CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Why We Like Storyblok

Jace Anderson, Director of Accounts at Acro Commerce, introduces Storyblok, a headless content management system that works well with our accelerator, Gesso. Learn what makes Storyblok stand out and why we look forward to future collaborations with their teams.

As a child of the 90s, Acro Commerce has seen its fair share of technologies come and go. In our early years as an agency, our first business model was as a one-stop shop for website development, digital marketing, graphic design (you should see our Nascar wraps), and Flash development. 

We even dabbled in building our own platform, Store Box, eventually becoming wiser and settling on Drupal as our technology of choice. Early on, we realized that proprietary software was very limiting. We could never scale if every client required its own version of our platform. 

What drew us to Drupal was the flexibility and control we had over it to create solutions that didn’t limit our client’s imaginations, despite the early days of the internet, much less ecommerce. The Drupal Community was also a huge factor, with talented individuals worldwide contributing to and expanding the platform’s capabilities daily.

As we outgrew Drupal and emerged as Acro Commerce, a system integrator with a composable, technology-agnostic approach, it made sense to join forces with best-in-breed solutions for our “preferred” partner/technology stack. 

Finding the Right Dance Partners

Dancing on our own has been fun, but having someone else to do it with is way better. However, we have to be picky. 

Our trajectory as a composable agency can’t be sacrificed, so there were particular characteristics we were looking for:

• Headless compatibility: Headless architecture integrates flexibility and reliability, regardless of the manufacturer or operating system.
• Strong APIs: Modern decoupled architecture relies heavily on APIs (application programming interfaces), enabling separate software components to communicate with each other.
• Flexible content structures: Creating pages and content should be flexible, user-friendly, and built for non-technical resources like marketers and administrators.
• Works with our accelerator: Being able to integrate our development framework, Gesso, improves project outcomes such as speed-to-market and future scalability.

Enter Storyblok: A Headless CMS

Sparked by a meeting at the BigCommerce Summit, Storyblok came into the picture. After years with a developer-first platform (Drupal), Storyblok isn’t just for developers; it empowers all teams to produce and scale better content faster. 

Besides being introduced to highly talented Storyblok-ers, their platform truly set them apart. Evidently, they took away several lessons while gaining a significant market share in Europe and Asia. They have applied them to their product to capitalize on the North American composable trend. 

What Made Storyblok Stand Out

As a former Drupal agency and longtime theorizers of how to make CMSs better, here are a few things that caught our attention about the Storyblok platform:

• Storyblok provides an intuitive and user-friendly content editing experience. This is a crucial advantage for businesses with content creators of varying technical expertise, making it accessible to both developers and non-technical users. We have seen the steep learning curve for more developer-focused CMSs on several occasions.
• Storyblok's API-first approach makes it developer-friendly and allows seamless integration with various platforms, including our decoupled accelerator, Gesso.
• As a SaaS solution, Storyblok handles maintenance and scalability, reducing the burden on your IT team and ensuring reliable service. In contrast, with Drupal, we consistently maintain the platform for our clients.
• With Storyblok, you can define and customize content structures according to your specific needs, making it suitable for a wide range of industries and use cases. This is key for Acro Commerce as we have been focusing on manufacturing, which introduces hundreds of different use cases and types of content structures. 

Through our Discovery & Strategy process here at Acro Commerce, we strive to find the best solutions for our clients, not just the best technologies. We foresee Storyblok satisfying this requirement more often in the future. 

Interested in learning how a headless CMS can help your business streamline messaging and workflows?

Use the form below to contact us, and one of our subject matter experts will contact you to schedule a meeting.