Case Study

A Modern CMS and Website with Statamic

We recently revamped the DivergentSoft website. In doing so, we made the decision to move from straight Laravel, to an architecture that leverages Laravel and Statamic.

Out with the old

DivergentSoft’s website was showing its age. It had not seen a significant redesign since 2016. Needless to say technology, design trends, and frankly DivergentSoft itself had all changed a lot in the interim.

The landing page of the previous version of the DivergentSoft website

A common challenge

Approaching the redesign of the DivergentSoft website, we observed a similar challenge among several of our clients. Simply…they needed a straightforward way for non-technical employees to modify and create content within their applications.

Even we struggled with this challenge. When the previous website was created, it was a safe assumption a developer would be available to add a new page, or create a blog post, commit it to source control, and deploy it to the website server. The problem with the assumption was that when developers were doing client work, that always took priority (as it should). The result is a website with no new content for 7 years.

An opportunity to learn

We knew that if we could solve our own challenge, we could solve those of our clients as well. As we considered solutions, we had our various client applications in the back of our mind. For our choice to benefit our clients, it had to fulfill a few requirements.

Familiarity. The ideal solution would align with our expertise and web development strengths. Leveraging the tools we already use would be a big benefit, and allow us to deliver quickly.
Simplicity. Our CMS would need powerful and flexible content creation tools, yet it would need to be straightforward to use for a wide range of users of varying technical expertise.
Business Logic. Our clients often require customized and sophisticated business logic. Any content management solution could not limit our ability to customize web applications.
API First. Some of our web applications serve as the content management systems for the native mobile apps we have developed. The mobile apps leverage custom APIs we have built. Our new content management system would ideally allow us to separate the data from its presentation, and operate in a headless manner as needed.
Extendability. We did not want the CMS to limit us. We needed to be able to build and customize applications, as easily as with a Laravel application.

With the above requirements in mind, we quickly zeroed in on Statamic.

Statamic is a modern, clean, and highly adaptable CMS that can run full-stack, headless, on flat files or databases, & as an SSG.

Statamic Team

Statamic checked all the boxes for us. From a developer’s perspective, it is built directly on top of Laravel, our web application framework of choice. We know Laravel well. It is completely extendable and we can continue to benefit from the entire Laravel ecosystem.

For those creating content, Statamic’s primary content editor is first class. It is powerful, simple to use, and highly customizable. It also supports collaborative content creation, live previews, and real-time multi-user editing. All important features for our enterprise clients.

In with the new

You are looking at our new website, created with Laravel and Statamic. The development process was straightforward and there were no surprises along the way. As expected our Laravel knowledge proved advantageous. When we needed to go further, the Statamic developer documentation was first class.

For us, our goals were achieved:

New. We updated from our dated 2016 website to something more modern and versatile.
Content creation. We are no longer calling on developers to create content for our website. Anyone can create a new job posting, case study, or whatever else they can imagine.
Learning. Our experience illuminates opportunities for our clients. Particularly those with complex business requirements who also need to rise above the complexity to easily create content on their web properties.

Where to from here

For our clients with outdated Wordpress based websites, and those who need to improve their approach to website content management, while allowing room for customization and uniqueness, we will certainly be exploring Laravel and Statamic as an opportunity.

Let's chat...

If you think your project could benefit from Laravel and Statamic, we would love to help.