As with many web publishers, the 'static' nature of the incumbent Content Management System (CMS) limited the editorial and commercial teams’ ability to develop product, without time consuming and costly web design and development activity. Platform revisions needed the expertise of web designers and developers, which meant constraints on product development. The fixed nature of the traditional hosting was also expensive, and difficult to change to meet increasing, but fluctuating demand.
Deploying blaze, to empower Get the Gloss Editorial and Commercial teams
Blaze is Byte9's headless content management platform. Uniquely, Blaze features a front-end 'web application' known as a 'Single Page Application' (SPA). Once the SPA is delivered to the website visitors browser, all of the functional advantages of an app are available within the browser. Traditionally static pages are served by legacy CMS systems where content is ‘fixed’ in order to meet performance goals. With a Single Page Application, Get the Gloss are able to deliver a dynamic, data driven user experience where each component on a page can be updated individually, for each page-load.
This new, much richer website functionality is controlled within Blaze's Page-Builder interface. Page-Builder gives Get the Gloss' editorial and marketing teams unparalleled functionality and control over content display, for all pages, searchable listing and directories across the site.
Searchable listings of content and an expert’s directory can be created, configured and replicated for each channel of content, landing pages created from composite content types, pulled together by content classification.
Get the Gloss site managers are able to create custom search pages using Blaze’s native Elastic Search engine, that combines search results by type and allows choice and control of structure and categorisation of content pages.
Being able to set Google Tag Manager wrappers around individual page components and on page calls to action allows the finest grain user and event data to be shared with analytics and marketing automation tools. Engagement undertsanding is therefore based around the richest first-party analytics and event data. Integration with Google Big Query allows Get the Gloss and the Byte9 team to begin to apply Google’s machine learning to content engagement and apply predictive analytics, to derive further content engagement value for sponsors and advertisers.
Advertising and banner management is now manageable by the Get the Gloss Commercial team at all levels. Any type of banner media at any size can be inserted into any content type, listing or search result at any interval. Additionally content topics and classification is passed to Google Ad Manager as key values, enabling micro-targeting of content audiences across the entire content archive by Get the Gloss sponsors and advertisers.
Best in Class performance, with Blaze and Amazon Web Services elastic computing
The Blaze Single Page Application is delivered to a user’s browser in milliseconds, outperforming all CMS systems and media properties of a similar type. Web Vitals performance of the SPA is category leading, with all of the advantages that an SPA brings.
Blaze media management has transformed the management and optimisation of Get the Gloss image media, being able to manage a single, high-resolution image in the Media Gallery, whilst on-demand front end presentation, AI assisted optimisation and cropping and distribution to AWS CloudFront nodes, for image delivery has significantly improved page performance, whilst also reducing the burden of admin for the image management team.
Blaze’s use of Elastic Search and the GraphQL API framework mean that sophisticated content relationships and listing can be managed in the most performant way. Blaze Page-Builder users can create and configure very sophisticated, content rich landing and listing pages which will render with class leading performance, faster than much more simple, static pages. Get the Gloss’ ability to insert dynamic, ever changing product data into editorial is a game changer in an editorial, product marketing sense.
Elastic computing, delivered using AWS Elastic Beanstalk and ‘on-demand’ instances, supported by a number of micro-services mean that Get the Gloss only pay for exactly the amount of computing required, which scales instantaneously to meet demand. The cost to serve the fluctuating audience, as it grows, is optimised.
Improved performance, increased traffic, increased content engagement and reduced cost
The improved performance Blaze framework and the elastic computing services delivered by AWS have both improved site performance and therefore SEO and site traffic markedly. Since launch, double digit week-on-week traffic increases are reported in analytics, because of the perfomance and sophistication of ehhanced editorial, content relations, meta data managment now possible on page and within content listings. Users are also spending longer engaging with content on-site, increasing sponsor and advertiser return on investment.
Get the Gloss’ editorial Commercial and Marketing teams are also empowered to develop the site and editorial, directory and sponsored content and manage data sharing between marketing automation and advertising platforms without any web designer or developer involvement, driving editorial product developmnet and monetisation.
Headless CMS and No code solutions like Blaze are transforming the web editorial and content marketing landscape.