As a PaaS (Platform as a Service) company, at platformOS, we ensure our partners are at the heart of everything we do. We believe that true innovation and success come from strong, collaborative relationships. By partnering with forward-thinking organizations, we can lead the future of web services and deliver flexible, scalable, and trustworthy results. We work closely with our partners to understand their unique needs and goals, providing tailored solutions that drive their success so they can focus on creating reliable services for their clients. Together, we create a dynamic ecosystem where mutual success is the ultimate goal.

With this series of partner articles, we aim to highlight some of our partners' capabilities to solve problems their clients face. Our partners bring unique solutions and expertise, helping businesses overcome challenges and achieve their goals. Stay tuned as we highlight their innovative approaches and success stories.

The problem of managing website content and SEO challenges

Modern businesses often face significant challenges in managing website content and optimizing SEO:

• Content quality and relevance: Creating high-quality, relevant content that resonates with the target audience while also incorporating SEO (Search Engine Optimization) best practices (keywords, meta tags, etc.) can be demanding. 
• Consistency and updates: Regularly updating content to keep it fresh and relevant is essential for SEO. However, maintaining consistency across different types of content (blogs, articles, product pages) and ensuring timely updates can be resource-intensive.
• Technical SEO: Ensuring the website's technical aspects (site speed, mobile responsiveness, SEO-friendly URL page structure, etc.) comply with SEO best practices requires ongoing attention and technical expertise. Technical issues can impact search engine rankings.
• User experience (UX): Balancing SEO requirements with a positive user experience is challenging. Factors like intuitive navigation, accessibility, and page load times contribute to user satisfaction and SEO performance.
  
  

How our partner, DataOT, solves these problems

DataOT helps businesses overcome these challenges when it comes to data publishing. But most importantly, they excel at SEO. After all, why invest in a website if it does not help you win the SEO game for your industry domain/focus?

Being a SaaS offering, everyone is always on the latest version, ensuring you get all the new features right away - no more waiting around or dealing with messy updates or plug-ins (aka WordPress!). It just works, plain and simple. The DataOT platform is highly flexible, eliminating the need for you to have to adapt your operations to suit the tool, as is the case with most content management systems (CMS). Plus, it's blazing fast with built-in SEO, so your website performs like a dream right out of the box. Whether you're a tech wizard or someone who just wants things to be easy, DataOT is made for you. They're here to take the hassle out of managing your online presence, providing a smooth, efficient experience for all levels of users.

When designing the platform, DataOT wanted a solution that was built for speed and efficiency. They’ve been building complete CMS for 20+ years now. DataOT is fully aware of the pitfalls of WordPress sites - they work great until they don't - in that a simple update often breaks the site! For that reason, upgrades, theme changes, and maintenance costs for WordPress can be 3-5 times the cost of the original build (over two years). Shopify can be good for an eCommerce experience, but anything outside that would require significant development and plug-ins.

Key features to help solve the problem

The following key features of DataOT work together to address common challenges in website content management and SEO. By providing seamless integration, flexibility, and ease of use, DataOT ensures that businesses can maintain high-quality, relevant content that is consistently updated and technically optimized. The comprehensive eCommerce capabilities, advanced user management, and robust caching solutions further enhance the overall user experience, making it easier for businesses to achieve their goals and succeed in their field.

Data focus

DataOT is developer-focused and designer-friendly. They understand web designers want to use their tools, whether Canva, Photoshop, or some other (HTML) design software. They do not force anyone to use an inbuilt page designer. On-page designers often look impressive, but they tend to cause things to break in practice. To address this, they have extended the power of platformOS by introducing selectable layouts, pages or direct slugs, and dynamic views. This extension enables designers to create stunning, functional designs (in their tools!) while configuring selectable views for non-technical users.

‘Views’ has changed the game

DataOT identified that clients want different options for the same section on a website. For example, press releases or blogs might have the same content type but be presented differently. Views allow the website owner to select the ‘view’ that suits that specific content. DataOT then only shows the form fields required for that view, and the front end renders the content accordingly. Less technical users only need to focus on the content!

eCommerce

DataOT has built a complete eCommerce system comparable to anything in the market, including unlimited custom fields, shipping plugins, taxation, webhooks, and more. Integrated payment gateways include Stripe, PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Afterpay, eWAY, and more.

User CRM

platformOS handles the grunt work of user management, but DataOT takes it further with their CRM. Users can add any combination of custom fields, such as date fields, files, images, and text boxes. They have clients with complete event management systems running in the CRM.

Roles and permissions

Users can sometimes be scared to submit or access sections they don't understand. No problem — give them only the access they need with full "create, read, update, delete" permissions. For example, set up roles such as "Editor" and only give them access to specific web apps or roles with pre-set permissions, like "Packers" that would have read-only access to orders. Users can be in multiple defined roles, and their permissions will be automatically blended.

Truly no-code adding and editing of content

When introducing DataOT to clients, they tell those clients that if they can update their LinkedIn profile, they can use DataOT. There are no command lines or uploading of files, everything is done in the browser via drag-and-drop or cut-and-paste. And remember to use the inbuilt AI to check or write content for you! The system uses prompts and won't allow you to save where required data is missing.

Publishing and expiry dates

All content on the site has publishing and expiry dates. This feature is perfect for preloading data into a ‘web app’ (a mini database) for the coming week and automatically publishing it at a preset time. DataOT clients use web apps as complete traditional web banner systems with publishing and expiry dates, allowing for specials or text to be displayed only for a specific time period.

Cache controller

Caching is essential for a fast user experience, but setting caching that is too long means content won't be displayed quickly, while setting it too short diminishes the benefits of the cache. Caching a page or function allows DataOT to store the final copy of the HTML page or piece of code without having to query the database for every page load. The DataOT web app system includes a cache controller function to manage this balance effectively and automatically and to bust the cache only when content has changed!

Webhooks/APIs-for-everything

DataOT built webhooks to run based on multiple cases, including form submissions, orders, and web app changes. These can be run internally and externally and have a preprocessor to transform any data before sending. Use cases include FTPing changes to an external server, extended validation checking for records, connecting records to HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Salesforce, Zapier, or just about any API out there.

Direct slugs

DataOT identified early on that clients wanted the ability to have short, meaningful URLs directly related to the page content. They’ve created direct slugs, or ‘dslugs’, to allow clients to have a complete landing page experience with no-code content selection.

Views, granular layouts, granular auth policies

DataOT has built entire websites based on data-driven form content inputs. But they take it even further in that they configure each dslug to have its selectable layout and even its own auth policy to view the page.

Disconnected callbacks

Timeouts are gone! Some actions can take time on the web, especially when dealing with large data or slow external APIs. Without getting too technical, they invented their technology to wait until something is returned before starting something new. It's like a WebSocket promise that executes a callback of code only once the data is available.

Who is DataOT?

Built in 2021 as a marketing technology platform, DataOT is a 100% Australian content automation platform with eCommerce and AI. We serve both B2B and B2C markets and cater to various industries, including medical, charity, housing, retail, and financial organizations. Created on the back of platformOS, DataOT operates without requiring dedicated DevOps or large software development teams, saving you money. DataOT operates as a software as a service model (SaaS), with every instance running the latest version and being automatically upgraded to ensure users always get the latest features.

The future

DataOT is looking to partner with B2B agencies where you bring your own developers, or we build the site and, as an agency, you update it for your end customer, or a hybrid of these. For end customers who want to integrate and automate with existing platforms to save time and money and want an extremely fast, easy-to-use, out-of-the-box SEO-friendly website experience, DataOT is the go.

For more information, visit DataOT or contact them at info@dataot.com.