Websites that empower teams and leverage information with JAMStack

According to the Brands Pyramid, conceived by our co-founder and CEO Ismael Barros, the first need of a company is profitability. Once achieved, the next goal is stability. After that, loyalty and visibility to ultimately transcend. To achieve this, any digital organization needs a website that acts as a showroom, as its own channel to activate the brand and make it grow everywhere. Therefore, it is common that branding projects that challenge us every day lead to the creation of a website. At Soluble, we always try to make them useful, efficient, and empowering so that teams work happily.

With this aim in mind, our Tech team works with the JAMStack approach, which makes it possible to assemble a website with the data and tools that a company uses on a daily basis to put all the information organized under the same Design System.

We can explain it from a slightly more technical point of view, which is also revealing: JAMStack is an architecture that separates the management of the data that feeds a website from what is displayed to the person who visits it. For example, if a company uses Notion, a CRM such as Hubspot, or an internal database to register its entire catalog, this source of information is connected to different tools to sort it and display it to users.

It is a system that uses APIs to generate static pages and serve them through CDNs (servers that deliver information more efficiently). And that has many points in favor in terms of speed—hello, SEO optimization!—, costs and respect for the environmental footprint.

Accompany us in unpacking its main advantages.

Autonomy, agility and quality: leveraging data

When it comes to working on a website, teams are often faced with the need to prioritize agility, autonomy or quality. Achieving all three at the same time is really difficult because agility and autonomy are often associated with a loss of brand consistency. And a digital product that allows a team to be autonomous is usually not the most agile solution. Of course, if you want quality and agility, you'll likely need third-party services to create a custom solution.

This is where JAMStack becomes a winning solution.

Power to the teams, time for what's important

The pros of JAMStack can be summarized in four comprehensive categories:

• Use tools that the team is already familiar with and actually uses on a day-to-day basis. No more duplicated processes. A change to an internal database (e.g., a catalog) is only applied once, because the website uses that source. This, in turn, avoids worrying about the visual elements: the teams continue to work in the most efficient way, and the website can be built from that point.
• At the technology level, JAMStack allows the use of the same Design System shared by all the company's products on the 'commercial' website, usually managed by the marketing team. The company's entire digital presence relies on the same development material. Moreover, these are product designer-friendly technologies: again, comfort, agility and happiness for the team.
• As a content manager—or the repository of the data that will be shown to the user—in Soluble, we generally use DatoCMS because it allows us to manage different environments very easily. There can be a test environment to see what a change in the web looks like (a blog post, changing the copy of the home page, etc.) before publishing it, and also a production environment to deploy the final modifications. You can even generate, with just one click, an isolated environment for more ambitious tests in long-term projects that require multiple changes. And then, when we are sure of everything, we can mix the new features with the main environment without the website ceasing to be operational. That is to say, with JAMStack it is much more agile to work on large features coexisting with the day-to-day management of the website, as this type of solutions are usually more robust and scalable.
• To have 100% control over what is published. All the information remains in the company's infrastructure, which is a great advantage over other, more widespread content managers.

So... Why JAMStack and not a more mainstream CMS?

This is a frequently asked question. Why JAMStack and not Webflow or WordPress, for instance? While it is accurate that these content managers also offer agility and autonomy, they do not allow an excellent use of data.

Probably, the experience of managing more purely static data, such as blog pages or sections, is more enjoyed with this type of solution because you can see the changes in real time. However, you lose advantages that, for many projects, are essential:

• Having our own infrastructure. In the case of Webflow, we would always depend on their own.
• Facility to manage websites in several languages.
• What is done in this type of more 'commercial' CMSs stays in their environment and cannot be used for other things. For example, a product catalog created in Webflow cannot be used to create a customer portal.
• We cannot connect external sources. Therefore, if we want to add a blog, API documentation or a Help Center to the same website, we would have to maintain the data or import the contents manually.

With conventional CMSs, the first setup is always very nice. But it is a sparkle that does not let you see beyond: when it comes to working on new features that change what already exists, the work ends up being less agile, so the release cycles end up being longer and more frustrating. JAMStack is a useful solution in the short term and, above all, in the long term, as it is a great alternative for growth and scalability.