Within the dynamic world of digital advertising, staying forward of technological advances is crucial.
This is among the driving forces behind Artwork & Science, a full-service digital company and winner of WP Engine’s inaugural Company Accomplice Award for Headless Mission of the 12 months.
To study extra about Artwork & Science’s revolutionary work and the main points behind the company’s award-winning initiatives, we spoke with Artwork & Science Technical Director Peter Toi to study extra in regards to the company’s success. We talked about what’s behind it.
Thanks, Peter. Congratulations on successful the Company Accomplice Award! Earlier than we go into particulars, please inform us extra in regards to the origins of Artwork & Science and its core competencies.
Artwork & Science began in 2011 as The Juice Company, a digital advertising firm on the intersection of technique, person expertise, and expertise innovation. After buying a number one Toronto-based website positioning/PPC firm in 2013, we rebranded to Artwork & Science. Artwork & Science combines the inventive inspiration of artists with the analytical rigor of scientists.
Over the previous 13 years, now we have grown right into a full-service digital company. We’re proud to announce that Clutch is Canada’s #1 Digital Company, a 2023 Google Premier Accomplice, and ranked as certainly one of Canada’s Prime 500 Rising Corporations for the fourth 12 months in a row. I am pleased with that.
Our core competencies embody model technique, inventive promoting, web site improvement, e-commerce technique, website positioning, CRO efficiency, media planning, buying and reporting, and revolutionary and experimental initiatives.
How has your partnership with WP Engine impacted your company’s development and success?
Artwork & Science has been a member of the Company Accomplice Program since 2018, however our relationship with WP Engine goes again a few years to after we first began utilizing WP Engine as our major WordPress internet hosting platform. Apparently, I nonetheless keep in mind the primary time he was launched to WP Engine as a sponsor and speaker at an occasion in Toronto. word camp A few years in the past. From that first interplay, I thought-about WP Engine to be the gold customary in managed WordPress internet hosting. Since then, WP Engine has lived as much as my first impressions.
Internet hosting with WP Engine provides us the peace of thoughts to give attention to the place we carry worth: offering our purchasers with strategic perception, inventive pondering, and constructing award-winning websites. As a inventive company, we do not essentially need to spend our time engaged on infrastructure or managing internet hosting.
On the similar time, lots of our options are extremely technical and require help for Git workflows and pipelines, high-performance CDNs and caching, and enterprise-grade safety. WP Engine has offered us with a right-sized resolution for all our WordPress initiatives.
It is nice to see WP Engine’s options develop with us and proceed to help companies like us. Add-ons like Good Plugin Supervisor permit you to focus your vitality on creating worth on your purchasers as a substitute of sustaining the established order.
The help you obtain as an agent by means of membership within the Company Accomplice Program has contributed considerably to our development and success. The help we obtain from WP Engine is all the time top-notch, each technical and gross sales help.
Our account administration and gross sales help groups are key companions on the pitch to assist construct internet hosting options the place safety, site visitors, or company necessities are beneath scrutiny. Whether or not you want efficiency profiling or different troubleshooting, direct entry to Tier 1 help can be invaluable.
And I can say with out hesitation that the help of an account supervisor and entry to key members of the Atlas group have been important to constructing and launching the Embark web site beneath tight time constraints.
Are you able to share some perception into the Embark undertaking, a headless WordPress undertaking, and the choices behind it?
of get on board This undertaking is a superb instance of our full-service capabilities. Our shopper wished to rebrand and give attention to a brand new messaging platform to distinguish themselves within the RESP monetary providers area. This required complete help together with branding, campaigns and web site improvement.
With that in thoughts, the choice to go headless was apparent. As a contemporary monetary providers firm, our shopper’s digital footprint included a web site, shopper portal, and attainable future cell apps. Headless structure permits syndication of content material from a single CMS to varied platforms. Flexibility in content material distribution and supply was definitely one of many principal causes we selected Headless and WP Engine Atlas for this undertaking.
Moreover, our shopper had already talked about headless as an method they wished us to think about early within the analysis course of, so the dialog was pretty straightforward.
The choice to make use of WordPress was made as a result of it was a platform the advertising group was aware of. After all, WordPress is ubiquitous on the web, amongst advertising groups and companies world wide. Subsequently, the familiarity, ease of content material enhancing, and advances in each RESTful and GraphQL API integration have been sufficient causes to decide on WordPress.
Headless was additionally engaging for this undertaking due to the elevated safety due to an API-only content material resolution.
WordPress could be a very safe platform when deployed appropriately on a platform like WP Engine and dealt with by a improvement group that is aware of what they’re doing. We discovered that we might limit entry to the backend by delivering all content material through API, which allowed us to implement extra safety measures, decrease plugins, and impose stricter improvement guidelines. Ta.
What have been a number of the technical challenges and successes of the Embark undertaking?
One of many principal challenges was to make sure excessive efficiency, which was tough given the four-month schedule. 4 months is a very long time to construct a web site of this measurement and complexity, however even much less should you embody efficiency optimization, content material enter, and website positioning and monitoring implementation. All of this was achieved on a comparatively new platform and new expertise.
What stood out right here was the help we obtained from WP Engine. I am unable to thank my account supervisor sufficient for the associate help he offered us and the WP Engine technical group we labored with. They helped us keep on schedule and keep away from the weeks of trial and error it takes to develop greatest practices and optimizations. We have been in a position to contact help instantly they usually responded extremely shortly. Our success is definitely as a result of excessive stage of help we acquired.
That is very true if you wish to obtain good API efficiency with sub-100ms response instances. The identical was true when leveraging WP Engine’s caching mechanism. WPGraphQL Smart Cache. By activating your entire cache pipeline and refactoring the construct course of and code in a method that was appropriate with the whole lot, we noticed a 6,000x efficiency enchancment between the primary and final construct. Due to all this work, the positioning is working very quick.
Are you able to inform us extra about successful Headless Mission of the 12 months? What influence does this recognition have?
Successful this award is a testomony to the arduous work and dedication of our group. This acknowledges our efforts to remain on prime of the newest in internet improvement, scale back our purchasers’ technical debt, and set them up for long-term success. This additionally acknowledges our dedication to retaining our expertise updated and making certain our purchasers obtain the newest options to future-proof their digital presence.
However the web site is only one a part of this bigger endeavor. In actual fact, your entire group at Artwork & Science needs to be recommended for the hassle they put into making certain the success of this undertaking.
Everybody at Artwork & Science was concerned on this undertaking, beginning with the strategic and artistic group who developed an attractive model with a journey metaphor, to the technical group who introduced it to life, to the shopper providers group who managed your entire undertaking. We labored collectively to make this occur. success. I’d additionally prefer to thank her Embark Scholar Corp. for inviting us to be a associate in shaping college students’ futures of their post-secondary profession paths. Nice imaginative and prescient helps allow nice work.
As a Technical Director, I used to be very blissful to win the Headless Mission of the 12 months award. We always adapt to adjustments in our expertise ecosystem and setting. This can be a nice validation of our efforts in direction of adaptation and innovation within the business.
Thanks, Peter. And congratulations on this worthy award in Arts & Science!
Be taught extra about WP Engine’s Company Accomplice Program, the most important WordPress company ecosystem. To study extra about our totally managed WordPress platform, go to WP Engine.
