Going headless
It seems that the job of managing a growing website, or websites, is as problematic as ever. Whilst there is no shortage of Squarespace’s, Wix’s, Weebly’s and WordPresses to choose from, some of which are excellent, there are often ensuing design or development challenges that result in frustration or - worse still - a great deal of work being binned.
Whether you’re running a health spa, selling furniture online or building the next Facebook, you will at some stage require web design and development support to achieve your goals. Avoiding (or at least reducing) technical headaches when this time comes will ultimately save time and money.
And what better way to avoid headaches than to remove the head completely? Choosing (or migrating to) a headless content management system to separate content from code will help in the following ways:
- Work can take place on both content and code without detriment to the other.
- Content can be securely accessed from multiple applications, for example a website and mobile application, at the same time without duplication.
- Front ends can be quickly and easily updated or redeveloped from scratch.
- Separating concerns leads to less bugs and increased application security.
There are some great options on the market, some of which are very inexpensive. My recommendation (at the time of writing) is to look at Ghost (well-known in the developer community, less so in the wider market) and consider launching on Google Compute Engine with Bitnami.
Why? Because:
- Ghost’s interface is very beautiful, making content creation a pleasure.
- Ghost is simple, powerful and very fast.
- Ghost is open source and allows complete access to all the code.
- The underlying stack is Node.js, which many developers love to work with.
- Google Compute Engine allows for unlimited scaling at reasonable price points.
- Bitnami makes deployment on GCE a breeze.
Of course you could very easily choose WordPress, Contentful, or something else, to achieve the same objective: a highly useful and usable CMS coupled with a well-documented RESTful API.
Get in touch to chat headless, and how it can help your project.