Wessel van der Pal - Streamline digital transformation with a headless CMS platform

In today's episode, we'll be discussing headless content management systems and how they can help businesses streamline all of their digital transformation and digital strategy efforts. Wessel, welcome to the show. We're very happy to have you here. Do you want to add anything before we dive into the conversation?

Wessel van der Pal: No, I think you got it covered there. And yeah, thank you so much for having me on the show. 

Tim Butara: Thank you for taking the time. I think it's a great topic. And especially since we're trying to bring it closer to more business oriented audiences. And so in this context, just to set the stage for the whole conversation, can we start by explaining what exactly are headless content management systems?

Wessel van der Pal: Of course, yeah, no, I think that is a very good approach here to not only talk it from a maybe technical perspective, because developers often will know what you're, when you're talking about a headless setup, what, what that means. It's good to maybe explain it in a simplified way so that Also, non developers understand and also can find out what the benefits are of a system like this.

So, what a headless CMS implies is, that you have a content management system. This is by itself an admin panel or an back end, some people would say, where you can edit content of your website or even native app, whatever it is, where you have content. The best way to explain this is, for example, you have a company website with a blog, With blog posts and these blog posts need to be edited by an editor.

And ideally this is done without a developer every time need to change this. So for this, you have a content management system. So that is just the CMS by itself where traditionally in the last, let's say 20 years, this has been some, something called a monolithic system where you have the CMS, and the website connected.

That means the CMS, where you edit the content and the website, which the visitor will see and read the content of is one system. Most famous of this is WordPress, which I think everyone listening will know because it's WordPress, the most famous CMS, but there are others like Drupal is popular or Typo-3, which is a big name in Germany.

Yeah. And these are all systems, actually, these are all funnily enough systems made in PHP, and this is all a monolithic CMS. So both the editing and the visitor facing front end is one system. Then we have the headless CMS, which is new approach or I would, it's not entirely new, but it's getting, gaining more popularity and that's why we also talking about it today. 

Where in the headless CMS, you detach the website from the CMS. So instead of having one system like WordPress, where everything is in WordPress. Context WordPress way of making the website, you have a CMS that only delivers the content and a front end that takes the content in a so called API and then displays it by itself. So it's not one system, but then in this case, two.

Tim Butara: And in this case, you could also probably display it to several different frontends with using different frameworks, right, in a headless setup. 

Wessel van der Pal: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So instead of having it connected, where in WordPress or Drupal, in a PHP, one system, you can have a front end website in a modern technology, which is popular, React or Vue.

Those are kind of the most used technologies for headless. And this would be just a web page you open in your browser, but at the same time, you could have an iPhone with a native app for in Swift, or let's say Android with coupling that gets the same content from the same CMS and displays it in an app or even, I don't know, smart TV, Apple Watch, whatever can get data can display content from this headless CMS. 

Tim Butara: So, this is what would be called like multichannel or omnichannel experiences. 

Wessel van der Pal: That's exactly the buzzword everyone uses for it. Omnichannel is the most used word for this, yeah. 

Tim Butara: Yeah. And so you mentioned that we're going to talk about, like, what the business benefits of, of this headless approach are and also why should non developers at a company care about this? So, so what are the benefits to them? How can they get on board with going headless? 

Wessel van der Pal: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that is a very good topic because yeah, where do the benefits lay and maybe where do the disadvantages lay as well. But if we're talking about the benefits, I think the first thing that comes in mind is security.

Because most have the CMSs and we are mostly working with a CMS called Storyblok. Which has great features like a visual editor, which I will not go into depth here, but most heavily CMSs as Storyblok, Contentful or Contentstack, Sanity, all of these. Names that more and more people will hear are so called hosted by the provider.

So Storyblok or Contentful is hosting the system. What does this mean? This means as a developer or as a company, rather say in a business sense, you don't have the responsibility of hosting your content. This is done by the provider. So it is like a software as a service. The service provides all needed to make this running.

So you pay a monthly subscription and this includes everything like the system itself, but also security updates. And all of that, where not all have the same as doing, doing this, just as a disclaimer, for example, Strapi is a CMS where you still host it yourself, but almost all the others are hosted by the provider.

This means you don't have to update your system yourself. Where everyone who ever worked with WordPress, developer or marketing or whoever, knows that the updates are a pain because updating can break the system. And not only the CMS, but also the website itself. So security is definitely a big deal.

