Episode 3: What is Headless?

00:00
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
The world of digital marketing moves at a dizzying speed. Strategies, budgets, tactics, buzzwords. How can we even begin to distinguish the signal from the noise, the good moves from the bad? Take it from the team that's tripped as much as we've triumphed. We're putting our best moves in the spotlight and spilling every secret to give you step by step instructions to feel for your own success and digitally scale your business. This is Marketing Moves.

00:31
Ashtyn Morris:
We have a great episode planned today, all about what a headless CMS is, fun. Today we have a special guest, VividFront's managing Director of development, Joseph Testa, lovingly known as Joe here. We're ready and excited to have you on, but before we get into the meat of this podcast, please introduce yourself.

00:54
Joseph Testa:
Awesome. Yeah. Thank you. I think you just introduced myself extremely well. Joe, Joseph, Joey, I have been at VividFront for around eight years. I lead the entire Web services side of things, as we call it here. Now, mainly on the technical side, with Toni, our director of UI/UX, leading the design side. But we have a team of around eight or nine individuals, developers and designers, all shooting towards the same goal of creating awesome experiences for our clients. But, yeah, I think that's what I do on a day to day basis. Outside of that, I really enjoy cooking, eating, and playing with my dog.

01:37
Ashtyn Morris:
And Cleveland sports.

01:38
Joseph Testa:
Yeah, that's a problem.

01:40
Ashtyn Morris:
I don't think that's a problem.

01:42
Joseph Testa:
I think I'm obsessed.

01:43
Ashtyn Morris:
But it's okay to have obsessions.

01:46
Joseph Testa:
That's almost as bad as your Vikings obsession.

01:48
Ashtyn Morris:
All right. That's actually not bad for anyone except myself and my mental health.

01:53
Joseph Testa:
That's fair.

01:54
Ashtyn Morris:
Yeah. It's hard being a Vikings fan here in Cleveland. But before I go off on too many tangents, today we are going to be talking about headless. I don't know about you guys, when I hear headless, I do not think anything associated with websites, web development, any of that. So, luckily, Joe here is our expert. He's really going to break it down for us and understand at a level that you don't have to be a developer to know, because there's a lot to unpack. So we're first going to start off with a general question.

02:25
Joseph Testa:
Okay.

02:25
Ashtyn Morris:
What is a CMS?

02:28
Joseph Testa:
Okay, so the formal definition of a CMS is a content management system. All that is to say, a CMS just provides you a place to put content. How that's delivered to the user, how it's managed in the admin is all kind of dependent on the CMS itself. But a CMS allows you to deliver content in a digital format to users on the Web.

02:51
Ashtyn Morris:
Oh, the wide world of Web.

02:53
Joseph Testa:
Yes.

02:54
Ashtyn Morris:
What are some examples of CMS?

02:56
Joseph Testa:
Yeah, some of the most popular examples I forget the stat. Don't quote me on this anyone in this podcast, but I think 90% of the Web is run on WordPress, so that's probably one of the most popular WordPress. Sorry, CMS out there. There are other competitors to that in the same space. Drupal is a pretty popular one. There are some kind of net based ones that are popular, and then there are various closed source things. At VividFront, we try to tend to use open source platforms. WordPress is one of those. One of those more popular ones. Other examples of CMS are eCommerce driven CMS. So Shopify is the one we prefer. I used to do a lot with Magento. It's another example. And then there's the whole headless infrastructure and ecosystem of CMS as well. But there's so many different kinds. It all depends on kind of the team's technical knowledge, on what is decided to be used and the client's needs.

03:59
Joseph Testa:
You know, if they're an eCommerce client or if they're just a content client, if they're both. So many different offerings, so many different things within those CMS. But there's a lot of them.

04:10
Ashtyn Morris:
Yeah, that's exciting.

