Simmons & Simmons achieves full control over presentation and data with Contentstack

Simmons & Simmons was using Sitecore CMS, and was struggling with an intensely manual process to keep its website and product site up to date and efficient. Any updates to the websites needed to be created manually, and it was difficult to keep content and presentation data separate. Simmons & Simmons also faced limitations with how to present templated pages, forcing them to use scripting within the content which slowed down the process of making changes. 

As a legal authority, many of the publications on the site are legacy, and may have been written many years ago. There are thousands of articles that need to be kept as legacy information for clients and users, and migrating them to the latest version or moving them to a new channel or platform was becoming a huge challenge. 

Simmons & Simmons also found that there were a lot of unauthorized changes being made, where content was updated in the body of the original text, or where specific elements had been redesigned, and the data wouldn’t copy over accurately when it was transported to a new location. Without becoming a barrier to creative freedom, the business wanted a smarter solution to manage their wealth of data, including not just content but also client and customer information. 

A headless CMS was an obvious choice for Simmons & Simmons, to get more control over both presentation and content. “We wanted to have complete presentational control”, said Taslima Yousuf, Digital Business Analyst. “We also wanted a distributed application ecosystem where we weren’t tied to any specific product. There was no way to do that before. Contentstack was the simplest headless CMS we saw, with an intuitive user interface, and customizable models.”

Simmons & Simmons can now recreate new sections of their website and product site, without any need to rewrite the code. Stakeholders simply make changes, send them across, and these arrive in the right areas automatically. 

In particular, Contentstack’s Modular Blocks feature has been really useful for Simmons & Simmons, to allow the business to play with the layout of pages, and give more options to content editors to be able to adapt any template. New CTAs, images, or video components can be added with ease, without the risk of breaking the page. “This has been great for user experience,” Yousuf said. “We lock down parts like the header for example, and then we give the freedom to chop and change buttons, links or images to add personalization and targeted UX.”

The company is also making use of Contentstack Marketplace, looking towards extending their capabilities with image components, audio, and even podcasts. Developers can use the easy integrations offered by Marketplace to build out a tool within Contentstack and then adjust it to meet their specific business needs. 

From a development perspective, integration capabilities have also made day-to-day work far easier.