The pandemic made it impossible for us to host a physical event, however, as they say, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. We invited our partners and guests to join us in our live studio set up in Brno, Kentico’s headquarters, and put together a line-up of sessions exploring topics connected to (not only) headless content management.

What made Kontent Horizons 2020 stand out were the live stream and Q&A sessions that got the conversation going with Horizons attendees. Bye-bye, boring pre-recorded sessions! Who said that virtual events couldn’t be engaging?

Kontent Horizons could be described in many ways. An event full of stylish turtlenecks, jackets, and branded face masks (because safety first, guys):

An event where even a dinosaur had to wear a bow to meet the fashion standards:

All jokes aside, we were delighted to reach 1,000+ attendees, so we’d like to thank all of you who attended the conference. A big thank you also goes out to our partners and sponsors who made Kontent Horizons possible.

In fact, the best-rated talks in each of the regions were those prepared by our partners, namely: A future-proof national platform for Cancer Council Australia (session by Luminary), Helping Kimball Hospitality transition from a traditional CMS to Headless (session by BizStream), and Helping content editors transition to a headless model (session by Kyan). By the way, recordings from all three days (Nov 17 - APAC, Nov 18 - North America, and Nov 19 - Europe) are now available at horizons.kontent.ai!

If you’d like to see what it was like behind the scenes, watch this short video:

During the event, we were also live polling the audience, and here are some of the findings: 

#1 Most of our attendees were interested in Headless CMS

As you can see from the chart below, the main reason for joining Kontent Horizons was the attendees’ interest in Headless CMS, which is not surprising since it was an “event on all things Headless CMS and content”. The desire to learn something new does not come as a surprise either—now is a great time for everyone to push themselves to grow and gain new skills. By the way, have you seen our new e-learning courses? ;)

The event drew interest from both technical and business users: approximately 65% of those who participated in the poll said their job role could be described as technical, and 35% said they’re working in the business field.

#2 People dress up for virtual events

Contrary to popular belief, people do not stay in their pajamas all day when working from home or attending an online conference. The majority of Europeans who participated in this poll (73%) said they would never wear their PJs. 

Speaking of clothes—if you were quick enough to get one of our early bird tickets, by now you have probably received your Horizons swag pack. Do you like the socks, Horizons T-shirt, or wear that bag every day when you go grocery shopping? We’d love to see that! Post a photo on Twitter with #KontentHorizons:

#3 Most attendees had used Kontent before the event

Only 3% (in North America) to 15% of those polled (in Europe) had never heard of or used Kentico Kontent before they attended Horizons. What’s more, about one third considered themselves to be power users, which is great to hear! We’re constantly striving to develop the best headless CMS on the market, and we’ll share some exciting news next week.  

#4 The best thing about headless? Delivering content to any channel

The chart below shows that approximately one third perceived the ability to publish content to any channel as the greatest benefit of headless CMSs. To learn what developers and marketers worldwide think about Headless CMS, get your complimentary copy of The State of the Headless CMS Market 2020 Report. 

#5 Keeping your content up to date is no piece of cake

The larger your organization is, the harder it is to keep all your content consistent and up to date. However, as you can see below, there are other challenges connected to content operations that large organizations have to face. If you want to learn how you can break down content silos, we highly recommend watching Tomas Hruby’s talk titled Tackling large-scale enterprise content operations.

#6 Some struggle with getting used to the content-centric approach

Martin Michalik’s excellent talk, Headless CMS is not for developers, sparked a lot of discussion in the chat. Martin also wanted to find out what the biggest challenge for people coming from the traditional world to headless was. For most, it was the leap from page-centric to content-centric thinking. 

We were also curious about how many rounds of review content in various organizations usually goes through. Here you can see the results from North America and Europe:

#7 People understand the importance of content models

During UserCentric’s informative and captivating talk on content modeling, we asked the audience how familiar they were with content models. It’s clearly not a new, unknown thing anymore. 90% of those who participated in this poll said they knew a few things about this topic or were well informed. If you feel like you should learn more about designing content models, check out our Content Modeling Hub.

#8 Developers love Gatsby 

A lot of developers in the audience were looking forward to Ondrej Polesny’s session on choosing the best Jamstack tools for your team. Regarding this poll result, Ondrej says: “Gatsby and Next are also my first choice for Jamstack. Their feature competition pushes Jamstack forward and greatly benefits us, developers.”

See you at #KontentHorizons 2021!

We hope you enjoyed the event (or that you liked the recordings if you were unable to join us), and we can’t wait to see you again next year. Nobody knows if we’ll meet you in person or virtually again, but one thing’s for sure: it’s going to be unmissable!

P.S. Don’t forget to check out the recordings from Kontent Horizons 2020.