
Ask HN: CMS for static pages on a React website? - bchelli
Hello,<p>I&#x27;m looking for a tool or a service that will allow a marketing team or a product team to add static pages to an existing site built in React. I have two use cases:<p>1. Lead generation, creating custom pages for different type of customers with forms to get in contact with our Sales team<p>2. SEO, creating content on our site<p>Ideally I&#x27;m looking for solution type WebFlow that a non-technical person can interact with but embedded on an existing site.<p>Thanks for the help,
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romanovcode
Best thing you can do is proxy pass a path of your website to some CMS,
however when your CMS will have to execute CTAs on your SPA, good luck with
that.

Worst thing you can do is allow HTML fields in your Headless CMS and pass it
through in your SPA but it is like going back to 90s way of doing content.

SPA is not a good case for this type of website. What you need is WordPress.
This problem cannot get solved with Headless CMS.

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bchelli
Thanks @romanovcode!

This is indeed hard/impossible to implement this routing logic on a SPA...
Also I would lose common header, footer and style in general.

I think this is why most people are using a blog.xxxx.tld with a WordPress,
basically to save them the headache.

On the other side, I'm looking at SEO and I wonder if splitting my domain
authority between two subdomain is the way to go.

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simplecto
I think you might be looking for a headless cms. Lots out there so I will link
you to a directory site.

[https://headlesscms.org/](https://headlesscms.org/)

I have been looking seriously at directus and strapi

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bchelli
Thanks @simplecto!

I did not know about this directory. I have looked at Strapi in the past, this
is indeed a great tool, but I'm looking for a tool that does not need a tech
team to build the front end piece (the head) of the CMS.

Ideally, I'm looking for some kind of tool or SaaS to build content and a
custom UI at the same time (WebFlow like but embedded in my site).

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simplecto
You are welcome! You might also look at Microsoft powerapps, bubble.io, or
ionicframework?

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bchelli
bubble.io seems like a good match in term of the editor, I hope this can be
embedded in an existing site, I'll give it a try ;)

Thanks!

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kojeovo
Contentful?

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bchelli
Thanks @kojeovo!

Contentful, from my understanding, is a good headless CMS, but does not allow
a product team or a marketing team to manage the design/layout of new pages.
Basically I would still need an engineer to implement the structure of the
page, create the style, etc...

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comis
Correct, Contentful is a CMS.

Question for you though: why would you want product/marketing people feebly
attempting to create new pages/layouts with some tool when you could just have
a React engineer code up whatever they design with ease? I mean I get it,
graphic designers and business analysts are cheaper than engineers, but if it
takes them 2-3x as long (or more) to do the same job are you really saving any
money?

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bchelli
Thanks for taking the time @comis, this is a valid question.

My assumptions are the following:

1\. Dev cost is not only the time spent by the Dev team but, planning, project
management, back and forth between tech and the different stakeholders. On top
of that, you can add deployment cost, QA, etc...

2\. Miss-opportunity cost, I feel like there is a trade-off between developing
core features and supporting features (marketing, sales static pages) and that
on a competitive market, most of the time, supporting features are not being
prioritized due to a lack of tech resource.

3\. Finally, small initiatives have a huge overhead for marketing and sales
teams, if adding a drop-down to a form requires to create a ticket, ask the
product team to spec it, design it, and add it to a Sprint,... Then, the drop-
down will probably seat there until it becomes a critical issue or until it
can be bundled with other small tickets. Which might never happen...

This is basically to avoid all of this that I'm looking for a CMS to embed in
our existing site.

Thanks,