04:12
Joseph Testa:
It's daunting at times, I feel like. So I think it's funny because we get so many questions about what is the right CMS for XYZ, what is the right CMS for a company my size, what is the right CMS for this budget? And I don't think that's the right way of approaching that decision. I think that it all depends on the goals of the site as opposed to size, budget, complexity, whatnot. I think you have to look at the goals of the site and then choose the right CMS around that. So we aren't choosing or deciding specific CMS because that's what we think can apply to everyone. We're looking at everyone's unique needs and then getting a solution. So there are other CMS like squarespace and more of those visual builders that really lock you down in that box. We're not opposed to those. Those are the right size solutions for certain clientele and certain goals of projects within the website space.

05:13
Ashtyn Morris:
That makes sense.

05:14
Joseph Testa:
Yeah.

05:14
Ashtyn Morris:
It's meeting with clients where they're at in that moment, and that might be wildly different in five years.

05:20
Joseph Testa:
Exactly.

05:20
Ashtyn Morris:
It's always important to keep that in mind with their goals for scaling their business.

05:23
Joseph Testa:
Exactly.

05:24
Ashtyn Morris:
Obviously. Working here at VividFront, we have an amazing web services team. I feel very lucky to be able to hear all the knowledge. One thing that comes up very often is the discussion of front end versus back end. There's a lot of moving parts, and I feel like that's important for us to address first before we jump into the headless discussion. So could you break down the difference between front end, back end, and how that will kind of run this conversation?

05:50
Joseph Testa:
Yeah. So to put it simply, front end is what you see. Right. It's the visual elements on a page. So anything you're interacting with in any web experience, whether that's an admin within a site, or the front end experience of purchasing a new dog bed for your lovely animal, that's all going to be things you're seeing. So that's all front end code. Back end is the stuff you really don't see, right? That's the thing that's driving stuff. See the scary stuff, right? The stuff that's driving the front end in a way providing it functionality that you're not seeing but core to the data, the inventory syncing, all that different stuff that goes on in the backgrounds that you don't see, that's going to be the back end development role. And all of those have different languages involved. So that's the other facet of front end and back end.

06:43
Joseph Testa:
There are two different skill sets. A lot of the time. There are full stack developers now though, that are well versed in both front end and back end development. And the trend that we've been seeing is front end has become consistently more complicated and it almost in the API driven world we're in, serves as a backend and a front end in ways that it used to not. So that separation of front end versus back end is kind of still going to exist, but it has been getting a little bit more convoluted because back in the day, front end was just HTML, CSS and a little JavaScript. With the popularity of JavaScript now and how powerful it is, knowing how to use JavaScript is just as powerful as being a full stack developer.

07:35
Ashtyn Morris:
Before we just pivot from this conversation a little bit, what is an API? You mentioned that and I feel like most people won't know, including myself.

07:43
Joseph Testa:
Yeah. So APIs provide you an ability to do something with a service that could be yours or could be another company service offering. So basically it's just a link in the ether of the websites that provides you the ability to either post to it, get from it, or really it's just posting and getting honestly. So you can post and get things from an API. So whether that's information or posting information to it, to provide information to that system. So all that's to say, it's just literally it's like a road to the back end.

08:28
Ashtyn Morris:
Wow. Yeah, love that.

08:29
Joseph Testa:
Yeah, that's oversimplifying me. Oversimplifying. So don't kill me developers for saying it's.

08:35
Ashtyn Morris:
Okay, you're explaining it to a non developer. So oversimplification is the route to take.

08:41
Joseph Testa:
And that's the route to get to the back end. So APIs are what allow the front end now to be so powerful and to, like I said, be kind of almost a full stack language in itself. And that's really important for the headless ecosystem. But all web experiences now are becoming API driven.

08:59
Ashtyn Morris:
Wow. Okay, so now I feel like we have a good understanding of front end, back end APIs. How does headless fit into this? And really what does it mean to be a headless CMS?

09:11
Joseph Testa:
Yeah, so I think stepping back a little bit to kind of breaking down what is headless versus what is the other options out there. Traditionally, how CMSs have grown up and become popular has been by providing a one stop place to do everything. So in a monolithic CMS, that's the term for a normal CMS, a non headless CMS. They're going to be providing you the templating, the backend, themes, the plugins, everything within their own CMS platform. It's all decided by them what you can and can't use and how it's used. Right, so it's a super one stop shop for whatever you might.

10:01
Ashtyn Morris:
Seems rather limiting, though, potentially.

