WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Performance chapter of the 2021 Web Almanac covering Core Web Vitals (Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, First Input Delay) as well as First Contentful Paint and Time to First Byte

The goal of the Web Almanac’s Structured Data chapter is to explore how structured data is currently being used across the web. We hope that this will provide insight into the landscape, the challenges, and the opportunities at hand.

Explore the "30 Best SaaS Pitch Deck Collection" base on Airtable.

Check out this showcase of some of the best, open source headless CMSes. This is community-drive so be sure to submit your favorite CMS today!

Lighthouse now supports performance budgets. This feature, LightWallet, can be set up in under five minutes and provides feedvack on the size and quantity of page resources.

Your website is your online store-front open 24/7. Learn how to come up with a winning website that attracts visitors and turns them into customers.

This eBook will bring you up to speed on all things “programmatic,” including: the key actors and various ad formats that continue to unfold; different types of technological platforms and associated privacy considerations; and, measurement and pricing strategies that can help you to get ahead of your competition.

For the past decade, ThoughtWorks Technology Radar has been the definitive guide to what's hot and what's not in tech.

The internet has changed the way we work, interact and learn with others across the world. How many people in the world are online, and how has this changed over time? Explore global and country-level data on internet access and technology.

Curious to know what technologies are used on your competitor’s website?

In mature markets like Web Content Management, there is almost always a single proprietary leader and a single Open Source leader. There is Oracle and MongoDB. Splunk and Elastic. VMWare and Docker. Gitlab and Github. That is why I believe that next year it will be Acquia and Adobe at the very top of the WCM Magic Quadrant. Sitecore and Episerver will continue to fight for third place among companies who prefer a Microsoft-centric approach. I was not surprised to see Sitecore move down this year as they work to overcome technical product debt and cloud transition, leading to strange decisions like acquiring a services company.

One of the many challenges with building or refreshing a website is the selection of a Content Management System (CMS). Despite our best efforts the CMS can often be a source of difficulty in a project, but there are alternatives. Read about the approach we took on www.thoughtworks.com to developing functionality to support content management in an incremental fashion.

CONCLUSION

This article has detailed an incremental approach to developing a content managed web application, in contrast to the adoption of a CMS at the outset. While there are the costs associated with developing functionality which you could get “off the shelf,” these are offset by some of the advantage of this approach – flexibility, simplicity, control, obviating the need to learn a bespoke framework and above all being able to move in small steps from a simple static web site to a managed one.

• Content creation functions, such as templating, workflow and change management
• Repositories that organize and provide metadata about content
• Library services, such as check-in/check-out, version control and security
• Website management features, such as layout, menus and navigation
• Content deployment functions
• Personalization and analytics capabilities
• The ability to integrate well, via APIs, with adjacent technologies such as digital commerce platforms, social media platforms, marketing automation platforms and broader digital experience platforms (DXPs)
• Hybrid (traditional and headless) and pure headless capabilities for API-driven omnichannel content delivery

We applied the editing-publishing separation
pattern in building a two-stack CMS to support a global
readership while supporting complex coordination of legacy
editing tools. 

When content volume is low and only few trained people are responsible for content creation and maintenance, any added complexity of a two stack CMS isn't worthwhile. Such complexity makes it harder for content creators to learn how to use it and adds significant effort in system maintenance. (Although this may be mitigated by tools that are designed to work in this style.)