We are proud to welcome NJI as a new agency partner! They are a full-service, global creative agency specializing in policy and public affairs. Rooted in Washington, D.C., with a global reach, NJI creates opportunities to inform and influence—always with localized, measurable impact.
“After years of close collaboration with WordPress VIP’s engineering team on 50+ website builds for clients with rigorous performance and security requirements, we’re thrilled to announce our official partnership,” says NJI’s Global Vice President of Development Claudio Meira.
With over 16 years of experience, NJI has established a reputation for high-caliber work and a commitment to pushing boundaries. Their creative strategies bridge the gap between policy objectives and creative communication.
NJI pairs audience-driven strategies with the best technology to produce secure, dynamic, and intuitive websites with an emphasis on performance and load-time optimization. They’ve designed, crafted, and built over 300 websites on WordPress. Their work on innovative websites across a myriad of industries has received global recognition from MUSE Awards, Web Excellence Awards, dotCommAwards, WebAwards, Indigo Design Awards, Summit International Awards, AVA Digital Awards, and others.
From a single code file to a server ecosystem, NJI’s in-house technical team abides by rigorous standards to enhance efficiencies, optimize performance, safeguard against security vulnerabilities, and exceed industry best practices.
Their crew of technical experts, creative dreamers, and ambitious strategists collaborates to distill complexity. From virtual reality experiences to event activations featuring boundary-pushing creative, NJI specializes in bringing compelling stories and persuasive messages to target audiences.
“This milestone reflects our commitment to excellence and innovation in the digital landscape, empowering us to elevate our service offerings for clients and provide unparalleled solutions that are secure, scalable, and sophisticated,” says Meira. “We’re eager to leverage our shared experiences to push the boundaries of web development.”
According to Forrester, the majority of enterprise customer experience gains come from “finding and fixing problems, often in their back-end systems and processes.”
Content is at the heart of a digital customer experience. Addressing infrastructure problems in the content creation lifecycle helps enterprise marketers create more effective content at every stage of the customer experience journey.
If improving the quality of your digital customer experiences is a business goal this year, answering five questions can tell you if it’s time to upgrade your enterprise content platform.
1. Are there unnecessary steps in your content creation process?
Getting to market quickly is essential to delivering timely and relevant content to your audience. Unfortunately, many content platforms lack the flexibility that modern teams require. Consider how long it takes your team to move a piece of content from ideation to implementation across your channels. Is it easy for creators to bring life to your brand vision, or do you wait days for simple website updates?
Choosing an enterprise content platform that suits the needs of both your creators and developersshortcuts the content creation process by empowering everyone on your team to get their jobs done quickly.
“We’ve probably employed 300 people in the last three years and a large percentage of those have actually used WordPress before. It’s an easier system to use,” said Joel Davies, Head of Operations at News UK.
That ease of use translates into real business value when it leads to decreased training time and higher-quality content.
Is it easy for creators to bring life to your brand vision, or do you wait days for simple website updates?
2. How much time are your developers spending on basic maintenance?
Creating innovative digital customer experiences requires technical talent. Yet in most of our conversations with prospective customers, we find their developers and engineers are spending most of their time maintaining infrastructure instead of contributing to business goals.
Talk with your technical leaders to understand where your developers are investing time. Are they free to execute your product roadmap, or are they bogged down in performance improvements and software updates?
“Using WordPress VIP means that my team can focus on being creative and innovative, rather than spending time worrying about architecture,” reported the VP of Technology of Hachette Book Group.
Promoting creativity and innovation on your technical team will not only have a significant impact on your bottom line, but can also improve employee satisfaction and retention. All that from an enterprise content platform? We see it happen every day.
3. How strong is your site performance?
Speed and performance matter in your digital customer experience. One Google study found that as page load time goes from one second to three seconds, the probability of a user bouncing increases 32%. From one second to five seconds, it increases 90%. High traffic should be a cause for celebration, but for many enterprises, it’s a cause for concern: will your site shine on your biggest day, or will it crash when you need it most?
Peace of mind is one of the biggest benefits for WordPress VIP customer FiveThirtyEight, who served 1.3 billion pageviews the week of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Through it all, WordPress VIP’s server time stayed flat at 144 milliseconds, delivering a lightning-fast experience for every visitor. Instead of worrying about performance or uptime, their team could focus on delivering content to readers all over the world.
“Using WordPress VIP means that my team can focus on being creative and innovative, rather than spending time worrying about architecture.”
