Show IH: Headless, the static website CMS
Hey guys,
Last time I posted about Headless, it was nearing completion and I asked for feedback. I got some great feedback and after lots of testing (and bugfixing), Headless is now live!
So what is Headless? Headless is a CMS designed specifically for static websites. So if you build your website with Jekyll, Hugo, Hexo or just made it in pure HTML without a back-end server, then you probably have a static website. In that case, you can manage your content and translations in Headless. No need to build or maintain a CMS yourself.
You can check it out on https://www.headless.rest
What's next?
I'm starting my marketing efforts (and learning how marketing works I guess, pure developer here), fixing bugs as they pop up and starting to think about the next phase of Headless (automatic website provisioning !).
If you have any questions or feedback, I'd love to hear it!
Hey @Christilut,
I checked out your product for the first time now. The landingpage design is looking nice and professionell to me, but it took me a while to really understand what problem you are trying to solve. Since I am a developer, I know static site generators like Jekyll and how I can generate content for such systems.
Therefore I initially thought that your product is just another static site generator with an online interface to generate the files for me.
After that I tried to figure out more in your
Docssection, and as reading the introduction, it madeclickfor me. 😎Basically you help me to serve my own content through an API, for which you also provide code examples to make it easy for me to get that content on my pages.
As a PHP/Laravel developer you solve a recurring problem for me. Which is, that in the Laravel framework I have no CMS when starting a project and no easy way to include a full featured CMS without polluting my codebase. I remember that I searched mutliple times a easy solution where I can manage content in an external CMS and retrieve it through an API.
Surprisingly you built just that, without telling me well enough on your landingpage.
Also, for me it is always nice when a website has a section about the
makers. You could include your twitter handle or at least an e-Mail address. This builds trust in that there is a real person behind that product.Hope this feedback helps, wish you much success.
Cheers
Philipp
Thanks, great points. Definitely going to make a page about who's behind this.
And the wording has been a problem for a while. It's very hard (for me at least) to figure out what wording the landing page should have to accurately show what Headless does. I'm going to give it more thought. Since the Docs introduction helped you, I'll start there.
I'm wondering about Laravel, since I have no experience with it. Would Headless be easy to to add or are there some specific things you need to know, that might be valuable to add to the Headless docs?
Thanks for the feedback!
Congrats on launching! I like the LP a lot, it's nice and clean, professional looking.
I agree with @philreinking, I think the problem/solution could be better stated on the LP.
I think a visual of the workflow (or workflows) would also help...some kind of flow-chart/diagram (a simple one). Sometimes visuals can go a long way if people can grok the problem/solution at a glance. Show me visually how I'd use your product so I can connect the dots. Docs will be useful to dig deeper, but in the initial landing page I first need to understand the problem, and how Headless solves it...or you could lose me before I get to the docs. Are you pitching me on a CMS, or another static site generator/tool. Is this only a problem that people currently using Jeckyll or a tool like it would understand? Who would relate most to this problem? I get the sense that this DOES solve some important problem, but it wasn't super clear to me (although maybe I'm not the audience, not sure).
Btw, I still need a simple tool for my personal dev site so I've been looking into things like Hugo but I haven't used a static site generator before. I'm curious about your product. :-)
Thanks, good points. I think you're right about a diagram. I'll try to create something simple that shows clearly where Headless fits in the big picture.
For your site, Hugo is a great choice. Jekyll (another static site generator) is a bit more popular but personally I prefer Hugo. There's a Hugo example in the Headless quickstart so it shouldn't be a problem to connect them.
I'd recommend hosting your static site on something like Netlify. I host my sites there too and couldn't be happier. It has built in Hugo support.
Let me know if you have questions (about Hugo, Netlify, Headless, anything) and I'll be happy to help.
I think that the use case I tried to describe with my own Laravel experience can be applied to simply all projects built on top of custom codebases where initially no CMS functionality exists.
We developers just use git to version control our contents and add content directly into the codebase. As long as there is not a non-developer person involved, this works very well.
But that’s the point, nearly every non-developer person I talked to about that, is not happy with the fact that he has to open up a text editor, make his changes, and push it to git.
An easy way to solve this problem would be an external CMS which I can just grab the contents from via API, so the editor can just log into that CRM and do his changes there (for my last project I used a Wordpress Plugin for that).
Maybe you could use that point of view to describe your product better? Also, in my opinion, people who are using static site generators have no problem with adding content directly to their codebase, because they are developers. Instead, you could try target developers who need to build or include a CRM into their projects for their non-developer / editor people.
Hope that helps ☺️
Thanks, definitely helps.
I'll try to describe some use cases like these that explain how Headless can help. Should also be more clear when I finish a good overview diagram.