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.

Image: by Rob Shea

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. 

Over the past year of working on Pantheon's Customer Success team, I've gotten to know the incredible community of site owners, developers, designers and marketers who work on the platform every day.  This group of generous, hard-working, intelligent folks love the Open Web (just like I do), and as I got to know the Pantheon community, I knew I wanted to get more involved. So when the opportunity arose to hop over to our Developer Relations team as Pantheon's Developer Outreach Manager, I took a leap.

Throughout 23 years of designing and developing websites for my clients, I’ve found that there is one thing that frustrates them consistently. Hosting. To help you understand what I mean, I need to summarize what my clients and I have experienced over the past two decades.

You’ve likely heard the term DevOps tossed around among engineers—but you’ve probably also heard about Agile, Kanban and any number of other software development techniques. WebOps sounds a lot like DevOps… so what is the difference, and how does it apply to your goals of creating a better website experience for your prospects and customers? We’re here to help clear up any confusion. 

There are a lot of intriguing things about Rob Watson, CEO of Webidextrous.com. He’s a strident defender of WordPress page builders—you should hear him out. He could contemplate superheroes for hours—but how could anyone choose between Captain America with his strong moral center and Iron Man with his awesome tech? 

Agile methods of project management are increasingly popular in digital marketing—and for good reason. Agile allows for a collaborative loop of testing and feedback that's highly effective at pushing projects forward.

Remember when the Internet was going to be the place that finally brought people together to share knowledge? A great equalizer, where everyone could come to learn, regardless of their physical location? Instead, we have a great place to argue politics with your old high school friends. What happened?

Agile marketing tactics let you market faster — that means iterate and test faster, respond faster, and create a reliable understanding of your customers faster. In this post we’re going to talk about five areas that you can transform with agile marketing automation. Before we jump in, though, let’s make sure we’re clear on what we mean by “agile marketing,” “marketing automation,” and “martech stack.”