Re-engineering the digital channel: Step 1
A brief write up on challenges and potential solution concerning alternative content delivery to end users. Not all cases are identical so this solution should be more usable to companies that do not use e-commerce solutions in their core presentation. Add-on stores like Shopify should play along quite good. The static file serving fits well for pages that are not user and time dependent. One of the challenges for static site generators is the lack of user friendly UX in content creation and editing. The whole deployment pipeline is highly technical and fast. This is not an UX fit to common business users.
Automation of the static page generation can offer seamless content delivery pipeline. The approach in that case would be to use a headless SaaS CMS that provides API interface for content consumption. The only custom work in this setup is to develop consumer interface for the static content generator as well as front-end templates.
The scope of this article is not geared towards SWOT analysis of static vs. dynamic and this will be covered in future articles. I am interested in opinions and alternatives to this approach — hybrid of CMS backend and static serving front end. The non-functional requirement is crystal clear — fast, mobile friendly but keep the content editing friendly UX. This pipeline in theory could provide best of both worlds — easy and rich content editing combined with unparalleled performance and scalability using Cloud based services such as AWS S3 + CDN CloudFront delivery.
I will push forward into specification of this theoretic PoC but feedback is more than welcome especially early on! This is not an invention, this setup can be found here and there across the web, especially used by digital transformation consultancies. Is this the way forward?
