Could a single line of dialogue in a blockbuster movie change the course of your entire life?
For Steve Lavigne, Director of Technology for OPIN Software, it was seven words in the original Jurassic Park.
During the scene in which velociraptors circled the humans in a building with an inactive security system, young Lex, the adolescent hacker, took one look at the defunct security system and yelled:
“It’s a UNIX system! I know this!”
Content at its best—reliable, helpful, timely, and honest—is what we need right now. As the world’s teachers, journalists, government agencies, and medical workers respond to the rapidly developing COVID-19 pandemic, they are reaching the public through content.
With COVID-19 upending life around the world, web professionals are under increased pressure to deliver. Multiple sources (including our own) show that web traffic is up significantly, and many organizations are scrambling to figure out their response. As a WebOps company serving those who “make the internet,” we’re dedicated to solving these problems with you.
The health and well-being of our people—our colleagues, clients, community, and agencies—is our priority at Pantheon. We know firsthand how important it is to have a knowledgeable and trusted partner, especially during difficult times. In response to COVID-19, Pantheon is offering support to organizations on the front line.
As major events are canceled around the world, and employees are urging staff to work from home, that presentation you’ve been diligently working toward might now be virtual. The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has seen many Drupal and WordPress camps turn into remote experiences and, amidst all the chaos, we’re quickly learning how to work better together… virtually.
In 2011, then-CEO of Nokia Stephen Elop sent out an infamous memo. He said the entire company was “standing on a burning platform.” It wasn’t a single catastrophic incident that lit the fire; rather, it was a long-smoldering stagnation, a failure to innovate. The company had fallen so far behind in the industry that they faced an existential crisis. Does this remind you of your website marketing strategy?
When we launched Pantheon’s Global CDN back in 2017, we did so to deliver a faster and more secure experience to the hundreds of thousands of sites that rely on Pantheon every single day. As the closest point of contact to end users, the edge offers a unique place to provide essential security and reliable functionality.
Agile has been the game-changer of the digital era. It’s what the best software-engineering and product-development teams use to create successful products—and what enables their companies to consistently outpace the competition. These teams move faster and more efficiently, which is how they deliver results.
One of the mantras of WebOps is to “fail fast” and iterate. Alex Vasquez is a prime example of that lesson. His first foray into freelance WordPress development was a quick and decisive failure. But he bounced back and ultimately co-founded DigiSavvy, a web development and marketing agency that is entering its 10th year.
Many developers want to write technical blog posts, but they struggle with writer’s block. Last year, I gave a talk on technical writer's block at WordCamp US in St. Louis. The most important takeaway for developers who want to write more is the idea that writing is really a thinking exercise.
Pantheon is pleased to bring Drush 10 to the platform. Drush 10 is the latest version of the venerable command line tool that has been helping streamline Drupal tasks for well over a decade. If you’re new to Drush, there are a lot of things you can do with it, from one-off cache clears to scripting configuration management as part of continuous integration. Even if you don’t use Drush, you may find it interesting to know that Pantheon relies on it behind-the-scenes for several workflow operations.
One of my favorite projects to manage at Pantheon is our website experimentation program. It’s WebOps (website operations) in action every week. The group started out small with a high-level mission to improve the user experience and performance metrics on our website. Since then, the team and mission have evolved. A key element to our success has been regularly inviting new colleagues to join in our planning and analytics review sessions.
At Pantheon, we think marketing should own the company website. Marketing. Not engineers or IT. You may have heard me say this somewhere else, but this isn’t just our opinion. We’ve learned this from listening to CMOs who’ve smashed their goals, like Elissa Fink, who grew Tableau from a small startup to over $1B in annual revenue (and eventually a major acquisition via SalesForce).
In the past ten years—or even the past five—marketers have gained access to a wealth of new tools. You used to need to be a tech giant like Google or Facebook to do technology-centered, data-driven marketing. Now, all you need is a small team (and the right partners, of course).
So here’s the big question: Has your marketing department kept up with the changes?
Many companies make the mistake of thinking that building a website is all it takes to bring in traffic for years to come. But when companies view a site as a set-it-and-forget-it proposition, users tend to forget it, too. That's when traffic dries up.
Every company’s WebOps maturity journey will start at a slightly different place. In some cases, companies already use an intuitive content management system (CMS) that marketers have control over—they have a head start on the journey.
Building a website operations team is very similar to building a product-oriented team in a DevOps software development approach. There are two key differences, however:
WebOps involves a hard shift to the left. The whole rationale behind WebOps is to unify the business rationale and the engineering required to make a website function, rather than simply bringing together different parts of the engineering work.
