February 2020 Summaries

DFDS, a shipping and logistics company, embarked on a digital transformation in 2017 to improve its content management and scalability. They replaced their traditional CMS with Contentful, a headless, API-first CMS, to structure their content for distribution across multiple channels in 22 languages. This shift enabled them to quickly deploy content for new languages and campaigns, reducing siloed content and slow time-to-market speeds. With Contentful, they implemented automation tools that helped streamline authoring and management of content, saving time and improving productivity. The company was able to reuse content across multiple markets and business units, reducing the complexity of managing a large quantity of content. By leveraging Contentful's advanced features and building custom tools, DFDS was able to improve consistency, reliability, and scalability of its content, ultimately achieving a more efficient and effective digital transformation.

Clover, a cloud-based Android point-of-sale platform, has shipped over one million devices worldwide, allowing its customers to easily manage their businesses and run more profitably thanks to web apps and third-party app integration. Clover chose Contentful as a headless CMS to empower its content and marketing team to create and control content without relying on the engineering team. The company's first project with Contentful was the homepage, which resulted in 24 section types that could be used on three different page types for a total of 48 different content models. However, this led to content model overload, as it was overwhelming for people not used to working in this kind of system. To address this issue, Clover's Senior Software Engineer, Rachel Church, recommended fixing the content model overload by avoiding creating new content models for variations of the same thing, requiring hint text and validation for every field, and always reviewing content models with stakeholders. Clover expanded into new markets, outgrew its help site running on WordPress, and required more flexibility and localization capacity, leading to a total of 16 content models that were tweaked during the development cycle. Through practice and iteration, Clover learned to build content models that are both reusable and intuitive, and the company's experience serves as a valuable lesson for others looking to implement Contentful in their own projects.

Doing a website or digital experience that is accessible for people with disabilities is not optional, but rather a necessary part of the design and creation process. There is also a strong business case for creating an inclusive digital experience, as the global market for people with disabilities is estimated to be over 1 billion people with a spending power of more than $6 trillion. Avoiding lawsuits and prosecution due to lack of accessibility can have severe consequences. To start making your website or digital experience accessible, you need to consider your content model, which should be structured in a way that allows assistive technology to navigate through the page or website easily. This includes using HTML5 tags with semantic meaning, such as `<header>`, `<footer>`, and `<section>`. Contentful is built to deliver content to different channels, including devices like Google Home and mobile apps, making it easy to publish the same content in different formats for differently-abled people. The platform separates the content from its presentation layer, allowing editors to manage voice content easily and iterate without needing constant help from development.