Ask HN: CMS for static pages on a React website?

4 pointsby bchellivor 7 Jahren10 comments

Hello,

I'm looking for a tool or a service that will allow a marketing team or a product team to add static pages to an existing site built in React. I have two use cases:

1. Lead generation, creating custom pages for different type of customers with forms to get in contact with our Sales team

2. SEO, creating content on our site

Ideally I'm looking for solution type WebFlow that a non-technical person can interact with but embedded on an existing site.

Thanks for the help,

10 comments

romanovcodevor 7 Jahren

Best thing you can do is proxy pass a path of your website to some CMS, however when your CMS will have to execute CTAs on your SPA, good luck with that.

Worst thing you can do is allow HTML fields in your Headless CMS and pass it through in your SPA but it is like going back to 90s way of doing content.

SPA is not a good case for this type of website. What you need is WordPress. This problem cannot get solved with Headless CMS.

bchellivor 7 Jahren

Thanks @romanovcode!

This is indeed hard/impossible to implement this routing logic on a SPA... Also I would lose common header, footer and style in general.

I think this is why most people are using a blog.xxxx.tld with a WordPress, basically to save them the headache.

On the other side, I'm looking at SEO and I wonder if splitting my domain authority between two subdomain is the way to go.

simplectovor 7 Jahren

I think you might be looking for a headless cms. Lots out there so I will link you to a directory site.

https://headlesscms.org/

I have been looking seriously at directus and strapi

bchellivor 7 Jahren

Thanks @simplecto!

I did not know about this directory. I have looked at Strapi in the past, this is indeed a great tool, but I'm looking for a tool that does not need a tech team to build the front end piece (the head) of the CMS.

Ideally, I'm looking for some kind of tool or SaaS to build content and a custom UI at the same time (WebFlow like but embedded in my site).

simplectovor 7 Jahren

You are welcome! You might also look at Microsoft powerapps, bubble.io, or ionicframework?

bchellivor 7 Jahren

bubble.io seems like a good match in term of the editor, I hope this can be embedded in an existing site, I'll give it a try ;)

Thanks!

kojeovovor 7 Jahren

Contentful?

bchellivor 7 Jahren

Thanks @kojeovo!

Contentful, from my understanding, is a good headless CMS, but does not allow a product team or a marketing team to manage the design/layout of new pages. Basically I would still need an engineer to implement the structure of the page, create the style, etc...

comisvor 7 Jahren

Correct, Contentful is a CMS.

Question for you though: why would you want product/marketing people feebly attempting to create new pages/layouts with some tool when you could just have a React engineer code up whatever they design with ease? I mean I get it, graphic designers and business analysts are cheaper than engineers, but if it takes them 2-3x as long (or more) to do the same job are you really saving any money?

bchellivor 7 Jahren

Thanks for taking the time @comis, this is a valid question.

My assumptions are the following:

1. Dev cost is not only the time spent by the Dev team but, planning, project management, back and forth between tech and the different stakeholders. On top of that, you can add deployment cost, QA, etc...

2. Miss-opportunity cost, I feel like there is a trade-off between developing core features and supporting features (marketing, sales static pages) and that on a competitive market, most of the time, supporting features are not being prioritized due to a lack of tech resource.

3. Finally, small initiatives have a huge overhead for marketing and sales teams, if adding a drop-down to a form requires to create a ticket, ask the product team to spec it, design it, and add it to a Sprint,... Then, the drop-down will probably seat there until it becomes a critical issue or until it can be bundled with other small tickets. Which might never happen...

This is basically to avoid all of this that I'm looking for a CMS to embed in our existing site.

Thanks,