We are proud to welcome TOWA, our first VIP agency partner in Austria. As a full-service digital agency with proven excellence in implementing WordPress at scale, TOWA operates the whole spectrum — from digital transformation consulting and large software implementation to full-funnel marketing. With vast experience in WordPress custom development, TOWA represents better, faster, and more professional Enterprise rollouts.
TOWA recognizes and lives the changes of our time. For TOWA, digitization means disrupting business models, exploring new forms of communicating, and enabling customers with mission-critical technology to transform their business sustainably.
To genuinely put the customer at the center of our projects requires a mindset of curiosity, constant hunger for knowledge, analytical and creative skills, as well as an agile and pragmatic approach to project implementation.
Custom web development projects for global leaders like Jaggaer and BASWA Acoustic have helped drive strong conversion while showcasing a vision for the future. They’ve become model examples of platform digitization for their respective industries and beyond.
“Becoming the first WordPress premium partner in Austria recognizes our effort to envision and successfully implement large custom WordPress projects in highly competitive business environments. Our close collaboration with WordPress motivates us to keep going the extra mile, bridging design, technology, and business concepts.”
We are proud to welcome OutVoice as a new Technology Partner!
OutVoice joins our growing group of partners with proven excellence implementing solutions for enterprise marketers and publishers using WordPress at scale. They integrate freelance payments directly into WordPress to save content publishers time and headaches while managing their freelance teams.
OutVoice was a mission before it was a company. Co-founder Matt Saincome was previously a writer, editor, and publisher who had experienced the pain of freelance payments first hand. After looking for a solution for his own publication, The Hard Times, he couldn’t find anything that fit his needs. He did find his cofounder Issa Diao, though. The two began building the business and have since saved content teams over 100 years’ worth of time they would have otherwise spent handling invoices and waiting for checks to arrive.
OutVoice allows publishers to pay freelance content creators inside WordPress with the same click of a button that publishes their work. The plugin automatically generates, pays, and tracks invoices for tax season via its connected central platform on OutVoice.com. It also features easy onboarding, team management, recurring payments, print media invoices, and non-content related freelance payments. It’s benefits have spread via word of mouth and is used by Foreign Policy, Adweek, Inked, Clickhole, Vonage, Brooklyn Vegan, and many others.
Becoming a WordPress partner is another great step in our journey to eliminating invoicing headaches from all of publishing. People need to know there is no longer a reason for invoicing to be a pain. OutVoice is as exciting for freelancers as it is for publishers. Everyone wins when bad processes are replaced.”
We are proud to welcome First + Third as a new agency partner!
First + Third specializes in a narrative approach to design and development that prioritizes the user’s experience and their client’s top objectives in order to achieve big results.
Relationships, not projects
First + Third was founded by Greg Allen with a mission to help organizations add a web development team that cares as much about their goals as the project they hired them for. Their company philosophy is grounded in the belief that they “start relationships, not projects.”
The 100% remote team offers strategy, web design, and front & back end development to execute top-performing websites for clients as diverse as music icon Billboard Magazine and plant-based lifestyle publishing giant LIVEKINDLY.
No matter the project, all of their clients have access to First + Third’s full brain trust of collaborative and talented developers. “We don’t try to fit clients into boxes. We’re passionate about the right solution for each project,” says Allen.
Storytelling with a goal
First + Third’s clients seek them out for their unique ability to make websites that tell stories. Their visual storytelling strategy translates across industries from large foundations to publishing platforms to ecommerce websites.
Clients like Facebook, LeanIn.Org, and Pashion Footwear rely on First + Third to design websites that create an emotional connection that enhances user experience, increases page views and engagement, and nurtures large followings.
They’re especially proud of their recent project with LeanIn.Org, helping the foundation create a page that spotlights the challenges Black women face in the workplace. By selecting curated images, highlighting key statistics, and employing clickable headlines they helped LeanIn.Org accomplish their mission — to elevate Black women’s voices and raise awareness about this important issue — without overwhelming their audience.
First + Third understands that the word story can be overused in marketing — but this agency’s notion of story is more than an artistic expression. It’s something that’s very good for an organization’s goals:
“When we talk about narrative pages, most of the time people are thinking about a singular page. But there’s something really important about a story that continues from page to page, so visitors want to follow the trail and keep coming back.”
We are proud to welcome Curotec as a new Silver Agency Partner! Curotec is one of 45 in this exclusive group of agencies with proven excellence implementing WordPress at scale.
