Client
Cryptocurrency
Exchange
Industry
Fintech
Project
Crypto and exchange custodian business working for advanced trading, seeking to enhance their Contentful CMS integration for better content management and ease for marketing team to update content (text/images) without developer intervention.
Contentful
HTML
Next.js
CSS
Styled
components
React.js
Today’s customers expect a seamless digital experience across every touch point, which was also a crucial requirement for our global cryptography client. In the world of crypto and NFTs, it’s critical to provide simple, elegant, and secure access to portfolios and support seamless trading and exchange worldwide, anywhere a client may be. To do this, our client trusted Contentful, a leading headless CMS that helps businesses deliver, evolve, and scale omnichannel content.
At the heart of every Contentful implementation is a content model. Get it right, and editors can seamlessly assemble content to create new experiences on the fly without developer resources. However, many companies transitioning to Contentful may end up structuring the content model in ways that cause future problems. This global brand came to Net Solutions when they began to experience issues with their data model, slowing down content creation due to unnecessary reliance on developers and creating problems with design control and page optimization.
Teaming up with Net Solutions, our client embarked on a journey to realize Contentful's full potential to supercharge marketing and optimize the end-user experience.
Our client's marketing team faced issues, requiring developer assistance for every website design or content change. This is because not all types of content were captured in the content model created in Contentful.
Contentful is designed to help create a structured source of truth for content. It uses a structured data model that makes content reusable for end users like our client’s marketing team. This data model helps provide ‘guardrails’ around how each content type is structured and how it relates to the rest of the site (taxonomy).
When the work is done upfront, marketing teams can create a new experience within that content type without needing development. Our client’s marketing team could do this for blog posts and articles, which had a defined content system in Contentful, but they required the assistance of developers for every new or revised landing page and product page. This slowed down marketing and was an inefficient and costly use of developer resources. This process was not scalable as a company delivering multi-channel content across over 70 countries.
The crypto firm partnered with Net Solutions to address the following challenges:
The data models needed to be appropriately structured to encompass all the appropriate data types, restricting what content could be created and how. The existing data model was static and inefficient, creating problems for marketing agility, increasing developer resource use, and leading to page performance issues.
Inefficient use of the existing Contentful system limited the brand’s capacity to create and modify content across multiple platforms without extensive developer support. For any website design or content change, the marketing team had to coordinate with developers, and they had no flexibility to make changes from platform to website to get it corrected.
With the high need for developer resources, the marketing team was constrained from adjusting the website to optimize the user experience (UX) or creating new campaigns. In a highly competitive market, the lack of real-time capabilities could impact customer acquisition and retention.
To achieve marketing agility to test new ideas or respond to opportunities, the marketing team needed to be able to adjust website content (text, images, layout, colors) and create new content experiences without depending on developers or requiring redeployment.
Data and content model issues
Non-scalable processes
Delayed marketing capabilities
Net Solutions worked with the client to create a new content model and configure content types using predefined content blocks and templates optimized for performance and user experience (UX). Read on to examine each stage of the roadmap and the results achieved.
Net Solutions worked with the client to create a hierarchical content model that better reflected the types of content the client needed. The number of content types was carefully considered, balancing flexibility with the need for enforced design limitations in each kind.
A content type is a blueprint for the content you want to create. It defines the structure and fields that each piece of content will have. For instance, a blog post content type might include fields for the title, body text, author, and publication date. Content type usage refers to how these predefined blueprints are employed within a Contentful space. Properly optimized content types can improve performance. For instance, reducing the number of content types and fields can streamline database queries, leading to faster content delivery and rendering times.
In the evaluation stage, we were able to determine that only some current content types were being actively used and that certain content types needed to be included (e.g., product pages, and landing pages). By restructuring the content model to just core content types, marketing teams can use fewer but more streamlined content types.
To mitigate the problem of too many content types, we leveraged “variant” and “type” fields that don’t directly map in Contentful but have an appropriate mapping in the React codebase. Furthermore, we were able to identify and reclaim 9 content types that were not necessary or were being used inefficiently.
The Result: Better Website Performance, Reduced Developer Dependency
Net Solutions used enhanced data modeling to optimize the database layout, decreasing content type usage from 75% to 25%, leading to improved content type utilization and page optimization. Furthermore, this enables the marketing team to create content for all defined content types without developer resources.
In addition to revising the content model, Net Solutions worked closely with the marketing and development teams to configure content type layouts for key pages, including the new landing and product pages, and creating the necessary content blocks to enable developer-free content generation.
Example of Content-Type Structures:
Blog Post Content-Type:
Product Page Content-Type:
Working step-by-step through this process with our client, Net Solutions created guardrails on designs for each content type to maintain brand integrity with enforced design limitations. Further, we were able to leverage our knowledge of best practices in user experience design and our experience in how to optimize the use of Contentful’s content blocks to speed up future marketing efforts.
The Result: Optimized User Experience
Net Solutions ensured user interface consistency across the website with a predefined content structure and templates for each page. Further, our expert advice helped achieve key targets in usability and accessibility, ensuring the site is easy for visitors to navigate, using clean lines and simple page organization. The net result is higher engagement and user satisfaction, ideally increasing conversion and retention rates.
The goal of the content model revision, new page templates, and content blocks is to streamline new content creation without the need for developer resources. Contentful’s simple tools allow non-technical users to manage and update pages without developer intervention.
The Result: Real-time Marketing Without Developer Resources
The ability to create and update content in real-time has created greater agility in marketing, enabling rapid strategy iteration and quick promotional content updates. Contentful’s features, like content scheduling and versioning, further supported timely content delivery, thus empowering the client team to execute strategies effectively and efficiently.
Net Solutions leveraged single-user and page-level performance reports with tools such as Lighthouse, GT Matrix, Wiselow, and Google to audit for performance, accessibility, SEO, and more. Some of the metrics we evaluated were page response, content loading time, grading, and CSS efficiency.
The Result: Better Website Performance
Using these tools, we identified elements causing delays and monitored the impact of data modeling on performance. We also used concurrency testing to identify and resolve issues with simultaneous user access.
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