Websites that empower teams and maximize data with JAMStack

According to the Brand Pyramid, devised by our co-founder CEO Ismael Barros, the first need of any company is profitability. Once achieved, the next goal is stability. Then, loyalty, visibility, and ultimately, transcendence. And to travel this entire path, any digital organization needs a website that acts as a storefront. As a proprietary channel to activate the brand and make it spread everywhere.

That's why it's common for the branding projects that challenge us every day to result in the creation of a website. And at Soluble we always aim for them to be useful, efficient, and empowering so teams work happier.

With this objective in mind, our Technology team works with the JAMStack approach, which allows us to assemble a website with the data and tools that a company uses day-to-day to organize all information under a single Design System.

We can explain this from a slightly more technical, but equally revealing, point of view: JAMStack is an architecture that separates the management of the data feeding a website from what is actually displayed to the person visiting it. For example: if a company uses Notion, a CRM like Hubspot, or an internal database to keep their entire catalog registered, that information source connects with different tools to organize and display it to users.

It's a system that uses APIs to generate static pages and serve them through CDNs (sets of servers that deliver information more efficiently). And that has plenty of arguments in its favor in terms of speed—hello, SEO!—costs, and respect for environmental footprint.

This is just an appetizer. Join us as we break down its main advantages.

Autonomy, agility, and quality: squeeze the data

When it comes to working with a website, teams typically face the need to prioritize agility, autonomy, or quality. Getting all three at the same time is difficult, because agility and autonomy are usually tied to a loss in brand consistency. Likewise, a digital product that allows a team to be autonomous doesn't usually turn out to be the most agile solution. Of course, if you want quality and agility, you'll likely need help from third parties to create a custom solution.

This is where JAMStack becomes a winning solution.

Power for teams, time for what matters

The advantages of JAMStack can be summed up in four main categories:

• Use tools that the team is already familiar with and actually uses day-to-day. Say goodbye to duplicate processes. A change in an internal database (for example, a catalog) is applied only once, because the web draws from that source. This, in turn, eliminates concern about the visual side: teams continue working in the most efficient way and the web is built from the good work already done.
• At the technology level, JAMStack allows the same Design System shared by all of the company's products to be used on the "commercial" web", which is typically managed by a marketing team. The entire digital presence of the company has the same material for development. Additionally, these are developer-friendly technologies: again, ease, agility, and happiness for the team.
• As a content management system, or repository for the data that is later displayed to the user, at Soluble we generally use DatoCMS, because it makes it easy to manage different environments. There can be a testing one, to see how a change looks on the web—a blog post, changing the copy on the homepage…—before publishing it, and also a production one to deploy the final modifications. You can even generate, with a single click, an isolated environment to run more ambitious tests on long projects that require many changes. And then, when we're confident about everything, merge the updates with the main environment without the web going down. In other words, with JAMStack it's much more agile to work on big features alongside the day-to-day operations of the web, because this type of solution tends to be more robust and scalable.
• Have 100% control over what gets published. All information stays within the company's infrastructure. One of the major advantages over other more widely used content management systems.

So… why JAMStack and not a more conventional CMS?

This question comes up often: what's the reason for using JAMStack and not Webflow or WordPress, for example? While it's true that more conventional content management systems also offer agility and autonomy, they don't allow for excellent use of data.

It's likely that the experience of managing purely static data, like blog pages or sections, is more rewarding with this type of solution because you can see changes in real time, although you lose advantages that, for many projects, are really important:

• Proprietary infrastructure. With Webflow, you'd always depend on theirs.
• Easy management of websites in multiple languages.
• What you build in these more 'commercial' CMS platforms stays siloed within that environment and can't be leveraged for anything else. For example, a product catalog created in Webflow can't be repurposed to build a customer portal.
• You can't connect external data sources. So if you want to include a blog, API documentation, or a Help Center on the same website, you'd have to maintain that data manually or import content by hand.

With generic CMS platforms, that initial setup always feels smooth, but it's a flash that blinds you to what comes next—because when it's time to work on new features that change what already exists, the work becomes less agile, release cycles get longer and more frustrating. JAMStack is a useful solution in the short term and especially in the long term, as it's a strong alternative for growth and scalability.