Ryan Pugatch, VP Technology, Hachette Book Group
4. How easy is it to publish your content across multiple platforms?
One of the biggest challenges in consumer expectations is the “always-on” mentality. Your brand needs to deliver exactly what your customer is looking for, where they want it, when they want it, across an ever-growing number of platforms, channels, and devices.
To meet that demand, smart enterprise marketers adopt a “create once, publish everywhere” approach. Even then, it’s not easy to build a cohesive brand experience across every channel.
Rachael Trost, Product Manager at Accuweather, knew content was a key competitive advantage for her company, but her legacy CMS stunted her ability to reach their audience. So she turned to WordPress VIP to support a decoupled (or headless) WordPress setup connected to the REST API. “The headless implementation has been fantastic … to serve articles, videos, landing pages, various alerts, things like that,” she explained in a presentation on decoupled WordPress.
Are there channels you’d like to use to connect with your customer, but aren’t sure how? Instead of the one-size-fits-all approach of many digital experience platforms, your content goals are better served by an agile content platformenhanced with customizable plugins, integrations, and APIs to meet audience needs.
“We improved ease of creating content, content repurposing, flexibility, and performance by moving to WordPress VIP.”
5. Are you paying for anything in your enterprise content platform you don’t need?
Each year, marketers are asked to do more with less.
So take a long, hard look at the cost of your current enterprise content platform. Of course, assessing your total cost of ownership can be troubling, even humbling—you might be paying too much for services you don’t use or need. Or underinvesting and limiting your growth and flexibility because your platform offers little more than hosting.
The majority of digital experience providers fall in the first category: bundling expensive solutions into what essentially becomes shelfware, or locking you into a vendor ecosystem where the answer to any problem is “Buy this new product.”
Instead, WordPress VIP works with each customer to assemble the best enterprise solutions, experts, and global agencies from the large open source community to address their unique long-term growth goals. While an enterprise content platform is always an investment, you should never pay for anything that doesn’t positively impact your revenue growth.
A better digital customer experience
As you look ahead to each year’s growth goals, remember that the biggest improvements in your digital customer experience will be made from the ground up.
Take a moment to ask yourself: “Are my content tools agile, giving my creators and developers the freedom and flexibility we need to scale engaging digital experiences? Or am I locked into pricey marketing clouds that create unnecessary obstacles for my team?”
Modern digital customer experiences require a flexibility that is hard to find outside the enterprise WordPress ecosystem. If it’s time to rethink your business’s content management infrastructure, remember: no one does content better than WordPress, the software powering 30% of the Fortune 100. And no one does enterprise WordPress better than WordPress VIP.
Grupo Abril, one of the largest media companies in Latin America, sought to streamline the IT sprawl that had arisen from the organic growth and development of its dozens of brands.
Taming the sprawl of organic growth
Abril’s portfolio was spread across several content management systems, including a custom Ruby On Rails system hosted in-house, another hosted via Amazon Web Services, and a Drupal-based system supported by Acquia. This system was costly and ineffective. Because of IT constraints, some brands hadn’t had a site update in ten years and as a result, had no mobile-optimized version of their site.
Unleashing greater efficiency
Abril has made major improvements in agility since standardizing with WordPress VIP. In addition to hosting and supporting Abril’s sites and providing training for developers and editorial staff, WordPress VIP manages ongoing security and performance, and serves as an end-to-end consultant for all of Abril’s content publishing development.
Shared benefits across its portfolio
New features and site launches can now be deployed with just a few days’ notice. Company resources are no longer tied up in staying up to date with third-party APIs, and Abril is now first to market with updates any time those services change. This has opened up their pipeline, and freed the organization up to focus its resources where they can have the most valuable impact – editorial and front-end work.
“We have enormously improved our efficiency since we don’t need additional teams or third parties to support our infrastructure. We can focus on what matters, which is producing content and generating value.”
Ricardo Schultz, CIO of Abril
To learn more about our work with Abril, including detailed results of their successful migration, download the executive summary.
Unlocking power and efficiency for News Corp Australia
News Corp Australia is Australia’s largest digital news network. Together, its channels see 8 million unique visits a day and 600 million page views a month.
Multiple platforms hampered growth
With 90+ brands spread across a wide range of platforms, their team suffered from inefficient workflows which hindered their growth. To position themselves for continued success, they needed a flexible enterprise-level digital publishing solution with the power to scale.
After a successful test project, News Corp Australia went all in and migrated their 90+ brands to WordPress VIP.
