Why use a CMS?

When you’re first starting a startup, managing the content of your showcase page isn’t usually a priority.

However, over time, your needs evolve. Most often, to increase your business’s online visibility, you’ll ask your teams to add content to your pages, and perhaps even take the opportunity to publish a version in a new language.

The problem is, your website was created some time ago and wasn’t designed so that the communications department could manage it independently.

You therefore find yourself having to ask one of your developers to add the new changes to the site, preventing them from progressing on more important tasks…

Adding a CMS

A content management system (CMS) allows all members of your team to contribute to the content and design of the website.

The communications team can add or edit site content, add pages, keywords for SEO, etc.

The graphic designer can modify images, colors, etc.

Developers can modify certain variables.

DatoCMS

There are many “headless CMSs” (Dato, Prismic, Strapi), i.e., CMSs that manage your content, but not its display. This allows you to be more flexible and reuse the content in any application (website, mobile app, etc.).

In comparison, WordPress manages your content, display, and plugins, which can create confusion and complexity in the interface, as well as less reusable content.

DatoCMS allows you to manage your content in one place and then use it wherever you want via an API: your website, web app, applications, etc.

DatoCMS offers a free account for one user (see pricing) and hosts your content directly on their servers, saving you the hassle of configuring, hosting, and updating the CMS.

Interface and Features

To begin adding content, you’ll first need to add Templates that define the structure of your content.

To do this, Dato offers different types of fields (and subfields).

I’m creating three fields for my homepage: Title, Subtitle, and Content, of the “Text” and “Text Paragraph” types.

During creation, I’ll define whether they’re mandatory and whether they’re different for each language.

All I have to do now is fill in the fields, including the different languages, and then save.

Once your site’s content is defined, your developer can retrieve the content and media using the “GraphQL Content API” (explorable in the API Explorer tab).

Different Content Types

DatoCMS offers numerous content types to meet your site’s needs.

For example, it’s possible to add modular areas to give editors more freedom in creating content.

Here, for example, you can choose between different modular blocks: Button, Card, Image, and Text. These are the blocks I previously defined.

It’s also possible to create content collections. Here, for example, I’ve created a pricing list. Each “pricing plan” contains the price, features, and presentation of the plan. This data can then be retrieved from various locations on the site.

Choosing a CMS isn’t necessarily easy, but DatoCMS has many advantages, including its ease of use, multilingual support, dynamic layouts, and content field settings (mandatory field, multilingual or non-mandatory field, etc.).

DatoCMS has become my favorite content manager and the one I generally recommend to my clients who want to easily edit their content in multiple languages.

Please feel free to contact me if you’d like to learn more about this tool or if we’d like to start working together to migrate your content.