10:03
Joseph Testa:
And exactly so it's a one stop shop, so it has its perks there. But with that pre decided options comes limitation. So where Headless comes in, and API driven development in general is that it allows you to build exactly what you want for your needs, whether they be straightforward or really complicated. But it gives you the ability to literally build whatever you want by using those APIs we just talked about, those roads to other platforms, other spaces, and build that front end experience out while utilizing their headless CMS, which is like a traditional CMS, where you put content into, but branching off of that into other spaces that aren't limited. Right. You can use whatever Templating language you want, you can use whatever architecture you want. So if you want subfolders and translations and different domains all in the same code base, you can do that with a headless CMS, whereas a monolithic CMS you're going to be stuck within.

11:08
Joseph Testa:
For example, WordPress has a multi site approach. In that multi-site approach, it allows you to be somewhat flexible with your domain architecture and stuff like that, and your folder level language translations, but it's all predetermined on how those should work. Whereas in a headless setup, you can combine all those in the same way or different ways and really just completely tailor those routes and those translations and those domains to whatever you want within that one CMS without worrying about if it's possible or not. To put it simply, monolithic puts you in a one stop shop type of place, has a lot of great options, but to get out of that if you needed to, and there wasn't an option already available within that one stop shop, it's going to be impossible. So you're locked in. Your only options would be to rebuild or move to another platform, or go the headless route, if that's what you really need.

12:07
Ashtyn Morris:
So how long has headless been around? Is this like a new development in the past few years? Or is it really just coming on now? Or has it always been a capability, but just not utilized?

12:20
Joseph Testa:
Yeah, that's a good question. So technically, it's been around for a while. The ability to use APIs to drive an experience has been around for a while. That being said, services weren't always offering up the ability to do all you can do through APIs. Now, so many different platforms nowadays, you can do literally every single click action that you might be able to do within their own platform through an API. Now, so these powerful softwares are almost completely available to developers to build within their applications without any sort of caveats or setbacks. So these APIs have grown over time. And same with the front end languages. Like I mentioned before, it was just HTML, CSS and a little bit of JavaScript jquery if you were writing good JavaScript, nice vanilla JavaScript. But React, with Facebook coming out with React and angulars of the world views now there's more and more coming out, but those have grown so much and those specific versions of JavaScript or those JavaScript kind of libraries have allowed people and companies to choose the headless route.

13:36
Joseph Testa:
So APIs JavaScript has all been around for a while, but it's grown and evolved so much that it allows you to do whatever you want with it.

13:45
Ashtyn Morris:
Now, do you think it's grown as quickly as it has in the past few years because of just the need that people want more of that flexibility and just control?

13:54
Joseph Testa:
Yeah, I think one we're seeing a change in, I guess how companies view themselves in their buildouts. Tailored solutions are everything. It was for so long that everyone had a similar looking site in a way, similar functioning sites, right? You can go to a site, you can log in, you can maybe check out with a product, but all that's going to kind of follow the same structure. With the advent of these big tech companies and their popularity rising, them creating some awesome open source technology that other people could utilize, like React, for example. Facebook created it, but allows other people to use that and build their own similar versions of Facebook. Right? Everyone got on Facebook was like, wow, this is super powerful. I can get a push notification in my browser and I can see all the stuff that none of my technologies right now can do.

14:49
Joseph Testa:
But then they let all these other developers pick up on that. And these developers have been in the ears of their bosses and the business stakeholders and they want to enable cool experiences. So like everything it's evolved and has turned into something that makes a lot of sense for the business use cases, but also what the consumer expects in a web experience. I don't know how much more proficient people are nowadays with the internet, but I would have to say a lot more people are expecting perfect websites now than maybe in the past. So it's important that you stay on the cutting edge of that. Not too close to the edge, not bleeding edge, but cutting edge. Making sure you're following the right trends and making sure you're set up for success and setting in our instance, setting.

15:33
Ashtyn Morris:
Up our clients for success, do you think? There's obviously been a lot of changes and I think an overall awareness from how marketing and a web really intertwine with one another. And the importance of having SEO content rich content on your site, do you think that maybe has played a role into it as well? If people want to have more content, having the ability to really control that is another factor in the popularity. Look at me, I'm picking up on this.

