How Marketing & IT Traded Places to Get More Web Leads with Pantheon

David Hathaway is the Senior Information Systems Analyst, Enterprise IT at Vision Critical, whose Insight Communities enable businesses to better understand the opinions of their customers and the general public. With more than 20 years of experience in web development, Dave is Vision Critical's go-to guy for all things web.

A GLOBAL TECH COMPANY WITH 700 EMPLOYEES AND 5+ WEBSITES

Vision Critical is a Vancouver-based tech company with 700+ employees in 14 offices worldwide. Our company runs two separate web environments—one for front-end marketing and another for our web-based product. I’m focused on the marketing side.

MY FORMER LIFE AS A BOTTLENECK

Since our goal for our website is to bring in new business, anything I can do to make web development easier translates into business development.

Before Pantheon, I was running all our infrastructure and hosting, with some help from production IT Information Systems team. 

Here’s why this wasn’t sustainable:   

1. SECURITY FATIGUE

Hosting your own website means constantly worrying about security. Every single chunk of it. Whenever a site would go down, I’d spend 2-3 hours on it. What went wrong? Fix the issue. Rebuild SQL. Get rsync going. I didn’t mind, but there were other things on my plate.

2. 8 HOURS OF MAINTENANCE A WEEK

We did all our own hosting-related infrastructure, too. Most mornings started with making sure the replications between SQL databases and rsync were running. Daily tasks totaled about 8 hours a week.

3. ALL CONTENT UPDATES ON ME

The site our designers built was nice, but not particularly usable to people who weren’t fluent in HTML. Every new story or article landed on my desk. New content would go directly onto the live site. Marketing would see it, then need to make edits. One type-o on our front-page slideshow would often blow the whole thing out. Marketing wanted more attention. We wished they could make the updates themselves.  

4. A HOT MESS OF MICROSITES

When I joined the company two years ago, our web presence was a motley mix of CMSes, websites, hosting providers, and themes. We had 10 or 15 separate microsites to deal with. Each would be on its own hosting platform. Whatever was the flavor of the day.

5. DECENTRALIZED DEVELOPERS

We do most of our development here in Vancouver, plus relying on a few agencies and independent developers. As soon as we put multiple developers to work on the site, it became a nightmare. Juggling 3 groups of developers, each writing new content, on our own hosted environment, which wasn’t git-enabled. Every change was painful. Our development company said, “OK, we’re done, we want to run this stuff into your live sites.” It took a week to get changes in place.

WHY PANTHEON?

We used to be a WordPress shop. My second day here, they announced we were moving to Drupal. It was a big learning curve. We went looking for a Drupal-dedicated web host. It didn’t take long for us narrow it down to Pantheon. Since we do most of our own site development, we had no need for the ongoing professional services the other guys offered. Pantheon just works better.

6 REASONS MARKETING & IT LOVE OUR NEW WEB PLATFORM:

1. Marketing can make their own updates, instantly. Pantheon’s biggest user on a day-to-day basis is our marketing department. They create content and client stories on the test environment whenever they want, and change it whenever they want. No more “OMG, I hope this works on the live environment.” We’re confident. They’ve even done basic training on how to put up a page in Drupal. There’s no fear of experimenting, since we can resolve any issues before it goes live. IT is free to concentrate on higher-value tasks.

2. One platform for all our websites. We have 5 websites on the Pantheon platform at this point. Pantheon is leaps and bounds above traditional hosting. Three separate environments allow you to move your code up from a dev system to the live production system without a hitch. All the development happens in one place. The procedures to run and manage all sites are the same. Everything about it works in exactly the same fashion. That’s saved us so much time. It’s always the same procedure for every site.

3. More updates, more leads. Our marketing group got significantly more leads last year than they had in previous years. What made the difference? We attribute their success directly to their ability to get content up on the site right away. If they want a slide up they can do it in five minutes. They don’t need to wait for me to get around to it next week.  

4. Built-in git workflow eliminates the learning curve. A lot of web developers understand the git workflow, but haven’t worked with it on a large scale. That was certainly one of my biggest learning curves. Pantheon makes using a git-based workflow a no-brainer. Once you’ve done it, you’ll never go back. I can’t imagine doing web development any other way.

5. No more day-to-day maintenance or 3am wake-ups. We spend an awful lot less time worrying about the site now than we did before. It’s great not to stay up at night worrying about whether the hand-wired hosting situation would hold. Sometimes I’ll pop into our Pantheon dashboard, but I don’t give it much thought day to day. Unless I’m getting an alert, we don’t spend any time on maintenance. We’re free to focus on other things.

6. Multidev speeds new features to market. Multidev lets us set developers loose in their own little world. When they’re ready, we can QA it. Our first project on Multidev went so smoothly that we’ve done every other project on Multidev since. I tell developers, ‘You go and do your development over there, and when you’re ready, we’ll move to the live site.’ Getting new content is so much easier than it used to be.

ADVICE TO OTHER MARKETING/TECH TEAMS?

If you want to improve the relationship between marketing and IT, empower marketing to make more updates themselves. We’ve been working with Pantheon for more than a year, and I rarely have to go in--unless they need custom CSS or other code changes. “Now” is the new “next week.”