After several false starts, a marketing team got its website back

A marketing team that could not touch its own website

Genzeon is a healthcare technology company. Like most companies that sell to other businesses, it relies on its website to explain what it does and to turn interest into conversations. That work belongs to marketing.

When we met the marketing lead, that was exactly what was out of reach. The team had a new design, already approved inside the company, and a website they could not change on their own. A new headline or a landing page for a campaign meant a request to a developer and a wait.

The project meant to fix this had been attempted before, by more than one firm, and it had not shipped. So the team had designs everyone had signed off on and no working site to show for them.

Every change needed a developer, and the fix kept not arriving

The site had been built in two parts. Content lived in WordPress, and the pages visitors saw were produced by a separate system that pulled that content in. Setups like this suit some teams well. For a marketing team without developers on hand, it meant the person writing a page could not see the page. They filled in fields in one place, and the result appeared somewhere else, arranged by code they could not reach.

Day to day, that turned small jobs into requests. Changing the navigation was a development task. So was building any page that did not match an existing pattern. Marketing runs on the calendar of campaigns and events, and this website ran on the calendar of whoever was free to write code.

Meanwhile, the redesign sat finished on paper. People across the company had reviewed and approved it, and each stalled attempt made the next one harder to believe in. What the marketing lead needed was plain: the approved design, live, on a site the team could run themselves.

We made it simpler, and built exactly what they had approved

We rebuilt the site as one WordPress site. Content and pages lived in the same place again, so the person editing a page saw the whole page and controlled it. A wording change took a few minutes of marketing's time, and nobody else's.

We built what had already been approved. The designs were signed off before we arrived, so we matched them and did not reopen the design conversation. Nobody at Genzeon had to walk a new round of mockups through approvals, and the project could finally move.

We gave marketing building blocks. Each page was assembled from a set of sections the team could add and reorder, so a new landing page started with someone in marketing and not with a request to a developer. The navigation menu, a large one with a panel for each part of the business, was editable from the WordPress admin screen for the same reason.

We moved everything. Every page, post, image, and document came across from the old site and was checked, so that nothing the team had published went missing at launch.

What the team could do on launch day

The new site went live about eight weeks after we started. On that day the marketing lead could do what had been out of reach for a long time: change a page and publish it without a developer. The team could build a new page from the sections, edit the menu, and post to the blog on their own schedule.

The design that had been approved long before was the design visitors finally saw. The work the team had already done getting it reviewed and signed off was not wasted, and nobody had to defend it a second time.

This was a project with a beginning and an end. We were brought in to get a stalled rebuild launched and to leave the marketing team in control of it, and when the project wrapped, that is where things stood. The decision that mattered most was also the least glamorous one: choosing the setup that fit the people who would use the site every day.