Refactored - Momentum begins here
Storyblok is the first headless CMS that works for developers & marketers alike.
In recent years, low code and freeware solutions for website builds have impacted the CMS industry. Decision makers, with marketing directors chief among them, are looking for user-friendly and simple content governance that seamlessly integrates with marketing automation and CRM solutions. More than ever before, agencies are prioritizing best of breed, future-proof solutions with inherent interoperability to solve current business needs.
One such agency is Refactored, a full-service B2B agency based in Colorado. Led by co-founders Rob Bean and Kile Lindgren, they guide a team passionate about strong branding, customer-focused strategy, and the delivery of messages using pioneering technologies. Their empathy for marketing professionals and the complex problems they face helps their clients mature in their approach to marketing.
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By providing strategies and solutions that build greater capability, improve marketing performance, and ensure a lasting positive impact on their business, Refactored provides an uncommon agency experience. They are firm believers in developing genuine partnerships with their clients to become extended members of the client’s marketing team.
Refactored specializes in marketing for complex, B2B companies that need to speed up, get unstuck, or start from the ground up. The agency develops and executes strategies based on deep industry understandings, audience insights, and recognition of the right channels and technologies to accomplish their goals. Their clients don't just achieve incremental gains, they leap forward. In a nutshell, marketing momentum begins at Refactored.
When taking on a project, they strive to deliver integrated, intuitive solutions to meet their clients’ objectives. Fundamental to achieving this is understanding the context of the end user to connect customer’s paint points to the benefits of the client’s product. Once that understanding is in place, Refactored employs an integrated approach to solve multi-dimensional problems: They often complete digital-, content-, and web-based projects simultaneously so clients can quickly go to market with compatible solutions.
Limitations of the current market
From Refactored’s perspective, traditional CMS solutions have become overbuilt and bloated. In recent years, they’ve observed vendors stripping out features, delivering less functionality, charging more, and all the while shifting the accountability of the CMS’ success onto client development teams.
Conversely, headless CMS allows agencies to take control of the coding environment and editing experience in a liberating way. It gives access to a framework that can be built effectively, efficiently, and economically.
Storyblok has helped us be more nimble and flexible as a business – we can deliver complex Enterprise solutions in a shorter period of time, while being supported by an architecture that facilitates the deployment of client content anywhere with ease.
Refactored’s co-founders see traditional, all-in-one, monolithic CMS vendors making platform choices that are not focused on customer choice, ultimately diverting control from the customer to the vendor. For instance, because most CMS platforms have a unified codebase between the CMS administration tools and the website front end (the head), it requires that your website be developed using the same underlying language as the CMS. The problem comes when that underlying technology changes and the customer is now forced to essentially replatform between versions of the CMS software–often at a time when a replatforming project may not have been in the plan or budget. Also, some CMS vendors bundle and charge for integrated marketing features that lack the sophistication of a best-of-breed solution. These days most brands have made heavy investments in other marketing technologies and find all-in-one CMS solutions to be dated, redundant, and they simply don’t want to pay for features they won’t use. This type of approach to CMS limits customer choice, adds complexity, and increases the cost of content management—minimizing benefit to the customer.
In contrast, Refactored describes Storyblok’s headless CMS as a fitting antidote to this problem because they ascribe to a customer-centric business model. Headless CMS delivers ultimate flexibility for how and where you can build different front-end “heads”—using different technologies where appropriate. Additionally, because the underlying technology is cloud-based, upgrades to the CMS Administrator can be made without disruptive impacts to a customer's website, so you don’t have to worry about the vendors next software upgrade breaking your site or requiring a technology overhaul. And because a Headless CMS is just managing content, you can choose whatever solution best meets your organizations' needs for managing conversion and doing marketing automation. So when it’s time to redesign the website, or when you’re ready to move to Headless, using Storyblok’s modular methodology allows developers to replatform projects with agility:
Storyblok has helped us manage the process of upgrading websites in a way that’s less disruptive than in the past. We’ve been able to bring headless components alongside the traditional CMS platforms and migrate to the headless solution on the client’s timeframe, and without the shock and awe typically associated with a replatforming project.