Besides that, if you want to be as flexible as possible. So you want to, again, with that headless approach, right? Like the decoupled where you have a website by itself and back end by itself, you can be so fully creative with the front end itself because there is no rules. So you're not binded to a certain way of dealing with the data.

This might be a bit abstract and a bit technical. But if you work within WordPress or Drupal, you need to do things in a WordPress or Drupal way, where in a headless way, you can be as flexible as possible. So it limits less where this can be seen in layout, you can create any kind of layout, but it can also mean connecting to any third party service.

For example, you want an CRM connected to it to collect leads to by drive for Salesforce, like these kind of tools, which are popular, it's way easier to connect this to a website with an headless approach than a monolithic way. 

Of course, there's more reasons, but I would say these are really, really big reasons already otherwise, usability. So as you Tim, you are doing content editing on websites. You know, that the one system is easier to use than the other. And the great thing with an headless CMS. As I already mentioned earlier, Storyblok, they fully, fully focus on editing experience. So they have their team really focusing on how can we make it as easy as possible to edit the website.

So editing content wise in an headless CMS is in our experience with our clients, where we, for example, migrated from a monolithic system to an headless system. They said, wow, we didn't expect it could be this easy because they come from very complex systems and don't have a lot of rules on what, how to add new stuff.

Like you need to click on this button, you need to not click on this button, where in the CMS, this is often done way more intuitively for the content editors. Besides that, what is important for everyone in marketing is having a performant website, of course. So you don't want to have a slow website. And it doesn't mean that a headless CMS is always faster, but it's easier to optimize and headless website using for example, Next.js or Nuxt than a monolithic PHP website. So it's proven to be easier to optimize. 

Other than that, I think if we talk about future proof, more and more companies go in the headless direction. So when your business needs a new website that needs to be scalable in terms of adding new languages is something which is, for example, way easier with a good headless CMS than when you start now your website, let's say using WordPress, where you just, you are gonna be blocked by certain known issues. If there's any other thing I want to mention as someone who develops a lot is that as a developer I would just prefer working with modern technology like JavaScript like a React framework or Vue framework, then PHP.

So if you want to hire good developers, and I'm not saying that PHP developers are not good developers. I am very careful with that, but I think that a lot of developers that are starting out would prefer working with these new technologies. So for that reason, I would also say, when you want to hire people, that then young, newer talent would most often prefer working with JavaScript. I think these are a few reasons that come to mind why a headless CMS is a good option for businesses. 

Tim Butara: Taking all of this into account, what kind of use cases and industries benefit most from implementing this headless approach? 

Wessel van der Pal: That's a very, yeah, that's a question that is not, I would not say it's really binded to a certain industry as everyone with a scalable website can benefit from a headless approach. So that's one, but what we noticed here at take it_ is that in the last, let's say three years that we saw where in the beginning, when we really started focusing on this specific technology, we saw that mostly startups that were already with in the tech world, it didn't mean that they made websites, but they were software as a service themselves.

We saw that these types of companies first were very attracted to the idea af a headless CMS, because they came from a tech perspective and saw the benefits. They were like, oh, this is great. We understand this. This is something we can focus on and make our website. And so it's future proof, right? Like we want to roll out different languages. We want to have a performing website and we want to have talent working in JavaScript. 

So we saw that these type of companies that are, were mostly startups are skill ups. Right. In the tech industry, we're very interested in the idea, but what we see in the last years, like follow from that, from the beginning of like three years ago, but we see more and more other non tech related industries that see the benefit of a good website that need to have a lot of content or a lot of languages.

They, they get convinced, hey, this headless CMS approach sounds very interesting because this can scale our business and the content of the things we do, and since a lot of companies are focusing on content and explaining that product to their audience, a good website is needed. 

So what we saw is for example, like, if you take on the one side or the one extreme and a tech startup that works with technology, we took also work now on a website for a museum group where you would not expect them to be early adapters, but they are using Storyblok in this case to provide content for their museums in the region in Germany. So we see it vary across a lot of industries. 

Tim Butara: That's a great point about it being a great fit for museums, also because, you know, because of everything that's been going on for the past few years, museums and other cultural institutions have had to, have been really pressured to, to undergo like a thorough, successful digital transformation if they wanted to kind of still bring valuable content to their audiences, even with like all the disruptions. So this is a very interesting bit of info, definitely. 

And okay, maybe if we take a look at the other end of the spectrum, you mentioned before, if we're also going to talk a little bit about maybe some potential downsides of going headless. And so I'm wondering, like, what are the main challenges and key considerations of this downside that people should be aware of when they're introducing headless into their digital strategies?

