Strategies for Modern Web Portals: Prioritizing User Experience

Modern websites must be functional, attractive, and flexible.

Companies must have an evolving digital strategy that can meet the requirements of both customers and all stakeholders that interact with their digital services. 

This means that it is essential to have a platform that is adaptable for everyone. A modern website must offer:

• Engaging and personalized digital experiences.

• Alignment with the company's commercial strategy.

• Product-focused approach.

• An environment driven by the application of modern technologies such as artificial intelligence or machine learning

• Adaptability of use in different electronic devices.

Websites as "digital products"

A modern website's development must be durable over time, ensuring flexible, portable, and scalable content. For this, your company's website must be considered as a digital product, which requires constant updating so that it adapts to the needs of its users.

Good software practices

1. Innovative technologies: The implementation of modern software architectures allows for greater speed, flexibility, quality, and best development practices for your website as a product.

2. Agility: Teams must respond quickly to the needs and updates demanded by your website. How long does it take your team to deliver a required update? Today we are talking about weeks or even days to ensure site efficiency. And this trend will continue to grow in importance in the future. To achieve this type of agility it is necessary to transition to the use of integrated technologies, such as Digital Experience Platforms (DxP).

DxPs are software platforms used to manage the customer experience consistently across all digital touch points: websites, mobile devices, social media, and enterprise content management. This approach prioritizes modern software tools, creating a set of services that work in harmony to create a unified user experience.  

3. Serverless architecture: This type of architecture is a development model that allows users to write and deploy code without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. Servers are used, but developers do not need to know about them, they only need to write code to implement it. This is considered an advantage as teams do not have to worry about server administration and spend more time focusing on improving the product experience.

Flexible content platforms - Content Modeling

The way you publish, update and manage your content is critical to the success of your website. 

One of the best alternatives to easily and quickly manage the content of your website is the Contentful platform. It provides you with:

• Infrastructure for content distribution that allows you to deliver content to users 24 hours a day.

• Management of customized content models according to your business needs.

• Simple and easy-to-use user interface.

• Omnichannel content distribution.

• Backup, so there is no need to worry about accidental data loss.

• Code-free content management that makes it possible to add and edit various types of content, as well as manage them within the platform.

In modern applications, data is stored and managed in a structured way, allowing various technologies to access and use it in real-time to provide the best possible user experience. 

This approach has become fundamental to the modern web experience and is achieved through content modeling, which gives your content a modular structure so that APIs can easily access and reuse it in many cases for different purposes. 

Structured content makes it easier for people to experience your content and for websites, applications, and other systems to do so as well. 

Previously, websites were created where the content was treated as a library of text documents using traditional CMSs. This approach made it very difficult to manage individual pieces of content that could not be used in other different contexts or had to be adapted differently for each device, causing slowness on the website and becoming a business risk. 

For these reasons, content modeling became a way to provide content editors with the ability to keep their content up to date across countless touch points.

Contentful facilitates the creation of content models that support all user journeys through their web experience. The content modeling process allows you to fully explore and understand your content and the intricacies of the relationships between elements, giving you better control over the user experience.

In addition to this, developers today are building the front-end components (those with which the user interacts) for their websites using a variety of architectural approaches. All this in order to bring flexibility to the sites and ensure a modern system suitable for all users. 

Contentful enables the deployment of tools, plugins and guidance to help developers integrate a content platform into the architecture of their choice. It is a platform that remains constant as development teams evolve their build process or application architecture, or add new delivery channels to their digital portfolio. 

Teams are free to explore different options before committing to a specific route and can rest assured that their content creation tools and hosting environments will remain the same for developers and publishers.

Contentful and Aplyca

Aplyca is partner of Contentful, the most popular headless content management system in the market, since November 2021. If your company is interested in implementing projects that seek the development of modern websites to improve the user's digital experience and content management with technologies such as Contentful, do not hesitate to contact us.