16:04
Joseph Testa:
Yeah, you are. This is great. I think that with the headless ecosystem and just like I said before, tailored solutions to clients needs, they're looking for a lot of different ways to handle and show their content to their user base. So it's really important you choose a solution that allows you to do that. And we can say to our clients, yes, as much as possible. Not only that though, content is so content is king. We know content is everything. That's a great way to build brand awareness, thought, leadership, all that stuff is super important. So having a good scalable system in place to allow you to do whatever content you want in the ways you want to do that content, but also from the performance side of things, it's so important that content, wherever it exists and however it's served up to the user, is quick performant.

17:02
Ashtyn Morris:
There's nothing worse than a slow moving site.

17:05
Joseph Testa:
From a user experience perspective. And even now, with how strong and smart technology has gotten you're, being docked by Google for having a slower website or for having too much of this, or your text contrast is bad, so it's not as accessible. There's so many moving parts and pieces to websites than there were before that you have to have a technology that allows you to, one, accomplish the performant nature of websites and give you the ability to serve up all that content, but two, do that in a scalable way. Right? Because with so many moving parts, you either have the choice to hire 1000 different individuals to be the stakeholders for each of those individual requests or build a platform that allows you to somewhat automate some of that or have built in tools that you can leverage to monitor that and to maintain that.

17:59
Joseph Testa:
So it's really important from that perspective going with a more modern solution to be able to do that.

18:06
Ashtyn Morris:
I feel like we keep bringing up the word scalable, but can you elaborate a little bit more on that in terms of how can you actually utilize a headless CMS to help you scale your business? Not just in the media, but for the long term?

18:20
Joseph Testa:
Right? Yeah, you said earlier, I think it was a good comment. Meeting the client where they're at is so important to us. As much as we'd love to just tell everyone they need headless in their life, in some cases that might be true. Most of the time we're looking for what their use cases are. Right? So one of the big requests we get from our clients a lot and one of the big pain points they have is when they spend all of this money developing a new site or new web presence, they don't want to have to do another iteration of that in four years time. Right. They want to build something that can ebb and flow with them over the next decade and a half, two decades even. I don't know how frustrating it can be from their perspective, but I can definitely empathize with rebuilding those to a new platform and new experience and how big of a lift that is for ourselves as the executors of that work, but also working with them and seeing how much their day to day job is affected by having to worry about this new website presence project.

19:32
Joseph Testa:
Right? So it's really important that we build a scalable project in any case. But headless really helps with that because you're choosing a platform that is almost, for a lack of a better term, to use another popular term, decentralized. Right. You're not locked in any monolithic solution to what this CMS thinks you should be doing with your platform. So say you have the CMS, but you're also on shopify at the moment. You're not in other countries, you're not selling to other languages or different local like different countries. You're just in one space, but you're using a CMS to sell to that one space. But in the future you might think you need content, translations, different domains to those different countries, all that stuff. Well, we might think about that and say, well, if that's happening in the next year's time, two years times, even five years times, we probably want to build that into whatever solution we're putting forward.

20:36
Joseph Testa:
So maybe it's not immediately active, but we give you the ability to flex into that, to scale into that, and it's all right there. It's not going to be a big lift to implement. It's going to be there for you when you need it, and you can do that. And an even maybe better example is, let's say you are on an ecommerce platform and five years down the line, it's fallen back in terms of features and things it offers, and you want to switch to a brand new ecommerce platform, but you don't want it to rebuild your entire front end. You like your front end.

21:10
Ashtyn Morris:
Sounds exhausting.

21:11
Joseph Testa:
Yeah, you liked your design. You think it's working well, it's optimized for all the different A B tests you've been doing, or flow mapping, UI, UX audits, whatever that is. It's been optimized. The front end is fine, it's working well. It's pretty performant, but you just want to swap out that ecommerce backend. In a Headless situation, you wouldn't need to rewrite that entire front end. You could just literally swap out the API calls to that new eCommerce platform. So you're keeping all that front end, how it works, how it's optimized, how it's converting for you, but you're just switching out the back end. So you're just setting up a new platform, essentially, and then the development team can just swap out those endpoints. And to the end consumer, there's no difference to what's happening.