Founded in 2010, Curotec has helped companies around the globe succeed with their digital initiatives, and is a multi-year winner of the Philadelphia100 award for the fastest-growing companies in the Greater Philadelphia Region.
While Curotec’s medium of choice is technology, people—from their team to their clients to their client’s customers—are at the forefront of everything they do. The team starts every engagement by listening to what their clients are trying to accomplish, and then building solutions to help them get there.
The agency’s diverse team celebrates working in an organization that supports and encourages them, making the group determined to deliver successful solutions that delight their customers—and have fun while doing it.
Their approach balances expertise in their craft with clear and appropriate communication and attention to detail. Their wealth of experience provides clients with end-to-end expertise for digital initiatives, including discovery and proof of concepts, design, content, ecommerce, mobile, web, application development, and cloud hosting. Curotec has spearheaded projects for Fortune 100 companies, large charitable trusts, and award-winning ecommerce sites.
“Building beautiful and functional WordPress websites and applications is part of Curotec’s pedigree. Becoming a WordPress VIP partner is both exciting and a goal achieved for our team. By being a WordPress VIP partner, we’ll be able to raise the bar even higher on the digital solutions we help our clients bring to market.”
We are proud to welcome Vertex as a new agency partner! With headquarters split between Austin, Texas, and Lagos, Nigeria, Vertex is the only Featured Partner with its own coding academy. This academy creates a direct pipeline to some of the African continent’s best and brightest developers—and in turn, helps Vertex provide 24/7 support to their clients.
Vertex offers design-first development
Vertex has been building Web-based software solutions since 1996. Their development approach is design-driven, led by a process they call the 4D method: Discovery, Design, Development, and Deployment.
Of these, their key differentiator is design. For all jobs, they produce design documents to reduce development time and ensure customer buy-in before a single line of code is committed.
Experience in enterprise-ready applications
In the 24 years since Vertex was founded, they’ve gained extensive experience in multiple industries, including healthcare, technology, online learning, and finance.
Their specialty is SAAS applications and mobile apps, as well as complex websites, ecommerce sites, portals, APIs, and application integrations. Notable customers include Merck, Dell, Ascension Health, Loomis, Harcourt Houghton Mifflin, Silicon Labs, Pearson, DefensiveDriving.com, Yahoo, Fujitsu Siemens, Aramark, and Best Buy.
They have also developed online applications for IBM, HP, Google, Lenovo, Veeam, Riverbed, EMC, and many others.
A game plan for success
Vertex helps customers reimagine, redefine, and automate business processes and product strategies to take advantage of the best current technologies and anticipate the digital landscape of the future.
Its teams are both cross-platform (offering full stack development in both Windows and LAMP environments), and interdisciplinary (with specialists in everything from software architecture, DevOps, native mobile apps, database administration, front end development, UI/UX, graphic design, and content development).
Their work on WordPress, for example, has included complex multisite deployments that seamlessly integrate with native .NET applications and mobile apps.
“We’re excited to become a WordPress VIP Featured Partner because it means we can offer our customers the best possible tools, support, and hosting services available for what is by far the world’s most popular content management system.”
We are proud to welcome Zephr as a new technology partner!
Zephr joins our growing group of partners implementing solutions for enterprise publishers and marketers using WordPress at scale. They lead the market with an intuitive, drag-and-drop customer journey builder.
Zephr’s initial focus and vision is to allow their partners to create the best customer journeys in a totally new, code-free, highly iterative way—and their ongoing product development is informed by years of experience building identity, subscription and paywall solutions. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in London, they already work with dozens of major clients globally, including a host of international media brands such as Conde Nast, News Corp and Dennis Publishing.
Zephr’s best-in-breed platform helps clients in the media and publishing industry build stronger customer relationships and create more long-term customer value. Non-technical teams can use Zephr to design, A/B test, and deploy data-driven registration, subscription, and retention journeys at scale. Their code-free UI allows business users to optimize those journeys in real-time, with no tech dependency to hold them back.
“This partnership cements Zephr as part of the best-in-breed digital ecosystem,” said Zephr CEO James Henderson. “We’re excited to help brands using WordPress to dynamically alter customer journeys in real-time, offering unique, tailored experiences that bring real value to both customer and brand, driving better acquisition and customer lifetime value.”
4 Technology Best Practices for Large-Scale Virtual Events
A look inside a production studio during the 2020 DNC
Andrew Binns is an expert on technology infrastructure for major events. His experience includes the Super Bowl Halftime Show, Tony Awards, and NFL kickoff, in addition to the last five Democratic National Conventions (DNCs). His role in the DNC goes all the way back to 2004—when WordPress itself was just a year old.
