The global team behind Atlas Bench is a huge asset, but the company website was impossible for the non-technical marketing team to update.
Language barriers and time zone differences made it even harder, since they had to rely on the European development team for even the smallest changes. To simplify things, the team tried WordPress, but while it helped with UI, it fell short on functionality.
Looking for an alternative, the team found ButterCMS and was immediately drawn to its built-in blog capabilities. As they explored more features—like the components library—they were sold. Now the marketing team has direct control over the company website, they’ve freed up technical resources, opened the door to new SEO efforts, and sped up implementations from days to seconds.
We got really excited for ButterCMS, because we can make designs as complex as we want, get them implemented, and make it maintainable.
Like most development companies today, Atlas Bench employs a diverse and global workforce.
That means they have a great mix of talent, but it also meant they faced added challenges whenever they wanted to make updates to the company website. Since their marketing team wasn’t equipped to alter the website directly, they would have to put any change requests through to the development team, but that was a task easier said than done.
On top of having more pressing matters on their plate—like client projects—the development team faced communication challenges, as not all speak fluent English. This meant additional explanations were sometimes needed to properly convey the marketing team’s requests. And, even once an update was eventually pushed through by the European developers, time zone differences meant the marketing team in America wouldn’t see them until the next day.
This convoluted process soon led Riley Venable, Director of Programs at Atlas Bench, to seek out a more user-friendly solution that would give the marketing team the control they needed to implement changes quickly and efficiently. At first, they tried using WordPress, and while they loved it for its user-friendly interface, it lacked the scalability and rich functionality they needed.
“There were always those small little issues you run into, and you can't fix them,” Riley says. “Using WordPress as the CMS to serve our front-end website was just a mess.” In search of an alternative, the team discovered ButterCMS.
The immediate goal was to replace WordPress with a tool that could simply get the job done.
ButterCMS initially stood out for its straightforward blog capability, but the team soon realized this headless solution made sense across the entire website.
“We got really excited for ButterCMS, because we can make designs as complex as we want, get them implemented, and make it maintainable,” Riley says.
Riley began working with the marketing team and development leads to see what they thought of ButterCMS. After some initial testing and discussions with stakeholders, including the board members, Riley got the greenlight to implement it. Since then, Atlas Bench has continued expanding its use case, adding features as quickly as the team dreams them up.
With ButterCMS in place, the team finally has breathing room for the developers they used to be so reliant on. Less technical team members, like their marketers in America, have been empowered to make direct changes to the website on their own time, and tweak it until it’s perfect. Plus, the developers have been given a fully-functional and highly capable platform to build upon.
No longer locked behind developers, the marketing team has been able to implement everything 3x to 4x faster, changing their outlook on what’s possible.
For instance, since making the switch, Atlas Bench has been able to focus on search engine optimization, something Riley says the marketing team had never before found feasible due to the bottlenecks of the past.
In addition to being able to own their own changes and updates, the marketing team has the agility necessary to implement proper A/B testing campaigns to observe SEO results without the hassle of getting developers involved, or double-checking that things have been implemented as intended.
“The big thing that brought us around to using ButterCMS is freeing up our technical resources and allowing our less technical team to make production changes,” Riley says.
The design team has also benefited from the components library inside of ButterCMS, which allows them to manage design components just like they manage them in Figma. This familiarity and ease of organization has made keeping the website looking clean and updated as simple as can be.
By eliminating bottlenecks of the past, ButterCMS allows Atlas Bench to not only realize 3x faster implementation, but also delve deeper into essential areas like SEO that were previously unreachable.
Now, despite having teams across time zones and language barriers, they have turned days-long interactions into seconds’ worth of work, allowing them to stay ahead of the game in today’s fast-paced landscape.
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