Agility at scale
Armed with WordPress, an agile platform that integrates seamlessly with internal systems, stakeholders are now able to contribute value to their sites in ways that were not possible before. A core suite of vetted plugins and a base theme serve as the foundation for each new site on the platform. And a new in-editor “Site Build” experience offers web producers the ability to assemble and organize an infinite combination of complex layouts—without touching code.
Major improvement in time to value
Since launching with WordPress VIP, News Corp Australia has continued to grow their digital publishing offerings, now hosting 40+ sites with WordPress VIP, and launching new assets on a regular basis. They take advantage of over 50 custom plugins, which integrate WordPress with their broader systems architecture. In many ways, this project allowed News Corp Australia to reinvent themselves and established a partnership to drive the evolution of the platform for years to come.
“[We] … cut the time it takes to build out a section of the site from days to hours. We’re so proud to be part of that success story.”
Weston Ruter, CTO at XWP
To learn more about our work with News Corp Australia, including detailed results of their successful migration, download the executive summary.
I recently had the opportunity to present at Discover MarTech, a virtual conference focused on marketing technology and management. My goal was to help fellow marketing managers see the silver lining in something many teams are struggling with right now: how to stay creative as we navigate the new culture of remote work.
Automattic, WordPress VIP’s parent company, has always been a fully remote workplace. Well, actually, we prefer the term “distributed,” because there are no central, physical, headquarters.
Each Automattician (which is what we call ourselves) works from a home office, or a local co-working space, a coffee shop, really, just about anywhere that has a good internet connection.
No such thing as “normal”
Right now, though, that list of possible locations has been whittled down to just one: the home office. And perhaps not the normal home office. It’s now the home office you can never leave. The home office with kids, with partners, and with a makeshift homeschool. Or the home office for one, on a bed in a tiny studio apartment.
So for us, the “new normal” of remote work that so many other companies have been thrust into is both incredibly familiar, and completely new. This is not normal remote work, even for us.
Shared values drive agility
The good news, though, is that being distributed actually enables us to be creative in a more agile way. That’s in large part thanks to the values and culture at the root of our workplace, and how our strategies and tools for remote work allow us to reach out to each other across teams, locations, and time zones.
I’m happy to share the recording of my 15-minute talk, which covers:
How values like agility, stability, accountability, flexibility, and authenticity inform the way we work, and how defining your own values can have a similar impact on your team
The role of open-source software in creating the stability and consistency we need to grow
The tools we use to improve collaboration across cross-functional teams in multiple time zones
Watch the video here:
If you have any questions or ideas, I’d love to talk more about this topic. I have so much empathy for everyone who is juggling life in a new way. When it comes to navigating our current reality, we’re all in this together.
Why Capgemini Migrated 38 Sites From Drupal to WordPress
Capgemini is a multi-billion dollar international consultancy focused on leader technology services and digital transformation. Capgemini’s global workforce comprises 200,000 team members in over 40 countries. Capgemini underwent a huge re-platforming project, migrating their network of 38 sites from their legacy Drupal CMS to WordPress VIP.
Drupal had become a choke point, causing unnecessary production delays
Capgemini’s legacy Drupal CMS was no longer improving workflows or supporting their editorial needs. To make matters worse, Drupal’s lack of backward compatibility made the website increasingly unstable. Finally, the system no longer supported their digital roadmap. To make matters worse, teams across Capgemini were becoming frustrated with the lack of usability and extensibility. Understandably, teams created their own solutions outside the group platform. These workarounds created a governance nightmare.
Capgemini migrated 38 sites to WordPress—which immediately increased productivity
Capgemini had a clear requirement: their new platform would promote a decentralized approach to publishing and provide a workflow and communication framework to increase visibility into the production process. Migrating to WordPress quickly alleviated Capgemini’s content creation challenges.
“We needed a system and a piece of technology that would force a reckoning of our team members to actually learn what digital publishing is, and what digital marketing means today, in a bunch of different cultures, languages, and markets.”
Parker Ward, Director, Content Marketing and Communications
Now, Capgemini’s teams deliver seamless user experiences across languages, cultures, and markets
WordPress VIP helped Capgemini leap into a new digital culture of creation with a robust, usable, and intuitive CMS. Now, the CMS supports Capgemini in delivering their business objectives and empowers their global network of teams to do their jobs effectively.
This post is part of a series providing executive summaries of WordPress VIP case studies. For a complete list of these executive summaries, click here.
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