Wessel van der Pal: Yes, of course. Yeah, that's, that's a very good one. Cause I mean, this can lay mostly in, in two kind of potential issues that one is in, if a company has a website, let's say they have a good Drupal website, which has always been a solid technology. And if the developers working for this company on the website are used to working with Drupal and they like it and they are experienced with it, it's often hard to convince these developers to say, yeah, okay. Now we're going to go completely different approach. We're going to go headless. We're going to build we're not going to build the CMS itself that is done by the software provider, but you're going to build only the front end connecting to this CMS.

This is often a challenge to convince developers that are kind of stuck with this mindset of PHP, which is always being reliable and good, but yeah. So that could be one big challenge. The other one would be for decision makers in a company. I don't know, head of marketing. Let's say that as the ownership of the content of the website, where they say, okay, yeah we have a website now in Drupal and we need the new website.

Why don't we go with Drupal again? Cause we know how it works. So it needs maybe convincing with some of the arguments I gave earlier. Like, I don't know, security or trustworthiness. usability, but some people or some decision makers don't like this idea and would prefer to stick with the technology they know in this case.

Tim Butara: So are there any cases where, where they would be right in wanting to stick with, with the, the tried and tested technology? So are there any cases where it would make sense to not go headless? 

Wessel van der Pal: I mean, that depends a little bit on your goals. I think that always is from case to case. I mean, if you want to grow your content or you want to roll out to different markets, I think it would almost always make sense to make that move.

Even let's say you have 20,000 articles, right? And you're afraid, like, how are we going to migrate this to an headless system? There are ways to do this. So we, for example, migrated websites. I mean, not 10,000, but let's say a thousand pages where we export these and then create a script, transform this data to a suitable to in this case, Storyblok, and then import it

in that CMS, and you have then all thousand pages. So there are these kind of concerns. It's like, how, how can we migrate this data? What if we go online and our SEO goes down? Like these are always the dots we hear. 

But I believe if you want to make a website that is like lasting another from now on 10 years,

headless is always the right direction. This doesn't mean that headless is always the good option, but that has more to do, let's say about the size of a company. I don't know, if you're a hairdresser and you have a webpage where you display your opening times and button where you can book an appointment.

In this case, I would say a headless is a bit overpowered and maybe a web, like a page builder, like Webflow is more suitable. in this case. 

Tim Butara: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So, Wessel, taking everything into account that we've discussed so far, and to kind of drive the conversation to a close, do you have maybe any final tips for listeners who are maybe wanting to implement headless CMS but are having a hard time getting used to it, having a hard time implementing it, or maybe just are not seeing a positive return from their implementation?

Wessel van der Pal: Yeah. And I mean, to get started, I would always say, make really sure that you understand what headless means and understand where the benefits lay so you can get the best out of it. So from a technical perspective, this would mean that, that, or even let's say from a business perspective, make sure that you have a person in charge or help you that understands what, okay, this is the situation, this is, these are the goals to set right goals.

And in the, and then after that set up the right architecture, map it out before start developing. So understanding really what it means to build ahead the CMS or set up. Another thing, small tip for all the developers who are listening that come maybe from an PHP world, I, I see, I've seen developers that started out with working with the headless technology to really say is this a Storyblok component or is this not a Storyblok component, because this is how it would be maybe in, in a lot of PHP context where you say, is this a Typo3 way of dealing with stuff? Or is this an shop where way of dealing with components, where your flexibility, and there is no set way, so you can really do it your own way. So don't think too fixed. Think flexible enough. 

Tim Butara: That was definitely a great tip because this is one of the great advantages that the headless CMS will bring in terms of value and in, in terms of a positive ROI is the flexibility that it offers you and the scalability and the like, hugely connected to it providing and enabling, empowering a future proof platform. So a great note to finish on Wessel. Thank you so much again for, for joining us today. Just before we jump off the call, if our listeners would maybe like to learn more, we'd like to connect with you or learn more about take it_ where would you point them to?

Wessel van der Pal: So you could go to take it_, that is TA, T-A-K-E-I t.agency. or find me on LinkedIn and feel free to always ask questions if, if you have any. 

Tim Butara: Okay. Awesome. We'll provide the links to those in the show notes and Vasil, thank you again. This has been a great conversation. 

Wessel van der Pal: Thank you, Tim. 

Tim Butara: And to our listeners, that's all for this episode. Have a great day, everyone. And stay safe. 

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