Headless content management offers a unique approach to structuring content that lets you do more with your content using less effort than in traditional CMSs.In this lesson, you’ll see how headless is different from other approaches and why these differences matter.
Unlike most CMSs, a headless CMS doesn’t decide how content is displayed. There’s no one way to present the content. How the content is displayed to customers will depend on the destination where it appears. The gist is that you create your content once in Kontent.ai, and it can be used on any channel – multiple websites, apps, kiosks, wherever you want.Because content creators don’t need to think about what the content will look like, they can focus on the message itself. In a headless CMS, the content is structured semantically according to its meaning and purpose. Content authors create chunks of content that can be assembled and presented together as larger items, like landing pages. The structuring of all the chunks of content is handled by a content model within Kontent.ai, the headless CMS. To summarize what makes a headless CMS distinctive, these are the main points:
Structuring content gives it greater clarity, precision, and flexibility. It makes the content better – for both content creators and your customers.
The main point we’ve already mentioned is that content creators can think about the message they want to convey. They don’t get distracted by aligning images or coloring call-to-actions (CTAs) the right way.
Structured content is also easier to maintain. When you reuse content in multiple channels, you still have only one instance of the content piece. No need to copy-paste every update to various systems and places. Create and update once, and distribute anywhere.
Since the content is carved up into the smallest meaningful pieces, it’s easier to track its performance, such as conversion, search engine ranking, and so on. This leads to another significant benefit, and that’s personalization. With content structured semantically, you can serve your customers what they came for at the right time, and at the right place (channel).
So far, it seems straightforward: structured content is good, and large content blobs are bad. You want to convert blobs into chunks.But there’s another dimension to consider that gets overlooked: changes over time. We need to ask: At what point is the content structured, and when might it stop being structured? Many people who seek the benefits of structured content don’t notice that their chunks begin reverting to a blob-like state when they aren’t watching. When a chunk gets extended with more content into a bigger piece, it loses its independent identity as a chunk. The content within the chunk gets locked in place within the context of the bigger piece. You can’t reuse it as it is because the rest of the content is too specific for places other than the one it’s used in.
When content chunks lose their chunkiness and how to avoid it
Headless CMS only deals with the content – it doesn’t force you to render the content into a presentational styling, layout, or format.
Headless CMS allows you to structure the content into chunks defined by a content model. You can reuse these pieces to avoid content duplication.
The chunks are free to move around to where they are needed on the frontend, such as websites or mobile apps, via a programming interface (called API).
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Michael Andrews, David Klement
3 minutes
