Well, that’s that done – farewell to 2019, goodbye….!
It was a year of uncertainty that made its impact, both on business generally and in technology. Many companies found themselves paralysed by the Brexit-quandary, public awareness around privacy and advertising led to deeper scrutiny of the tech giants, and the gig economy continued to grow seemingly unchecked, although some investors have begun to smell a rat.
Despite this, we found many of our clients confident in moving ahead with their marketing and digital roadmaps for the year, and we had plenty to be getting on with, fitting project work around other highlights like attending WordCamp Berlin as a team en masse, hosting multiple conferences in our PACE Marketing series and attending the Google Leadership CMS Summit.
2019 was also year of considered iteration for WordPress as a platform, after some seismic changes in 2018 with the lead up to WordPress 5.0 and the release of the Gutenberg block editor. Over the course of the year, many new block libraries have been released, allowing confident site-owners to enhance the new editor to their heart’s content. If you combine Gutenberg with the power of the WP REST API, you can get ever closer to the utopia of “Create Once Publish Everywhere” (COPE), allowing teams to create content within WordPress and publish across a whole ecosystem, from sites to mobile apps, email campaigns and more.
These are welcome advances, as it’s now become increasingly clear to businesses of all sizes that content marketing is one of the most effective methods to generate prospects and leads, drive business intelligence and enhance customer experience.
As WordPress specialists, this is of course music to our ears – over the last year we’ve completed project after project to help our clients deliver fantastic platforms that convert, with a frictionless publishing flow – letting the CMS get out of the way and allowing the marketing teams to do great work at the pace they need.
These principles apply to almost every client that we work with, large and small. We’ve been delighted to continue our partnership with Sage, working to launch an international content hub in 20 countries, as well as bringing a whole range of marketing sites online for Danone.
We’ve continued our efforts to give back to the community, and worked hard to find a way to cost-effectively deliver websites for charities and not-for-profit organisations, such as the Martlets Hospice and Clocktower Sanctuary, sharing some of our learnings on managing donations along the way. We’re very excited to become the digital partner (and new members!) of Business in the Community who encourage and support sustainability and good practice in business.
Finally, with partnership as one of our core underlying values, we’re especially pleased to have begun working with a number of new enterprise clients over 2019, including The Economist Group, Treatwell and Clarion Gaming. Welcome, and here’s to delivering greatness throughout 2020!
If you are interested in how we deliver WordPress solutions to empower marketing & content teams to be successful then please get in touch.