by Janus Boye
James on stage at our London CMS Expert meeting in February talking about managing transitions and dealing with resistance
Today migrating a corporate website from one digital platform to another is a common and well-known exercise, but in recent years the projects have grown more complex, as it’s really often about migrating from one tech stack to another.
In other words, from being analogous to a behind-the-scenes engine change, these projects are today massive change projects with impact throughout the organisation.
At London-based publishing house Pan Macmillan, Technology Director James Luscombe and his team have been hard at work since March moving their website with bestselling fiction & non-fiction books from their traditional DXP stack based on Azure to a tech stack with Gatsby, Kontent and Netlify.
We managed to meet in person in late February, just before the lockdowns, to hear about the initial projects plans. I recently caught up with James to hear about progress during the past months. Let’s take a closer look at how the project has progressed, the results from the relaunch and as James calls it: The adventures with Gatsby, Kontent and Netlify.
Why now?
As the main reasons for the project, James listed four reasons:
Speed, both in terms of frontend and CMS
Need to improve accessibility
Need to improve and protect search rankings
More flexibility and speed of development
These reasons are both common across our members and also increasingly important this year, as e-commerce has continued to be on the rise. New legislation has also driven accessibility up the totem pole so to speak.
In the popular article What Got You Here, Won't Get You There, Lars Petersen from Uniform earlier this year wrote that performance is the new frontier of digital business. Sites need to be blazing fast. Quoting from the article on deciding for a tech stack rather than a suite, Lars also wrote
Moving towards a stack approach puts you in the driver’s seat. It lets you assemble and connect the technologies that are right for your organization, rather than forcing you to change your organization around your technologies.
Starting with the content
Reflecting on the project and looking back on the past months, James opened by talking about the content and their move to content-as-a-service (CaaS). He strongly recommends doing a very thorough content audit upfront, in particular if you have lots of legacy content.
At Pan Macmillan content modelling workshops were instrumental and James found it helpful to ensure they didn’t use any old website-based terminology in their models or naming conventions. For the content modeling workshops and front-end build they worked with a London-based digital agency called Line Industries.
Kentico Kontent also recommends to focus on the content modelling as a strong foundation for a good start and have recently launched a new Content Modeling hub.
James talking about adventures in change, in particular about the impact to editors working on the website content.
Everyone working from home seems to have made the migration easier according to James, but he also said that it was a great deal of change at once, which might not be ideal for every business or team.
Finally, on the content, he said that they are now exploring more options how to use their content other than on the website. Clearly there’s a huge potential in email, and they are currently trying out different options to leverage email.
Learnings from working with Kentico Kontent
Pan Macmillan started working with Kentico Cloud back in 2017. This is the product that grew into the launch of Kontent in 2019.
After months of working with Kontent, James listed these highlights:
Onboarding was smooth
Previews were key at first, but less so once editors had confidence in how content would render
Workflow is great, but reminding editors to use comments and tagging took time to embed
Direct linking to content items or filtered lists
Speed, ease of use, search
As always, there’s room for improvement. In the category of what to be aware of, James in particular mentioned:
Migration takes effort and time to use the content models fully
You can’t export out lists of content items
Naming of content items needs to be strictly enforced
You have to enter image alt text after you’ve added the image in Kontent
Publishing state, status and workflow can confuse editors
Building a blazing fast site with Gatsby and Netlify
While Kontent is the central piece of the tech stack, as it’s also the software that the editors interact with, there’s also Gatsby for static site generation and Netlify for speedy delivery.
Specifically on Gatsby, they hit a bug in a new release which broke their builds early on. Today publishing their 20k page site is taking 3 - 15 minutes to build. Still, it’s important to remind editors that publishing content isn’t instant unlike on their previous site.
For Netlify, builds were taking 70 mins. James cautioned that if people keep hitting publish you burn through build minutes fast! Finally, James praised the option to do an instant rollback of a release.
To measure success, James was relying on the lighthouse score. Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages and according to James it was far from easy to bring up the score.
Learn more about managing big digital projects
In a recent member conference call, we covered Reaching For Level Triple-A Accessibility As A Brand.
For another Kontent case study read: SFMOMA Selected Kentico Kontent To Separate Content From Code.
You can also join our community and be a part of future networking and learning experiences! The CMS Expert group meets regularly and we also offer 20+ other peer groups across topics and geographies.