’s not pulling its weight. The problem with Wordpress or any other all-in-one website engine is not the platform itself; it is being locked-in to a single system, built for a single use. Business needs change fast, and this is why ‘composable’ website architecture’ will be the smartest decision you make in safeguarding the future of your content and your digital media brand.
What is composable website architecture and why is it ideal for digital publishing?
Composable website architecture is the method of diversifying the technology that powers your website into smaller, more manageable, interchangeable parts. Rather than committing to a single platform like Wordpress to handle everything; content, front-end presentation, subscriptions, data and other needs are decoupled and connected via APIs. Each part can then be:
- Replaced without rebuilding the whole site
- Reused across multiple channels and interfaces
- Scaled independently as demands change
This modular structure allows digital publishing businesses to evolve their digital presence incrementally, rather than through costly, high-risk rebuilds every few years.
What is the difference between composable and headless?
You might have heard the term ‘headless’ used in relation to content management. Headless is a system capability within a composable strategy. A headless CMS for example, allows you to separate content from presentation, which is a useful step towards keeping it structured, portable, and reusable. But composable architecture goes further by extending this principle across the entire digital stack.
Common digital media publishing challenges with composable website architecture
A headless CMS keeps content structured, portable and reusable
A headless CMS, like Sanity, treats content as data, not web pages; and makes no assumptions about how it will be presented.
Because it’s engineered for APIs, content is channel-agnostic and adaptable. By being able to populate multiple audience touch-points with centralised content, you’re able to innovate faster – mobile apps, microsites, emails, whatever you can dream up – all from the same CMS, without breaking a sweat.
Here are two content management system examples and their outputs – The left is unstructured and the right is structured:
User-centric content management that is fit-for-purpose, for an easier publishing experience
We strip away the one-size-fits all CMS clutter found in platforms like Wordpress. This gives editors have just enough choice to do their job well, while setting clear constraints and defaults to make their workday simpler. Our approach creates a modular scaleable CMS interface, giving flexibility only where it’s needed.
A media management system offloads heavy image and video processing to a dedicated cloud service
Your core application servers should not be responsible for storing, transforming and delivering heavy media files. We separate that responsibility entirely. Upload one high-resolution image or video, and automated cloud services will generate and serve the optimal format and size for every device, on demand. Media is cached and distributed globally via a dedicated Content Delivery Network, dramatically reducing strain on your origin servers. The result is faster performance, lower hosting costs, and infrastructure that scales without your servers buckling under traffic spikes.
A website that can be easily scaled, adapted or replaced as you evolve
Within a composable strategy, a headless front-end application uses APIs to gather all your content and other cloud data in a seamless website experience. As these APIs are universal, the application can be replaced by entirely different technology and still work. So when it comes time for a refresh, you can do so without worrying about monumental content migrations or changing your CMS.
We use the right tools for the job
No longer limited by the confines of a single platform, we can select cloud services best suited for your unique publishing needs. And by spreading the load across smaller systems, you can sleep easy knowing each cloud service is never overburdened handling anything its not built for.
Here are some examples of the tools we might bring together for a Digital Media publishing website, with ‘composability’ in mind:
- Sanity CMS might handle your editorial content, keeping it structured, portable and channel-agnostic. Its many content operational benefits, that make digital publishing a dream, are an added bonus.
- Cloudinary can automate image and video optimisation, delivering resized, cached variants worldwide.
- Flipsnack could manage your digital magazine, providing subscribers with interactive flickable audio/visual experiences.
- Okta might handle subscriber profile logins, keeping user data safely protected away from your own IP.
- ChargeBee could manage subscriptions and handling payment gateways and renewals
- Salesforce could manage your partnership prospects including sales pipelines and communication.
- Algolia could bring super fast, AI powered search onto your website by indexing all of your content.
This is quite an advanced example. With Composable, you can start small with just a few components and introduce new services and workflows as you grow.
Ready to future proof your digital publishing website?
Protecting the longevity of your digital publishing website isn't about finding the next perfect all-in-one platform, it's about building a versatile, resilient ecosystem. If you are ready to turn years of dread into a simple, incremental evolution, contact me for a free assessment.