Held in partnership with our friends over at Human Made, the webinar brought together speakers from major brands and publishers to highlight how they leverage the WordPress platform. As well as giving delegates a chance to hear first hand from organisations such as The Times, Harvard University, Google, and Penske Media Corporation (PMC), it also featured informative sessions delivered by members of the Big Bite team, as well as our industry colleagues at Human Made and WordPress VIP.
Record-time content creation
A standout talk of the day looked at how we’ve recently helped The Times and The Sunday Times to produce and publish digital content faster than ever before via a headless WordPress CMS. Led by The Times’s Newsroom Product Editor, Luke Sikkema, as well as our very own Head of Project Management, Lisa McCann, the session ran through the strategic delivery of The Times’s WordPress transformation which has sped up publishing by 34%.
The talk also looked at specific functionality and custom editorial features developed as part of the transformative project, which you can read more about here.
Open source, processes and performance
Additional speakers offering a wealth of knowledge included Brian Alvey, CTO of WordPress VIP, who discussed open source as the ultimate equalising technology, and touched on the enterprise advantages and commercial complexities of freely available functionality.
Adam Silverstein, long-standing WordPress contributor and Developer Relations Engineer at Google, emphasised the importance of user experience across WordPress, highlighting ways that enterprise brands can strengthen all-important core web vital scores.
Attendees also heard from Nicola Catton, VP Product Delivery at PMC, which manages world-renowned brands including Variety, Rolling Stone and WWD. Leveraging a WordPress VIP hosted solution, Nicola highlighted how the organisation’s in-house engineering team successfully meets the needs of its ever-expanding portfolio, covering everything from small updates to entire migrations.
Functionality first
During the webinar we also shared key insights from State of enterprise WordPress 2023 – our first-of-its-kind report that summarises findings from a survey of over 100 large-scale brands that currently rely on the number one CMS.
The discussion-style session with our CEO, Iain McPherson, and Human Made’s COO, Siobhan McKeown, took a closer look at the results which reveal that functionality trumps everything – including cost – when it comes to investing in a CMS.
The report also highlights that the vast majority of enterprise users are more than satisfied with WordPress, with 91% of respondents confirming that they’ll continue to use the platform.
Added value
Flying the flag for WordPress in the higher education space, the last session of the day featured Harvard University’s Senior Associate Director of Content Strategy, Aaron Baker, talking through the recent launch of the Harvard Gazette site. Chatting with Petya Raykovska, Director of Agency Operations at Human Made – the agency behind the solution – Aaron highlighted the many advantages of using a WordPress multisite system.
As well as touching on the broader value-add of using an open source solution, this included the time-saving benefits of the Gutenberg block editor for building curated experiences and stories, and improved collaboration across content creation teams.
Missed out on the webinar? Every session featured in WordPress For Enterprise can now be viewed online.
