With a vow to outperform – if not overtake – WordPress as the content management interface of choice for digital marketers, Scrivito has introduced a cloud-based CMS for digital agencies and medium and large businesses.
Scrivito enables creation of websites ranging from a single landing page to voluminous corporate websites, with a development approach that emphasizes reusable components. Built as a native cloud service, Scrivito allows customers to spin up another CMS instance, without having to re-install anything or reconfigure databases, search engine indexing, backups or metadata.
Scrivito’s new service takes advantage of ReactJS, an open-source JavaScript language for building user interfaces that handles the view layer of Web and mobile apps, while also permitting reuse of UI components. ReactJS “will make it far easier for agencies and marketing teams to build, edit and manage secure, reliable and cost-effective sites, microsites and landing pages,” Scrivito said in a statement.
Agencies and dev teams that stick with WordPress and similar platforms are doomed to be overtaken by the inevitable shift to JavaScript development technology, according to Thomas Witt, Scrivito’s co-founder and CTO.
The service provider also refers to its service as a “server-less” CMS, meaning it doesn’t require customers to install any content development or management software on their own servers. That means there’s none of the patching, security and scalability issues that come with premises-based content systems, the company said.
Scrivito uses Amazon Web Services for its cloud-based CMS and stores customer data in at least three geographically distributed data centers. Videos, images and other bandwidth-intensive content are delivered through Scrivito’s own content delivery network (CDN) with 60 edge locations worldwide to ensure content is geographically close to consumers. Scrivito claims this reduces page load times, especially for content types like large, high-definition video files.
Scrivito offers individual and small team plans. Per-user enterprise pricing is also available upon request, according to the service provider.
TVSmiles GmbH in Berlin has a mobile app that rewards users for interaction with brands and ads; it offers cash rewards and prizes to help advertisers get closer to consumers via chat, videos, quizzes and customized campaigns that TVSmiles creates using the Scrivito interface.
“What really helps us is the powerful editor functions,” said Gaylord Zach, managing director of TVSmiles. “There’s no technical expertise required or filling out forms. That’s nice, especially for creative people.”
Other early adopters of the Scrivito service include Drizly, an e-commerce site for beer, wine and liquor; IFCO North America, a provider of reuseable plastic containers; and Trox, a manufacturer of ventilation and air conditioning products.
TVSmiles’ Zach said his experience with other content management interfaces has been that they’re either very flexible and hard to configure, or simple and very restrictive with capabilities and user permissions. “Scrivito lets us add our own custom widgets and pieces of content that follow our own business logic and come to life with our user data,” Zach explained. “That’s a powerful combination and it allows us to set up content within minutes.”
As an example, he cited a telephone number feature that’s native to the TVSmiles’ mobile app, which triggers an SMS to a new user’s mobile phone to validate the phone number. On a different platform, the setting up the validation sequence could be complicated and time consuming. “But for our editors, it’s just a phone number and all the magic happens behind it,” Zach said.
Similarly, a “shop now” feature for recipes automatically creates a shopping list for all the ingredients in the TVSmiles app. The time savings for the creator and the end-consumer is a win-win.
