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.
As the new year approaches, many of us start to think about what’s gone well in 2019… and what we’d like to improve on in the coming year. How satisfied are you with your career? Do you wish you could have more of an impact, play a more strategic role or just have more insight into how the business actually works? Would you like to earn more money… and see your organization’s profits improve, too?
I still remember my first DrupalCon contribution day. It was in Portland in 2013, and I'd heard the message all week: Anyone can give back! Join us on contribution day!
Taking a leap of faith, I showed up on Friday to participate in my first mentored contribution day. I didn't achieve all that much on that Friday, but I was lucky enough to get a glimpse into the real magic of open-source: People working together to make something new, helping each other and learning new skills along the way. I was hooked.
How’s your marketing going these days? If you’re like most firms, you probably feel it could be going better, that you could and maybe should be doing more to get your firm out there in front of the right audience. Marketing your agency has always been hard. The fact that the best practices of effective digital marketing (generating real interest from great prospects) are always evolving doesn’t make things any easier. In this article, we’re going to cover one of the most important changes that has taken place in content marketing in at least five years.
Pantheon has made digital agency partners a cornerstone of our strategy. As such, publishing an e-book entitled “How to Kill the Website Relaunch” could be considered controversial. After all, many of our partners are probably talking to clients this week about a potential relaunch in 2020. Are we trying to put their project pipeline at risk?
Retrospective meetings are critical components of working within agile principles. These meetings provide opportunities for teams to reflect on their latest sprint, learn what worked well, call out openings for improvement, and discuss how to leverage that knowledge to propel forward.
Some companies hold retrospectives at the close of a single sprint or after a few iterations. If the priorities or requirements change suddenly, a retrospective meeting might even be held mid-sprint.
Website relaunch. Two of the most terrifying words in all of marketing.
I am extremely passionate about this topic. I’ve worked with thousands of website teams and personally suffered through hundreds of relaunches. They are time-consuming, budget-depleting, all-encompassing efforts that inflate expectations but often fall flat in terms of results. They can leave wreckage in their wake: burnt out teams, reduced credibility and sometimes even empty chairs around the table. I know there’s a better way—the agile way.
What pop culture creature has yellow fur, a tail, shiny black eyes, and delights geeks and nerds around the world?
No, not the electric mouse from the Pokemon series. I’m talking about Wapuu, the unofficial WordPress mascot. You know, this one:
You know that feeling when you put months of work into a fantastic marketing campaign, smoothly bringing consumers into the sales pipeline, only to have them get turned off by unresponsive landing pages and broken links?
Here is how the digital marketing landscape as we know it was formed:
2005: The rise of Google. Suddenly marketers had the power to know which ads worked (and which didn’t), and they could turn off the bad performers and invest in the ones that performed.
2010: The rise of inbound content marketing. Suddenly marketers could create and publish owned content and digital products to drive organic demand.
When you're frustrated with your work, what do you do? If you’re Katie Sylor Miller, Frontend Architect at Etsy, you figure out how to fix it.
Then, you share that information with the world. At least this was the impetus for her “Happy Browser, Happy User” presentation at WordSesh 2019.
Nowadays, many web interfaces use JavaScript to enhance user interactions, for example, providing autocomplete widgets in search forms. Let’s see how to use Behat to test this JavaScript functionality. Behat is a PHP framework for automated testing. With the help of libraries like Mink and MinkExtension, it can be used for testing web sites and applications.
The example will visit Wikipedia’s homepage and interact with the autocomplete feature of the search bar.
If you’ve never worked in a WebOps environment, even the term “marketing engineer” might seem foreign. Is this an engineer or a marketer?
Ideally, it’s actually both. Marketing engineers are engineers and need to manage the engineering aspects of marketing campaigns. But they are also marketers. The success (or failure) of their projects is judged based on leads and conversions, not story points or defect ratios. Here’s what work actually looks like for a marketing engineer.
If you only worked 20 hours a month, what would you do with your spare time?
Would you take more trips to the beach? Learn to juggle?
Or would you spend hundreds of hours planning and delivering presentations about DevOps and WordPress?
Not many of us would have the selflessness to devote our time to teaching the community. Fortunately for us all, Carl Alexander has that level of dedication.
It’s impossible to avoid the term DevOps in the engineering world. While most companies haven’t moved to a fully mature DevOps system, there is no longer disagreement about whether it’s a good idea. When teams follow a DevOps approach, they release updates to production much more frequently, they can go from commit to deploy in seconds, and recovery from downtime is measured in minutes, not hours.
More often than not, website security is only thought about after bad things happen. Just like insurance, you do not think you need it until you do. Typically, setting up security and doing maintenance on a live site is left to the client or perhaps a WordPress maintenance company, if the client chooses to utilize one. However, there are some simple steps that every site owner can take to keep their site secure, online and converting.
