How Jostens Went from Legacy to Hybrid Headless with dotCMS
Intro
Founded in 1897, Jostens is an American manufacturer of memorabilia. The company is most known for its production of class and championship rings and yearbooks, as well as for sparking the adoption of a cultural icon.
Challenge
Legacy Systems, Slow Updates, and Mobile Demands: Overcoming Jostens’ Content Challenge
One of the first challenges the CapTech team found was that Jostens’ tech stack was composed of custom, Java-based web pages alongside a legacy CMS. It also included an outdated UX/UI running on on-premise hosting. However, it wasn’t possible to improve their existing installation any further, which called for a new CMS that would enable Jostens marketing team to update content in minutes, not weeks.
One of the particularities of Jostens’ website is that it goes beyond a standard brochure website. Since it has such rich imagery, Jostens needed a website that was fast and efficient, even during peak times, and whose servers didn’t collapse under heavy traffic.
Also, since a sizable chunk of Jostens’ visitors came from mobile devices, they needed to deliver content not only to a website, but also to other devices at the same time— a perfect fit for dotCMS’ hybrid headless architecture.
One of the main benefits of dotCMS is that it provides an intuitive interface for managing content and creating content types and templates. Also, the fact that it works both as a traditional and as a fully integrable headless CMS that enabled us to integrate it to Jostens’ eCommerce platform.
Matthew Shankle
Senior Consultant, CapTech
Solution
Unified Commerce & Content: A Single-Source Experience with dotCMS
The CapTech team built an eCommerce platform in dotCMS using the same URL. They also leveraged dotCMS’ APIs to pull the header, footer, and primary navigation to the eCommerce platform. As a result, everything looks like a unified website with a single URL, but the website is split in the backend, with dotCMS handling both content and navigation behind the scenes.
Thus, when the marketing team or business users make a change, the results are automatically reflected in the eCommerce platform too, empowering the content team to create digital experiences.
Second, CapTech decided to leverage dotCMS’ image storage solution. The team wrote a custom dotCMS connector that enables image preview in the DAM before they’re brought into dotCMS.
Third, the CapTech team used AWS Cloudfront to host all the website images. They leveraged a dotCMS custom solution that included dynamic image sizing to the CMS to optimize image storing.
To make this all happen, the implementation team used dotCMS’, API-driven bulk import tool, which enabled them to pull content from other systems in a format that can be used by dotCMS.
Results
Jostens Accelerates Content & Campaign Velocity with dotCMS
Using dotCMS, Captech provided Jostens with a robust, hybrid CMS that made it simpler for them to create content, build new pages, as well as upload and manage images.
With the help of dotCMS, now Jostens can adapt to the market’s needs quickly and efficiently. They’re now able to create, test, and deploy new content and campaigns, which translates into time savings and overall content efficiency for the team.
Thanks to a modern CMS with a cutting-edge approach to both UX and UI, the website design is now more representative of the brand and its status as a leader in the jewelry and memorabilia industry.
With dotCMS, Jostens team incorporated 1.3k new images into their website, giving it a much more interactive, on-brand experience. Also, with dotCMS’ personalization engine, the new navigation bar appeals to different personas, which is something the old navigation couldn’t do.
On the development side, dotCMS also improved the configuration management process, going from development to testing to production in less than three weeks, which allowed CapTech to finish development sprints and begin testing quickly.
The speed to market for new content and campaigns is one of dotCMS’ main differentiators. Also, the time savings and efficiencies for the teams that implementing dotCMS has brought solid wins to Jostens.
All in all, with the help of dotCMS and our implementation partner CapTech, Jostens has a new, modern website that reflects the personality of the brand and its position as one of America’s leading memorabilia brands.