The need for a CMS

Dovetail had their favourite frameworks for building apps and web platforms that can handle millions of users, but they didn’t have a CMS that they really liked. Their own website was in need of a refresh and they wanted a solution where edits wouldn’t have to go through a developer. They decided to rebuild their own website to experiment with new CMSs and find alternatives that would be scalable, easy-to-use, and customisable enough to use on complex much larger projects.

Starting with Gatsby

The first thing Dovetail did when looking for a headless CMS was to find something that supports GatsbyJS. "We like Gatsby, it’s stable and modern. We just needed to find a CMS that integrates with it easily.” says Nick Clark, senior software engineer at Dovetail.

There were a number of options on the market but most seemed too inflexible and many didn’t have an attractive pricing plan. “I found an article comparing DatoCMS with Contentful. DatoCMS sounded more developer friendly as they really listened to feedback” Nick remarks.

Getting DatoCMS up and running with Gatsby was really easy thanks to the source plugin. The Dovetail team immediately had access to the GraphQL API they know and love and were able to use it to power all the content on their website.

A superior CMS experience

In addition to how easy it is and use and get started, the Dovetail team was especially impressed by how feature-rich DatoCMS is. The ability to run GraphQL queries to grab images in an intelligent way can speed up a website by not serving the wrong sized images. Image source sets are automatically generated and DatoCMS renders different sized images based on device meaning that no unnecessary bandwidth is ever wasted.

The SEO features that DatoCMS offers allows companies to fall back on intelligently defined defaults even if certain meta tags aren’t set. For example, Open Graph meta tags are automatically generated with the first image on a page. It’s smart defaults like this that make DatoCMS so powerful to use.

We first rebuilt our own website with DatoCMS to try it out and we love it so much we’re now rolling it out to our biggest client projects.

Get to know Dovetail

Dovetail is a full-service product development agency that specialises in building digital products that scale. Owned and operated by a team of entrepreneurs that have built and sold technology businesses before, they now build and invest in fast-growing companies. As an example, Dovetail helps design, build and maintain Afterpay’s web and mobile products during which time they’ve grown to a +$15B international payments leader.