As COO of the 2020 Democratic National Convention Committee (DNCC), Andrew led the transformation of this year’s convention into a fully-remote, high-performing digital experience. This historic event attracted a record-breaking 35.5 million digital viewers and suffered zero security incidents or outages.
WordPress VIP was proud to serve as the official digital platform partner for this year’s convention, and I recently had the chance to interview Andrew and Hannah Flom, Director of Digital Communications at the 2020 DNCC, about their experience pivoting to digital. (Be sure to watch the webinar for the full insights!) Below are a few of the tips Andrew shared to mitigate risk while conceptualizing, building, and managing high-impact enterprise technology productions.
Plan for every scenario. And then plan for 100 more.
The only way to make sure you’re prepared for every scenario, Andrew argues, is to literally prepare for every scenario. As soon as the pandemic hit, the DNCC team spent three weeks doing intensive scenario planning, where directors organized teams to come up with every possible outcome for the convention itself, from hosting it in-person to going 100% remote and everything in between. This approach empowered stakeholders to make timely and informed technology investment decisions.
“We literally had three teams come in and just come up with all of these crazy, crazy options for us,” explained Andrew. Then, they presented each of these scenarios to leadership, with recommendations for how to move forward. “We said, ‘These are all the options. This is when you have to make the decisions. This is how much money things will cost. This is how much money things will cost if you don’t make the decision on time.’”
The 2016 convention had five video streams. 2020’s had over 850.
Make redundancy a priority.
During the webinar, one attendee asked, “What was the backup plan in case one of the feeds went down?”
“We have backups, on backups, on backups,” Andrew said. “One of the things that we do from the very, very beginning is redundancy diversity on our circuits, on our hardware, on our software, on our programming, everything.”
This is especially important if you’re operating video streams from multiple remote locations, like Andrew’s team was. “From the very beginning we work with major ISPs, and major partners—like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, AT&T, Comcast, Spectrum—to make sure that anything we get in there, we have redundant and diverse networking.”
To optimize reliability and redundancy, Andrew also recommends using multiple paths of travel. In addition to IP-based connectivity, the DNCC coordinated satellite, fiber, and point-to-point setups.
Opt for open source.
The DNCC needed technology tools with best-in-class security and unsurpassed flexibility. For Andrew, that means open source—specifically, WordPress VIP.
“Open source is a good security posture. … WordPress is probably the most successful product tied to open source software out there, and that’s for good reason. There are so many people looking at the code, so many people fixing it when there are issues; I think it helps us on the security side.”
Flexibility is also key when planning a complex project like the convention. Choosing open source software opens up a world of technology integrations that are readily available to confront business challenges. (For more, read our report on the most widely adopted enterprise WordPress technology integrations.)
“Generally, if you have something you want to build, you have the ability to do it either with built-in or third-party plugins or custom coding,” said Andrew. “So across the board, WordPress is good on both the ability to adjust and change and flex, and also the security side.”
As the leaders in enterprise WordPress, Andrew turned to WordPress VIP to power a secure and flexible platform. “The security, the trust, the expertise, is what brought us to WordPress VIP.”
Build to the unknown.
Above all, when planning for any kind of large-scale technology production, Andrew says it’s essential to build toward the unknown. “We never know what’s going to happen. [The pandemic] was not on the list of things that we had expected, certainly, but the process that we had built on the infrastructure side was easily shifted and could take this on.”
Botify joins our growing group of partners as the first technology partner with proven excellence in enterprise-level SEO. WordPress VIP customers can now rely on a platform that’s built for the size, scale, and complexity of their websites and drive long-term and sustained growth from organic search.
Botify was founded in 2012 by Adrien Menard, Thomas Grange, and Stan Chauvin, three SEO professionals who were executing a range of SEO services for their agency clients. They noticed that the most commonly utilized SEO tactics by brands were focused on keywords and content, while technical SEO strategies — those critical to fully understanding and optimizing a website’s discoverability and indexability — were being neglected.
Noticing this gap, they set out to create a scalable, solutions-oriented platform and full-funnel methodology to address the entire organic search process — from crawling through conversions — to help turn organic search into a performance marketing channel.
Today, Botify offers the largest unified data model, the most prescriptive actions, and the power to automate processes, providing its customers with a complete and modern SEO platform that is faster and more accurate than the alternatives.
