5 ways we build better websites for merchants using Craft CMS

Despite its use by brands large and small (according to BuiltWith, over 40,000 businesses are active users), Craft CMS remains one of the best-kept digital marketing secrets.

Craft is an open-source content management system (CMS) designed with content creators in mind. It’s flexible, customizable, and affordable (pricing starts at $299 per project).

What does this mean for modern ecomm businesses?

When they’re built well, there are many advantages to Craft sites. Below are five ways we use Craft to develop websites for merchants eager to scale.

1. Flexible content creation & management

2. Fully customizable websites

3. Craft Commerce

4. Omnichannel content

5. Future-proofing

Empowering content marketers with ultimate flexibility is the key to growth.

Does that sound far-fetched? Maybe.

But when you need to outperform competitors, especially with behemoths like Amazon, it's clear that expertise-based commerce — differentiating yourself and your brand with authoritative content — is the future.

Sites that don't give content marketers creative options to display content will be disadvantaged in the fast-moving digital marketplace.

In other words, avoiding a frustrating author experience (AX) is a positive investment in the virtuous circle of content and commerce!

We support marketers by giving them more control over designing what they need. We work with our clients to take full advantage of the endless customization available with Craft — a dreamy proposition for most marketers.

For example, because product entries are the same as any other content entry — with unlimited options for treatment and placement — it’s easier for marketers to innovate and get creative with content modeling.

Other features include unlimited pages, flexible fields, the ability to create unique templates and forms, a variety of section types, localization, and categories and tags to keep everything organized.

Plus, we can add helpful usage tips, instructions, and reminders to customized components that reduce authoring friction. That way, marketing teams are better positioned to use the site similarly, which ensures greater brand coherence and harmony.

Beyond supporting content and marketing teams, we can customize your entire site. To do this, we don't just start building and hope things fall into place as we go.

Instead, we take the time to plan out what a site's data structure will be. We think through what performance-enhancing development we'll do and how to future-proof your build from the start.

Essentially, we study what you need as the client and adapt Craft to fit your business.

And because we’re not locked into pre-conceived templates, we can make virtually any improvement to the front and back end at any time. This includes personalizing sites according to each shopper's unique behavior and needs, like developing dynamic views that allow users to curate their preferred content.

In addition, many marketing websites with legacy systems require various apps to manage day-to-day operations, like campaigns, which can get expensive and cumbersome.

We typically build websites that require fewer apps because we can create the functionality you need directly in Craft. And we can design and build easy-to-manage Craft plugins specifically for your use case.

This level of customization eliminates gaps in functionality or the unnecessary bloat of off-the-shelf systems. Instead, we can build a website suited to your business model to save time and allow you to focus on what matters most — your customers.

Craft is incredibly flexible in its content modeling and has an ecommerce engine called Craft Commerce.

Craft, plus a best-in-class ecommerce engine, is a game changer for merchants using content marketing to distinguish themselves in the marketplace.

Using powerful APIs, we can “tie” your Craft CMS website to Commerce, enabling seamless integration of product updates.

Not only can you add as much content to your products as you like, but with the right approach to development, you can also have total control over how that content is displayed now and into the future as your business grows.

In other words, you don't have to know today who you will be as a business tomorrow because Craft is entirely extensible and adaptable.

We understand that there's virtually nothing you can't have or do with the right Craft build, making us ideal strategic partners for setting DTC businesses up for growth.

It bears repeating that, with the explosion of online businesses in today's post-pandemic reality, content-driven commerce can bring outsized benefits.

When shoppers feel more connected to brands, knowledgeable about products, and empowered to make a purchase right for them, that's a win for everybody.

For example, when selling a jacket, a product description with copy describing the material, images of a model wearing it, and a helpful sizing chart can overcome barriers to purchase.

Further, delivering that content wherever the customer is — whether shopping on a website, on social, via a smartwatch, on a mobile app or an in-store screen — is the next level in providing a seamless customer experience.

To support omnichannel content, we build headless websites that enable merchants to generate sales on whatever device their customers use. We also develop our headless sites to be incredibly fast, so customers aren’t waiting for a page to load so they can browse and buy.

Lastly, headless websites provide additional benefits, like the ability to gather information about shoppers’ behavior at each touch-point, thereby enhancing personalization.

The fifth and final way we build better websites for merchants with Craft CMS is by future-proofing your website.

As business owners, conversations about the future naturally include wanting to grow and create something better — for yourself, your colleagues, and your customers.

If that's where you're at — ready to grow your business because you have a vision of a better future — you deserve to have a platform that won't hold you back.

The way we build with Craft lets your creative inspiration flow without limits. It makes it easy to follow new ideas and innovate because we develop a website that can change with you.

With a well-built Craft site, you can relax knowing that you've invested in a long-term solution that can scale with your business. So, it's not a problem to start small and grow big.

And if you're already big, you'll be happy to learn that, by optimizing Craft with correct development, you can continue to scale without having to think about a future re-platform, saving time and money!

On a final note, to be fair, you may experience a downside to our Craft builds. With a customized, easy-to-use marketing website and powerful ecommerce engine, your sales could grow through the roof, forcing you to hire more staff to help fulfill orders…

(But you can handle that, right?)

* Hero photo by fauxels on Pexels