Ghost designers – that’s how Erwin and Uwe of Heinrichs & Heinrichs (we’ll call them H&H) think of themselves.
Their mission is to help large and small companies within their growing client base build out beautiful digital experiences, while working behind the scenes. “Place us on a team, and we will figure something out,” Uwe said.
While H&H are creative types with extensive graphic design experience, programming isn’t necessarily their forte. “We tried to bring new ideas for the web to life,” Uwe said. “We have great ideas, but until recently, haven’t have the opportunity to realize them.”
H&H tried collaborating with software programmers, but after hearing “it’s not possible,” and “we can’t do it that way” too many times, they needed a new approach – and a platform like Directus.
From WordPress to headless CMS
To come up with their innovative designs, H&H dive deep into the topic or business at hand, and develop a sense for how the client wants to present their brand. They use Figma or Adobe XT to try out their ideas – which can be a few UI components or even just a rough sketch. “Nuxt 3 is the front-end framework we use the most,” Uwe said. And, like many agencies, Wordpress served as the backend for many years.
“WordPress is a solid platform, but compatibility becomes an issue when you start installing and updating plug-ins.”
Although they tried other traditional content management systems including Joomla, Cantao, and Magento, for example, H&H decided to switch to using a headless CMS approach. To that end, they evaluated several tools, including Strapi and Contentful, but none met their needs. After a Google search for “best headless CMS,” they landed on directus.
Directus + Nuxt – a perfect match
According to H&H, Directus is way easier to use compared to other tools, when it comes to day-to-day tasks.
“Directus gives us much more flexibility in building relationships between data,” Uwe said. “The combination of Directus and Nuxt 3 provides a perfectly efficient workflow.”
H&H leverages Directus to build backends that power numerous front-end digital projects.
One example is Rockstar Recruiting. H&H built two websites for the recruiting agency that connects developers and data scientists with companies – one for all candidates and one aimed solely at tech executives – using Directus as the backend data engine and Nuxt 3 for the frontend design.
Exclusive features provide flexibility and control
The sites have several innovative features. For example, anyone landing on one of them through a Google search sees an animation that prompts them to choose whether they are a candidate or an employer. From there the user enters pertinent information, depending on the user type.
Keyboard shortcuts enable visitors to jump to various pages on the site – CTRL+H jumps to the home page, and CTRL+E goes to events. “The idea is to provide a great user experience for both developers and jobseekers,” Uwe said.
The two sites share many global components, such as content and location information. Advanced features such as Directus Translation capabilities enable users to select their location, and the site content translates automatically into the appropriate language.
All of this is completely dynamic and editable, and users can easily create new questions or change existing ones, and choose the format for answers. Auto fill features save users time and enhances their experience with the UI.
Despite the size of the data model, it’s easy to use the conditional fields within Directus to make autofill simple and reliable, without overwhelming the end user. The team uses Many-to-Any relationships within Directus to make adding SEO landing pages or other components quick and painless.
“As designers, we love to give the users a good experience on the front-end,” Ewin said. “But with Directus, we had the opportunity to provide a good user experience for the backend, as well. You have the capability to set limits for various types of changes, which makes it almost impossible to break the design – and that’s a huge thing we love about the platform.”
Another key feature is the meta data field. “Users have complete control over the metadata,” Erwin said, adding that this helps with SEO and Google Ad campaign performance.
Beyond the flexibility and control that Directus offers, H&H appreciate the freedom it provides to sketch out ideas on a "blank canvas."
“The moment an idea sparks, we can immediately bring it to life,” Uwe said. “If during the development process we identify a missing data point or a need for a different data structue, Directus's click & build approach empowers us to make those adjustments swiftly and efficiently."
"It's like having a creative partner that's always ready to accommodate our evolving needs.”
How does Directus help agencies do better work?
So what are the top three benefits of Directus, according to H&H?
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The ability to hand Directus directly to a client who has little or no coding experience. “The user-friendly approach makes it possible for clients to manage their content without needing to understand the underlying code.”
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Relationship management is significantly easier and requires much less abstraction. “Before Directus, detailed UML diagrams were necessary to avoid duplicate work, even for very simple tasks. With Directus, this process is much more streamlined.”
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Directus Flows significantly improve project maintainability and long-term management. “The UI makes it easy to create flows as dependencies, and you can understand on the fly how the various actions and snippets communicate with each other.”
Uwe said that Directus has significantly streamlined the development process at H&H by making it easier to manage and organize data, saving considerable time. Additionally, it has broadened H&H’s range of services, providing easy-to-use flows and a simple API that helps them tackle nearly any challenge.
“Directus has been a catalyst in our journey, enabling us to craft highly customizable and dynamic websites for our clients,” said Uwe. “Not only has it enhanced the user experience on both the front- and back-end, but it has also made it easier for clients to manage their content without compromising the design integrity."
"This seamless integration of design and functionality has resulted in a superior product that resonates with our clients.”
What does the future hold for the "ghost designers?"
With five projects under their belts and two more currently in the pipeline, H&H is looking forward to learning what else they can build with Directus.
“It’s rewarding to see the platform continually evolve, for example, enabling us to leverage various AI APIs and even Websockets,” Erwin said. “This ongoing development and the capabilities Directus brings have truly expanded the types of projects we can undertake."
"We eagerly anticipate the opportunity to continue expanding our portfolio with many more Directus-based projects.”