21:56
Ashtyn Morris:
Wow.

21:57
Joseph Testa:
So it can be so simple to swap out huge swaths of your site without an entire rebuild. So we know that platforms are changing all the time and there's great ones at one point in time and then they fall back in time and they turn out to be kind of duds and they're not doing enough to keep your clients and your needs going in the right direction. You have to swap out. The best part of headless is that you can swap out whenever you need and it's going to be doable because of how it's architected.

22:29
Ashtyn Morris:
All right, well, how secure is it? Is there more security? Less security? Is there anything that is a factor at play?

22:39
Joseph Testa:
Yeah, so it's been our mantra at least for the last five years, time to try to invest in technologies that allow our clients and the solutions we put forward to be more secure.

22:54
Ashtyn Morris:
Awesome.

22:55
Joseph Testa:
And to offload that compliance to those platforms. So you're not spending tens of thousands of dollars and maintaining security for your website and spending that on the different tests you might need to run, the different lawyers you might need to have involved for a breach, et cetera. It is, and we've seen it before and it really, like I said, a rebuild is a lot of work. So is having not secure enough website, so in the headless space, because it is API driven and the goal is to connect to these platforms that have that compliance offloaded to them, it is inherently more secure. You're offloading all of that compliance, those compliance concerns, for the most part, I won't say all, but a good majority of it way more than serving up something yourself on your own server to those different platforms through the use of those APIs so that you're relying on them and their SLA to maintain the right compliance and security levels.

23:55
Joseph Testa:
And you're just building, you're just making sure that the experience for your customer, how the site looks, how quick it is, your product inventory is being pushed. Right. Like all that stuff, that's all you're worrying about. You're not worrying about getting breached and whatever impact that can have, you have.

24:13
Ashtyn Morris:
Too much going on. That's the last thing.

24:15
Joseph Testa:
Yeah. And even us, we would much rather spend our time and your money, a client's money, on the things everyone actually cares about. From a customer's perspective or potential customers perspective, we want to be making sure that the site looks great, performs well, functions as a user would expect, and of course they're going to expect that their card information isn't going to get stolen. So let's offload that to these other services and let's not worry about it, because if something happens, we have an SLA with Shopify and they can reimburse that or whatever that looks like. Right. And that's what's so important to us. So choosing the right technologies, one, headless allows us to enable that and two, the vendors that have those SLAs and those different promises to us.

25:04
Ashtyn Morris:
Wow. So we've been talking about all the great things about headless, but I'm sure there's some cons. Can you just dive into those?

25:12
Joseph Testa:
Yeah, I think that like we've been talking about, we're not going to say headless is right for everyone. We want to understand your different needs and use cases. The client is who we're building this product for. We're not building it for our own positive feelings around what we've built for you. The client's opinion matters the most in everything that we're doing. That being said, one of the big pros I didn't mention, I do want to mention now, is that it is so much easier for a developer, especially a modern developer, to use these headless CMS and architect a really powerful solution in a much more efficient manner that can be, like we mentioned earlier, scaled on. With that, though, comes some upfront to that work. So maybe one of the bigger cons is that you do need a developer to set that initial headless ecosystem and architecture up.

26:10
Joseph Testa:
You can't just go into like a squarespace or maybe a WordPress site that has elementor on it and just build away. It's not going to work like that. You need a developer to architect whatever it is, this custom app at the end of the day for you, at least at first, for you to then build on. So once that initial build is done, you'll have all the capabilities in the world to do the things that you need to do, the content management within those without the need of a developer. But that initial setup, you will need a developer to set that up. So that's one of the maybe major cons, a minor pro with that though, is you get the expertise that developer has around architecting systems that work.

26:51
Ashtyn Morris:
Well and ultimately, if it's easier for the client themselves to manage the content exactly. There's, like you said, the upfront work, but ultimately the goal pass along to them, make their lives easier.

