Introduction
From snackable TikToks to artfully curated online storefronts and insightful blogs, content is the currency of this digital-first era. However, efficiently creating, publishing, and managing content is a central business challenge for most companies – and Contentful is on a mission to remedy it.
Since 2017, Contentful has been redefining content management with its core platform offering and unique ecosystem of solution and technology partners. Widely known for pioneering the “headless” CMS, it’s attracted an enviable client list ranging from mom-and-pop shops to over 30% of Fortune 500 companies.
As a scrappy start-up set on providing an excellent product, the company initially channeled its resources into product improvements and customer support. As the company matured and looked to build brand affinity, it decided it needed to extend that excellence to contentful.com — the company's primary driver of brand awareness and acquisition.
“We saw an opportunity to become a top-tier example of a highly-performant marketing website run on composable tools and serve as inspiration for what’s possible when building with Contentful,” said Tim Corden, Senior Director of Web Marketing.
But, they were dealing with the same roadblocks to digital maturity that many of their customers were: clunky content models and outdated technology. To deliver Corden’s vision, Contentful needed to update its architecture and refresh its branding — but they weren’t planning to go into it alone. With a robust partner ecosystem at its fingertips, Contentful selected Work & Co to help lead the transformation.
Developing a more sustainable, scalable digital experience
In early 2023, Contentful’s Web Experience and Brand teams pulled together an ambitious project plan. It included building a scalable design system, developing editor-friendly content models, creating content for new audience segments, and leveraging a high-performing tech stack that incorporates the capabilities and functionality sought by cross-functional teams and the latest offerings from Contentful. There was also an appetite to refresh brand imagery and messaging.
The team hoped these improvements would resolve some of the issues that had grown over time, including inconsistent messaging (a side effect of a growing team and limited reuse with content models ) and degraded site performance (a side effect of technical workarounds and ill-fitting frameworks). They also looked to this overhaul as an opportunity to address content sprawl (which would mean streamlining the existing content model which included 130+ content types), and correct API limit issues and deployment/preview failures.
“Our content model and entire technical infrastructure had been iterated on over time with limited documentation and ad-hoc development solutions, which included front-end hard-coding and multiple duplications of content types,“ Corden noted.
“Ultimately, this resulted in day-to-day difficulties with managing the website and restricted scalability and content reuse across the web experience,” added Neal Davies, Principal Product Manager, Web, at Contentful. It was also difficult for marketers to work autonomously within the platform. Sorting through existing content to support things like campaigns proved cumbersome and launching new content, or editing what already existed required support from Corden and his team directly.
Collaborating with Work & Co to build something innovative and scalable on schedule
There was a lot to be done — and there was a deadline. Contentful wanted to accomplish a significant amount of the work before its fall launch event in October 2024. To hit this deadline and ensure its final setup was high-caliber, Contentful tapped into its robust network of experienced solution partners.
Contentful ultimately selected Work & Co, part of Accenture Song (a global Contentful solution partner) for its expertise and collaborative approach. For over 10 years, Work & Co has been helping companies transform their core businesses through digital product innovation tied to design, technology, strategy, and AI for some of the world's biggest brands. An appreciation for close collaboration, along with expertise in using Contentful as the foundation for multiple projects, sealed the deal.
“From the start, I was excited by the prospect of collaborating with Work & Co. I’d been following their work for some time and knew they had a talented team. This was validated in the discovery process when they walked us through their approach to design systems and their experience developing scalable content models,” Clay Colwell, Senior Director of Brand & Creative at Contentful, added.
Moving at speed with streamlined content and designs
Contentful and Work & Co decided that the best path forward would be a three-prong approach, with a focus on the following:
Design system refresh: Work & Co would use its expertise in scaling design systems to bring web imagery up to date across logos, type, colors, motion, and illustration. These new styles and guidelines — and more realistic expressions of the product UI — would ensure Contentful’s web experience matched its enterprise-grade customer experience.
Content strategy overhaul: Work & Co’s content strategy team would complete a holistic brand evaluation, from messaging to key aspects of the user journey. It would redesign flows, broadening Contentful’s audience to what it now calls “the digital team.”
Incremental migration: Work & Co and Contentful would migrate its code base from Gatsby to Next.js, transforming its page-driven frontend infrastructure into a modular setup with reusable components to speed up the creation of new pages and content. They’d also adopt a more robust schema for clarity in structure with duplication.
The project kicked off with an audit of the existing content model with key internal Contentful stakeholders, followed by the development of a more streamlined scalable alternative to replace it. Updates to brand positioning and messaging with some preliminary building of a new web design system and UI kit to support key fall launch pages coincided with this, laying the foundation for later work.
It took the joint team just eight weeks to accomplish the above. According to Jordan S., Group Director, Design at Work & Co, what enabled the team to move quickly and hit the deadlines for phase one came down to determining what could be done realistically and then honoring the design principle of simplicity — stripping the design, content, and experience down to only the most essential elements. The resulting brand expression on these pages included bold iconography and images over illustration enhanced the story and improved discoverability for Contentful Platform, Contentful Studio, and Contentful Ecosystem.
Building the framework for a better internal and external user experience
Moving into phase two of the project, Contentful made a comprehensive overhaul of its technical framework. The company’s original marketing website ran on Gatsby — which, in the company’s earlier years, satisfied its smaller digital footprint. In need of server-side rendering and faster build times to support a more iterative production schedule, the Web team and Work & Co saw Next.js and Vercel as more performant alternatives. The pair would enhance Contentful’s core content delivery capabilities and complement the platform's decoupled architecture, enabling the company to deliver fast, secure, and scalable content experiences.
Because these technology solutions offered better support for the company’s existing and growing content library, they would also lay the foundation for improved performance metrics. For Contentful, success in this area included passing key core web vitals across web and mobile and increasing page speed from its current score of 60 to over 80.
Another positive side effect of this change included an improved developer experience. “Being thrown into the old code base wasn’t a great experience. There was little structure or visibility into where things were,” shared Nemanja Niciforovic, Partner Technology at Work & Co. “Since rolling out these changes, one thing is clear: developers prefer the new code base because it's far easier to maintain.”
With less to manage manually, the Web team has been able to focus on tasks that bring value to the day-to-day work of internal users — like adding tools to its tech stack that enhance productivity. These include Contentful-built tools such as Contentful Studio, Live Preview, Launch, Workflows, and Merge. They also have more resources to optimize high-priority areas of the website, such as the Pricing or Home pages.
Onboarding new users and embracing endless innovation
For the third and final phase of the project, Work & Co has been hands-off. Thanks to the reusability and versatility of the content model and design systems they helped build, Contentful has been able to be fully self-sufficient in creating new content and iterating on what already exists.
“It’s exciting how quickly we’re able to move now that we have a solid foundation for repeatability,” said Corden. “We recently launched our redesigned Marketplace — which highlights the Contentful Ecosystem. We’re also continuing to migrate case studies to the new design system, and we’re updating the blog.”
“With those final projects wrapped up, we’ll be able to onboard internal users,” added Davies.”Hopefully, they’ll have more autonomy working in the space than before.”
After taking this final step Corden and team will continue to make good on their long-term goal to utilize new products and features as they become available to other customers — all done in the interest of creating a better content platform and digital experience.
About the Contentful and Accenture Partnership
By combining Contentful’s composable content platform with Accenture’s industry-focused services and capabilities, we are closing the gap between brand promise and customer experience using composable solutions that meet the mission-critical business needs of enterprises today and into the future.
Learn more about the Contentful and Accenture partnership.
