This is a companion blog post to the conference talk I gave at the JavaScript for WordPress conference, online on July 12th, 2019. If you missed the talk or want to bookmark the recap and links, read on.

Being an entrepreneur is often about accomplishing more with less. When it comes time to develop a website for your business, you can benefit from that same entrepreneurial approach. Instead of going straight for tools such as Optimizely or Crazy Egg, which require meaningful traffic to produce actionable results, start with user testing.

When people don’t get what they want, they get cranky. When expectations are set, we want them to be met—especially when business is on the line. So, if you’re about to embark on a new website project for a customer, you want to make sure you have a plan in place, as well as have a detailed understanding of your customer’s background, current state, and future goals.

Pantheon was proud to sponsor and participate in WordCamp Europe 2019 in Berlin, June 20-22, 2019.  Our Developer Programs Engineer Andrew Taylor had a chance to sit down with Alain Schlesser, founder of Bright Nucleus and current maintainer of the WordPress Command Line Interface project, or as it is better known, the WP-CLI.

In the not-so-distant past, minute-long TV spots ruled advertising. Captive audiences watched whatever the advertiser decided to show. After all, there was no commercial-free alternative like Netflix and no smartphones to divert attention. With such a large audience, advertisers bet big on these spots, knowing that they'd be shown again and again to people without any alternative.

As a Developer Advocate, I work with web development teams on improving their workflows. That often means discussing how to adopt Continuous Integration (CI). I usually center my answers on a suite of Pantheon tools meant to combine an external git host (like Github or Bitbucket) with a Composer-based repo structure, and a CI platform (like CircleCI) push a build artifact to Pantheon. Any number of tests can then run after the push.

Today, I'm very happy to announce the first release of Pantheon Localdev. The current version is 0.4.2, so it is still in an early-access state, but it has been through extensive internal testing, as well as being put through its paces by members of our Heroes Community. I'm now happy to make it more widely available for production use.

Personalized content is the greatest consumer demand, but most brands have trouble meeting it. According to the "2018 Adobe Consumer Content Survey," 67% of consumers think it’s important for brands to automatically tailor content to them, and 42% get annoyed when content isn't relevant to their current situation. 

Last summer set the stage for a watershed moment in our move toward full-fledged agile marketing.

Data is everywhere, and marketers are expected to turn it into results like never before. But that doesn’t mean that harnessing it and deducing groundbreaking insights is easy. Data from social pages and third-party sites like Amazon and Google tell an important story, but discerning the nature of that story from the disparate sources can be a pain.

Earlier this year, I wrote about submitting our marketing stack at MarTech West. I had recently joined Pantheon and, honestly, the stack was partially aspirational, partially historical. Over the past few months, we have been revising, rebuilding and iterating on what is working and moving away from what was not. Experimentation and the ability to quickly assess successes and failures are the drivers behind what we select.

Today we’re excited to announce Pantheon’s new Australia, Canada, and European Union regions. Whether you need your WordPress or Drupal site to meet data residency requirements or have a performance use case not solved by caching requests through Pantheon’s Global CDN, we’ve got you covered. Now when you create a new site on Pantheon, you can select from one of four regions across the globe.

At this point, you probably know the importance of embracing an agile approach for your web and marketing teams. Here at Pantheon, we see that the best digital experiences result from teams that regularly collaborate, experiment, and iterate on their websites using data-driven decisions.  

WordPress 5.0 was the first WordPress release to incorporate the new React-powered Gutenberg UI framework. With Gutenberg as the standard for WordPress interface development, WordPress developers can now benefit from more from the awesome React and JavaScript ecosystems to improve the developer experience and user experience of creating and using our plugins, themes, and sites.

WordPress is currently changing a lot in terms of how we develop for it. The new “Gutenberg” editor is built using React. React is a very popular framework for building component-based interfaces that encourages us to develop our applications in reusable pieces. This is part of a larger trend in web application development - we are moving from building one large, monolithic app to developing collections of services.

As developers, we go to a lot of effort to create user experiences that we want to believe are intuitive. We often even create detailed documentation that we would love the user to read.  The reality is that users typically just want to poke around and try to figure things out on their own. Sometimes this is a good path and other times, especially when we are introducing new or custom concepts, this can end with a lot of frustration.   

When I was a kid I loved doing the “spot the difference” games in Highlights magazine. Anytime we visited the doctor or dentist, I’d go through multiple times to see how fast I could see what changed. I got pretty good at that over the years.