Why CMS and Schema Matter When Building a Website

In the 10th episode of Cutting Edge: Web Content Development, Paul Seal, a headless CMS expert well-known in Umbraco circles, discusses why the CMS and schema you choose matter. Here are a few clips from the podcast.

The challenges of building an in-house CMS

“A lot of companies have an in-house CMS. The problem with that was that every time we came to make a change to it, it was a big deal. It wasn't just a change to this particular instance of a website; it was actually to the code base itself, adding these fields and everything. But if you're doing it for one, you end up doing it for all. And it was a big pain.”

-Paul Seal

Your CMS governs your options for building and editing a website. How you set up your CMS can also make your team’s job easier or harder later. Paul shares some great reasons to consider a headless CMS.

Advantages of a headless CMS

“So that was when we looked for a different CMS and we found Umbraco, which is an open source one. It has a strong community about it, and there's support around it. So that was one of the things about the optimization; it was just so easy to be able to make these sorts of changes, but it's not necessarily due to Umbraco itself. It's just to create these content types and things like that. If there's a client that wants to add something new to it, you could just add to the content type or make new ones. That's the sort of thing that I like to do with optimization to make things better and easier.”

-Paul Seal

Setting up your headless CMS with logical schema and reusable content blocks (referred to as “components” in ButterCMS) will help your team edit content faster and easier after launch.

Composable blocks

“So you can make lots of things reusable, maybe reusable in the code and everything, now how do I achieve this? Well, if these things were named as, oh yeah, add a person, add an image tile, add a textile, these are clearly named objects that you can then inherit some of their properties to make that reuse in the development side of things. But it should be more about the editor and what their experience is like and shortening it for them, not necessarily for you as a developer. When you make it too generic, it's not a great editing experience, in my opinion.”

-Paul Seal

Listen to the full podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/if-you-cant-measure-it-you-cant-manage-it-optimization/id1702140596?i=1000635539606

Do you want your product or marketing team to test Butter CMS? We can set up a live demo to walk your team through the fast, easy-to-use interface.