# What Does a Next Generation Website Look Like?

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Most people tend to look at problems from their own unique perspective. Our decisions are highly influenced by how they affect us personally, and therefore a bias in serving our own personal needs guides a lot of the decisions we make. This has a significant impact on the organizations we work for, with mixed results.

As an organization grows in size, silos are formed so that initiatives and focuses are aligned at a manageable level. The question is, how can a group of silos work together to achieve one unified outcome?

One of the hardest things to do is to look at a company-wide problem and internally assess how potential solutions might impact other business units or even the entire company, not just your team, department or organizational unit.

Coming from a mostly technical background, I’ve had the opportunity to work on hundreds of website projects. One of the most common things I’ve seen is that website projects are typically owned almost exclusively by the marketing department.

The marketing department, well they know marketing. Typically they have a strong handle on the brand, the message, and the content. In fact, **the best website projects I’ve been involved in typically join a highly technically capable team with a strong marketing arm working under one roof.**

The overall issue I have witnessed with larger website projects is that an organization is not just marketing, it is also sales, operations, finance, as well as strategy and technology.

As more and more companies take advantage of cloud based technologies to run their business, opportunities on the customer facing side of the business are enabled within their digital offerings.

**This almost always impacts the website.**

The next generation website is built with the entire business in mind. The project opens itself up to stakeholders across silos and this can lead to an immensely impactful offering.

However, due to the need to work across silos, successfully navigating those conversations and building consensus and positive outcomes can be extremely difficult.

The status quo is to keep your website right where it is, within marketing, solving marketing problems and putting other problems from different domains on literally separate domains.

This strategy is not nuanced, and it has the potential to be a competitive disadvantage. Why? Because customers today are expecting a unified digital experience across the entire business.

So what’s the answer?

Go Headless.

In a headless environment, no one department wears the crown. Each aspect of the business becomes eligible to be either a data provider, or a data consumer. Your content management system, for example, is a data provider. However, the CMS does not wear the crown. In a headless environment, the CMS is treated just like any other API serving data to customers.

Take this example, for instance:

A logistics company runs a website built on HubSpot. They have been working on their SEO and creating custom landing pages for certain markets. Their website is owned and operated by the marketing department whose job is to provide leads to sales to close on new business.

In another department, IT is working on a custom software application to provide existing customers with real time access to on demand routed shipment data so that they can keep their eye out for opportunities in the market.

Here’s the rub. The CEO wants to connect the software initiative with the marketing website to enhance the lead generation process by providing **prospective customers with that same data.**

The IT team has looked into integrating it into HubSpot, but it’s a separate tech stack, and really not built with a cross domain development experience in mind. Thus, the project stalls out.

This is where headless comes in. By decoupling the customer-facing aspects (the frontend) from the data layers (the backend), the two platforms can be integrated seamlessly, each providing their own APIs within a frontend platform that is built specifically to be agnostic to any one backend platform or technology.

The development team and the marketing team meet and decide to go headless. At the beginning of the project, marketing and IT decided to build a unified design system to share UI components across projects, for both marketing and IT – creating a consistent, accessible and seamless experience across digital products.

The marketing team finds out that their website partners actually specialize in the frontend technology chosen for the headless site (they chose React). IT and the development partner actually end up equally contributing to the project. The website becomes faster, more accessible in the process and starts to drive new business with very little friction bringing in new customers. No more ‘request a quote’ or ‘request a call’, customers find what they are looking for and set up a business relationship automatically. They even decide to integrate some new AI features to make it easy for prospective customers to ask questions about their data.

This is what the next generation website looks like. Headless. Integrated, and determined to bring value across the entire business.