As a result, customers benefit from:
The most complete picture of their website’s performance in search, powered by a unified data set covering every stage of the search process;
The ability to direct search engines to their most critical pages through an understanding of exactly what pages they are crawling vs. missing;
Insight into the exact keywords and phrases that are generating visits – eliminating the guesswork surrounding searcher intent;
The recommended actions and alerts to improve and safeguard website traffic;
and greater efficiency from automating certain SEO tasks.
Hundreds of the world’s leading brands across ecommerce, media and publishing, travel, technology, and classifieds, including News Corp, GitHub, Clarins, Macy’s, Farfetch, Carvana, RetailMeNot, Condé Nast, Expedia, TUI, Monster, and Glassdoor, partner with Botify to lead their SEO efforts.
“Botify is excited to join WordPress VIP’s growing ecosystem and address the unique challenges that come from managing some of the largest and most highly-trafficked websites in the world. This partnership further supports our mission to ensure that the world’s most valuable content is never hidden.”
In the decade-plus that we’ve brought the benefits of WordPress to large organizations, we have learned their needs are concentrated in four key areas: agility, flexibility, simplicity, and ownership. VIP Go addresses each of those needs in a powerful, intuitive platform with the rock-solid performance and reliability our customers have come to expect from WordPress VIP.
What are the benefits of VIP Go?
Agility
With VIP Go, our customers’ development and marketing teams are more agile than ever. VIP Go introduces GitHub workflows and a new command-line interface (the VIP CLI) which puts more power in developers’ hands to ship new code quickly. Editorial teams enjoy the same intuitive interface as before, with faster turnaround time for shipping new sites and projects.
Flexibility
Direct access to the WordPress API makes it easier than ever for our customers to build exactly the experiences they’re looking to deliver with seamless third-party integrations. With the introduction of true pre-production environments, teams are able to experiment freely, test thoroughly, and tweak to their hearts’ content—all before making any changes to the customer-facing application.
Simplicity
Can we say three cheers for added simplicity anywhere we can get it these days? Our engineers built VIP Go based on over a decade of expertise powering the most sophisticated implementations of WordPress at scale. Over the years, we’ve learned what works, what doesn’t, and how to optimize the experience (from performance to usability to security) so customers never have to worry about things like uptime or traffic spikes. VIP Go bakes that expertise into the very infrastructure of the platform, so customers are free to focus their attention and resources on driving revenue and delivering their product roadmap.
Ownership
The new VIP Dashboard grants additional visibility and access to content syncs, domain mapping, command line history, and more, putting control of the application in the developers’ hands. The VIP-CLI makes it convenient to run commands and query applications. Furthermore, code review is no longer required, though it is still available for customers on a by-request basis. Our goal is to grant our customers increased ownership of their applications while continuing to provide the world-class support that has always defined our approach to customer partnerships.
What’s next?
As of today, more than 75% of our customers are already enjoying the added benefits of VIP Go. This group includes some of our larger organizations with complex, mission-critical applications—think brands like Intuit, Vanguard, Facebook, and more. Each of these companies migrated from our previous platform to VIP Go with great success, and we’re excited to move nearly all of our customers onto VIP Go by Sept. 30, 2020. At that point, we will begin phasing out support for sites on WordPress.com VIP and transition completely to VIP Go by Nov. 1, 2020. (Are you a current customer with a question about your migration? Please reach out to your Relationship Manager for more details.)
VIP Go is a significant milestone in bringing the best of open source to large organizations who need agility, flexibility, simplicity, and ownership in their software in order to bring out the best in their teams and their business. Content forms the heart of every customer experience, and we believe every customer experience should be delightful. We are proud to play a role in making the web a better place, one deploy at a time.
Now more than ever, “customer experience” has become synonymous with “digital experience,” and the quality of these experiences is a key indicator of business health. Our colleagues at IDC (a global market research firm) seem to agree: a recent study found that 91% of tech vendors consider customer experience a “top business priority.”
However, executing a strong digital customer experience strategy can be more challenging than it looks. It requires a constellation of best-in-class tools and technologies working in sync to minimize risk and grow revenue.
At WordPress VIP, our main goal is to help our customers empower amazing results for their customers. So we were curious: what major trends are shaping customer experience strategies in 2020 and beyond? How can business leaders manage the many complex processes involved in delivering a unified customer experience? We teamed up with IDC to find out and created this free report to share the insights.
Big-picture trends in customer experience research
The biggest challenges for today’s digital experience teams
Advice for organizations looking to improve their digital experience management capabilities
The report’s author is Marci Maddox, who has been researching content technologies and workflows for over a decade. Her core research coverage includes the evolution of enterprise content, customer communications, content sharing, and collaboration.
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