Introduction to Storyblok
Refactored’s founding partners have over 15 years of experience in working with numerous traditional CMS solutions, chiefly Kentico Xperience. In their efforts to elevate their activity around a more modern architecture and scalable infrastructure, they took a deep dive into the headless CMS market. After narrowing down their choice to three or four headless solutions, Refactored then put the shortlist of candidates to the test with actual client projects. This pragmatic approach gave Refactored confidence that the preferred solution will meet intricate client needs while supporting an efficient and affordable development methodology.
We chose Storyblok because it provides our teams the building blocks to structure client solutions that help us solve often complex content and design challenges–elegantly. The visual editor, instant preview, drag and drop block building methodology, and the ability to structure and organize content by taxonomy and folders has been essential to delivering solutions that meet technical requirements in a way that our editors also enjoy.
One of Refactored’s unique selling points is in the care that they take when integrating with a CMS. They maintain that clients should enjoy the tools they’ve invested in, so when they define workflows and determine content structure, they are also ensuring that the editing process will be intuitive to manage. Naturally, this positioned Storyblok as the ideal choice, because content can be structured with great flexibility, and can be set up to manage content in a way that simply makes sense to content authors.
We’ve found the team at Storyblok to be exceptionally helpful as we’ve learned the technology and with helping us realize the power of deploying into a more modern hosting solution than with traditional CMS.
Refactored’s team has been in the .NET world for well over a decade. And while the agency still supports many of the legacy systems they’ve built in that time, they are looking forward to leveraging Storyblok as one of their modern JAMstack solutions that keep them at the forefront of the website development enterprise.
Technology of choice
Storyblok can easily support a variety of methods and approaches, which Refactored finds advantageous. Most of their clients build on React-based solutions, but not all use the same technology for site building.
For instance, Automox uses Next.JS and WRI leverages Gatsby; with Storyblok, they are free to use whatever build framework the client prefers. And since many of their clients have aggressive SEO programs, having a high performing website helps with both customer experience and meeting page speed goals with Google. Refactored achieves this by frequently leveraging a JAMstack approach (and static site generation) with which they’ve dramatically increased site speed—without sacrificing a dynamic customer experience.
Typical Refactored project stacks include:
- Coding frameworks: Next.JS and Gatsby
- Hosting: Netlify (Business and Enterprise)
- Database: Fauna
- Search: Algolia
- E-Commerce: Stripe
- Chat: Drift
- CRM: Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics
- Marketing Automation: Marketo, Pardot, and HubSpot
Case Study: WRI
Western Research Institute (WRI) is a non-profit in the asphalt research space. The organization sought a fast, modern, and affordable website solution that allows them to share their capabilities and advanced technologies with industry stakeholders. Lacking a preference for a particular CMS, they simply wanted a tool that was easy to use and helped them reach their goals.
WRI has been a long-term client of Refactored, as the agency has supported them in numerous CMS solutions over the years. This includes a long stint in Ektron, a short-term move to Sitefinity, a full site test with DatoCMS, and finally a full migration to Storyblok CMS in the last year.
WRI and Refactored identified Storyblok as the technology platform that would best support their multi-phased expansion of website services in the coming year. In phase one, Refactored put their main website on Storyblok’s modern and agile foundation. Phase two will entail expanding the solution to support an annual industry conference they run by integrating e-commerce with Stripe. In the third phase, they will leverage Storyblok to evolve their annual conference into a powerful community with paid member features.
Storyblok has helped us to deliver blok-based highly flexible layouts, improve content rendering times, and the ability to service the high-availability and security needs of both our Enterprise and mid-Market clients with equal effectiveness
In WRI’s implementation, Refactored combined Storyblok with Gatsby, Netlify, Algolia, Fauna, and Stripe.
Refactored had originally built the site in DatoCMS, but found the solution deficient. Like many other headless CMS solutions, Dato lacked a real-time client preview and limited the way websites can be structured, forcing developers into adopting rigid content models and methods. Pivoting to Storyblok proved fruitful because it gave them the flexibility to build freely.
Partner of the Month
Specializing in marketing for complex B2B companies that need to speed up, get unstuck, or start from the ground up, Refactored develops and executes strategies based on deep industry understandings, audience insights, and recognition of the right channels and technologies. Accustomed to going the extra-mile for their clients, they found an ideal partner in Storyblok to solve complex challenges and deliver enterprise solutions. We are happy to announce that they are the March Storyblok Partner of the Month!
You can get in touch with them by visiting their website or writing them an email. You can also find them on our partners list.
