Headless CMS vs. Legacy CMS

Interested in switching to a headless CMS? Have no idea what a headless CMS is? No worries. You can schedule a call with us & we'll tell you all about it. Or watch the video below. Or both, you overachiever!

AE Studio senior software engineer Bruno Michels breaks it down in a chat with Emily Nielsen from GraphCMS, a headless CMS that helps you deliver omnichannel content with an API-first approach.

Bruno knows the ins and outs of transitioning from a monolithic web architecture to a headless one. He helped do just that for BioCentury, an online resource that provides deep-dive analysis, high-quality data, industry-leading business intelligence, and global events for biopharma executives, investors, and institutions.

BioCentury had 30 years of content—including academic articles, archives, whitepapers, conferences, and more—held within a monolithic website built using Drupal6. With a sitemap of over 50,000 indexed pages, BioCentury struggled to maintain this complex infrastructure and deliver content to subscribers in a user-friendly way.

As content trends changed, BioCentury also identified a need to modernize its rigid, dry website structure to include embeddable visual components and other features to make its content more engaging and interactive.

Many other companies find themselves in the same spot BioCentury was in. They want to modernize and customize their site content, but a general CMS makes it difficult, Bruno explains. You usually need plugins or people who know how to build them. A headless CMS can handle content and distribute it to various frontends and other services, and teams can experiment with different kinds of content distribution and strategies like personalization and AB testing, among many others.

Bruno dives further and explains how to figure out if a headless CMS is the right approach for your site, how AE Studio took on the BioCentury project using GraphCMS, and the major takeaways from the project. Check it out!
If you like what you see ⬇️, let's talk more: ae@ae.studio.

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