Axelos reimagines content marketing and portal experience with Contentstack

The delays of legacy systems

Axelos’ legacy CMS was based on a tightly coupled front end, with predefined themes and templates. It also featured a complex user interface to manage content, a rigid database and necessitated hard coding to retrieve requested content from the database before serving it to the theme layout. 

As a result, Axelos faced major challenges in managing the CMS and the content itself. Furthermore, the limited API flexibility frustrated integration. Together, these obstacles made enterprise-level scalability difficult.

The operational result of these technological limitations was a substantial dependency on development teams and slow release cycles. This led to cost increases and delays in updating both the site and content.

Embracing a headless alternative

Recognizing the need to uplevel its content experience, Axelos sought to relaunch the MyAxelos website.  This developed into a strategy to upgrade the underlying architecture and introduce modern technology into the Axelos stack.

A key element of this strategy was the replacement of the legacy CMS.  Following a thorough review of the market, Axelos chose Contentstack headless CMS.  Contentstack’s headless, best-of-breed technology would enable Axelos to develop the front end separately. This would enable Axelos to create content separately from deciding how it would be displayed.

Indu Gopinath, IT & Outsourcing director at PeopleCert, explained: “We chose Contentstack as it gave us the liberty to allow our developers to write applications using any programming language and use any tools and frameworks in the development process.  Critically, we didn’t have to worry about the platform on which those results would be consumed. This gave us complete control over how and where our content appears, as well as enabling our customers to access content how they wish.”

Marketing and membership portal experience

Contentstack has been deployed throughout the Axelos marketing site and the MyAxelos consultant portal to help consultants manage their profile. MyAxelos is an exclusive membership program that helps consultants stay up to date with frameworks.

The portal includes a variety of content.  This includes industry news and best practices, articles and white papers by subject-matter experts, case studies, exam preparation materials, guidance videos and a community of industry professionals. The MyAxelos portal uses Contentstack in conjunction with Gatsby, an >open-source site generator. As content is changed in Contentstack, a webhook is fired in the MyAxelos system to generate a new build with the updated content. React is then used as a front-end technology to display the content to the end user.

“We deliver a wide range of content that propels the careers of IT specialists throughout the UK,” Gopinath said. “We need a fast, reliable method of ensuring they have the most up-to-date material to support their best-practice journey.”

Following the implementation of Contentstack at Axelos, both product and content teams can create experiences easier and faster. The use of global fields enables the teams to reuse content. This means that development is faster and assets are used more, creating a greater return on investment. 

“Contentstack has enabled us to manage content thousands of times faster,” Gopinath said. “The end user can access our material without needing the development team to make it usable.”

As well as faster content publishing, Axelos has also seen a substantial reduction in development costs.

“The ability to deliver content to our user-base quickly and in the method of their choosing is a business-critical issue for us,” said Gopinath. “Contentstack has enabled us to realize goals of both agility and speed whilst we improve how we serve our market.”