27:02
Joseph Testa:
Exactly. So you have that little bit of upfront, which is unfortunate, but it's not always a bad thing because you have everything you need in due time to do all the things you want to do. I would say that's probably the biggest one. Right. You will need that developer, at least at first. Obviously the big reason for why that's a problem is that, well, our developers' time does cost money. So you do have to pay someone to set that up for you. But if that's the biggest cost or con, I should say it's well worth it in our experience, for the clients and projects we recommend it for.

27:38
Ashtyn Morris:
So in our experience as an agency, what have been some of the biggest headless wins and projects that have really benefited from going headless.

27:47
Joseph Testa:
Yeah. So with that, the use cases for complex architectures and things of that nature, the way and the speed you can move through these projects. Launching an entirely global web presence in four months is just unheard of with most platforms, especially ones that have completely translated content, completely separate checkouts for the different countries, completely separate inventory setups, completely separate everything other than the front end, which you've built with one code base. You've spent money only on that one project. Right. You didn't have to spend it for every single country that you needed to scale into. And it all happened within less than half a year of time. So wow. The ability to do that is kind of unheard of with most other monolithic solutions, especially if you want some say in how that presence and that end experience is architected. So you can do that completely from a customizable way too VividFront as an agency is going to be able to say yes still even in that quick timeline, to a lot of the requests you might have or say, yeah, we can do that in phase two, but everything's going to be a yes, pretty much.

29:06
Joseph Testa:
So if you're trying to move that fast, otherwise you're not going to build nearly as good of a solution and one that can actually last the test of time. So, yeah, I would say speed is one of the big factors. You can move quickly and actually build a great product. There's that triangle. Right. Speed cost and speed cost. What's the other one? Speed cost and not difficulty, but complexity.

29:37
Ashtyn Morris:
There we go.

29:38
Joseph Testa:
Right. Well, if you want things quick and complex, well, then it's going to cost you a lot of money, right?

29:49
Ashtyn Morris:
Yeah.

29:50
Joseph Testa:
If you want things cheap and complex, well, it's going to take a lot of time. We can make these headless solutions and it's going to still generally follow a very similar and familiar timeline that doesn't sound outlandish for you to get your web presence back on track and out there to the whole world to use.

30:11
Ashtyn Morris:
Wow.

30:11
Joseph Testa:
Yeah.

30:12
Ashtyn Morris:
So there's almost levels of headless.

30:15
Joseph Testa:
Definitely.

30:16
Ashtyn Morris:
Okay.

30:16
Joseph Testa:
I mean, there's levels of everything too. So I think there's levels of headless. Right. You don't have to have everything in the initial go. Right. You can phase it out. You can choose to want to go with a headless experience because you know in two years time you're going to be pushing your content to a mobile app. Right. You can use a headless CMS to push your content to any other experience too. It's not just a web experience. It can be a mobile app, it can be wholesaled content on another person's platform, anything that has a way to connect to it and have an experience on it. You can use this one headless CMS. To push that content out to. So if you know you're scaling into something, whether it be a new platform, a new experience, like an app, mobile app, anything like that, you know that's in your plans, it might be a great time to just build that initial build out for one experience and then have that in your back pocket to then build off of, into the future.

31:09
Ashtyn Morris:
Why limit yourself?

31:10
Joseph Testa:
Exactly. And even if you're just trying to stand up something quickly in terms of a one pager, there's no reason you shouldn't use a headless CMS if you know your future is this really awesome content experience but you just want to get up quickly. You can put up a one pager on a headless site that's totally fine and it's going to cost just about the same as a WordPress site as long as you're okay with that custom initial upfront of a custom one page site. But it's important for us to understand the trajectories of sites and build those so those end products can be scalable.

31:49
Ashtyn Morris:
So cool.

31:50
Joseph Testa:
Small to big for sure.

31:52
Ashtyn Morris:
As were having this conversation, in my mind I was thinking big websites.

31:55
Joseph Testa:
But yeah, no, I think complexity certainly is benefited by the headless ecosystem. But there's no reason it can't do simple and do simple really well at an affordable cost. Especially if you know you're going to scale into something bigger in due time. So simple to really complex. And that's why I said earlier that's not the way of looking at how we choose a CMS for someone. It's really about where you're at and what you're planning to do and what you need now. But also is there a decision we need to make on in two years time what's going on in five years time what's going on? Should we build something for then? Yeah, that's all a choice. It's all an option.

32:36
Ashtyn Morris:
So we are a Storyblok partner, correct? VividFront?

32:39
Joseph Testa:
That's correct. Yep.

32:41
Ashtyn Morris:
Want to talk a little bit more about that?

32:43
Joseph Testa:
Yeah, we love Storyblok. Not a shameless plug at all. But they it's pretty cool. And it's different than a lot of other platforms too. Headless CMS and CMS themselves. But one of the big trends that I've been experiencing and seeing, even on a Super Bowl commercial day, you'll see Squarespace there or Wix touting these lovely visual editors and how easy it is to build and manage your site. And that's really what we're competing against for so long. Having a website that can be controlled by a non developer has been limited to almost fields and non visual elements. Which is unfortunate right now that we can see all these super powerful visual editors. How do we get into that kind of gray space of beneficial, not overbuilding, but having a custom visual way of editing your content, but doing that in a cost efficient way that doesn't lock you into a box like a wix or a squarespace would with their pre built templates and styling.

33:50
Joseph Testa:
So when we look at CMS options, that's what we're really thinking about these days is the visual editing capabilities. Storyblok offers an incredible option for that, right? So they're the only headless CMS that we know of right now that provides that from a first party perspective. So they are the creators and maintainers of that visual editing tool. So many other ones are just fields and that isn't very intuitive to a person who can't be a visionary and isn't a designer. Right. We want to give everyone the ability to see what they're doing and the pages they're creating. Storyblok offers that awesome visual editing capability on top of a really fast and easy way to customize and enable that. So you're only building one component that the front end user will see and the admin sees. So you're not having to build something for the admin and then something for the end user.

34:47
Joseph Testa:
You're just building one component, one visual element that a admin or a content editor can use on the admin side of things in the CMS and then it's going to be shown the same exact way to the end user on the front end. So in a lot of different platforms that offer visual editors that you can customize, you have to build the different components in two different places. So it's double the amount of work where Storyblok offers you this awesome visual editor and the ability just to build one thing for it. So it really makes it a cost effective solution to getting that custom visual editor.

35:23
Ashtyn Morris:
This is just so interesting. I could listen to you talk all day about this, Joe.

35:27
Joseph Testa:
Yeah, I feel like I could talk about it all day. I mean, I love not just Storyblok, anything else really, but Storyblok is a great option for that and then there's other options out there too. But yeah, we love the visual editor and that's what our clients want to see. So we're trying to enable that wholesale.

35:46
Ashtyn Morris:
Wow, I feel like I've been blessed by all this. The relevant knowledge, I think you've been.

35:51
Joseph Testa:
Hearing it a lot lately, but you just haven't got to have a one on one.

35:55
Ashtyn Morris:
Well now the world gets to have a one on one with you Joe. And that is good luck world. Good luck.

36:00
Joseph Testa:
If you want to hear me talk about far more interesting things, call me at I'd rather talk about sports, but I do love talking about tech. So as always, if there's any questions for me, that can always be sent over to my email and I'm happy to discuss those and those needs with you if you have them.

36:17
Ashtyn Morris:
Yeah, this has been great. I really feel like you broke it down at a level that everyone can understand. But the good news is that along with this going live, there will be a blog posted on Vividfront's website under Marketing move so if you like to take it all in audio and through the word I could not think of the word. There. It's there.

36:41
Joseph Testa:
Yeah.

36:42
Ashtyn Morris:
Thank you, Joe, for taking the time today. As always, VividFront is here for you guys. If any questions reach out, happy to help. Definitely ready to help you scale your business.

36:52
Joseph Testa:
Loved it, Ashtyn.

36:53
Ashtyn Morris:
Thank you so much. Thank you, Joe.

36:56
Lisa Perry Kovacs:
We hope you enjoyed this episode. Now it's time to start making moves. Head to Vividfront.com/marketingmoves for exclusive marketing materials. Every episode, we add more of our greatest insider secrets to help you move towards success. See you next time.