How RAPID Built a Site That Can Handle Regular Updates with Butter

Thanks to its widely acclaimed and highly effective RAPID platform, iSchemaView is expanding its market reach quickly. The company has established itself as a leader in the stroke diagnostic and treatment technology space. As a result of this fast-paced growth, the iSchemaView
team is constantly making updates to its website to accommodate a high volume of new content.

Keeping pace with this growth requires a content management system that’s very, very scalable. That’s why iSchemaView selected ButterCMS, on which the company now runs its entire database and website.

ButterCMS allows iSchemaView to continue building a high-performance, single-page application in Angular (that is, one in which all code is delivered in a single page load, providing a faster, more seamless experience for the user). The flexibility of this system has allowed the iSchemaView team to rebuild their site multiple times to keep up with 10x growth during that short period of time and changing FDA regulations.

There are a few key aspects to the way iSchemaView runs its site that make a traditional CMS, such as WordPress, an unviable solution.

First and foremost, the RAPID platform operates in the medical space. That means that iSchemaView needs to be able to quickly update information on its website based on updates or changes to FDA and HIPAA regulations. In addition, the team is constantly receiving feedback from users including hospitals—as well as press about their innovative technology, all of which needs to be reflected on the website quickly.

• Press releases
• News articles
• Doctor and clinical training
• Product documentation
• Information
• Discoveries

Secondly, the RAPID website is set up so that every single field is independent to accommodate contributions from other stakeholders and departments. While uncommon, this is by design, and iSchemaView needed a CMS capable of handling multiple edits to many different fields on a regular basis.

Before moving to ButterCMS, iSchemaView ran a static site in PHP using only two developers. Says Todd Dunning, Senior Analytics Engineer, “It was not on a database, was not data-driven at all, and required constant updates given all the fields that iSchemaView uses.” To do this work sustainably, especially given the company’s overall pace of growth, the marketing and sales teams needed the ability to quickly deploy content updates without the help of engineering. “Everything, including our product and app, is built in Angular. And we just didn’t have the resources to do a WordPress build that would, in the end, mean we lose out on the performance improvements that Angular provides.”

After evaluating other content management systems, Dunning and the iSchemaTeam decided to move everything—the entire backend of the website—onto ButterCMS. “Our biggest priority was finding a system that could make content editable, quickly, as soon as we needed an update done.” The entire site is comprised of a single, high-performance application that depends on calls to the ButterCMS API to deliver rich, dynamic content.

This allows the iSchemaView team to maintain a software platform that is consistent across all of its products, apps, and the website itself. And it allows the website to function as a portal for iSchemaView products. With ButterCMS, the team now benefits from:

• Expandable content that’s usable right away
• A system that’s easy to use for both developers and marketing people
• The ability to handle thousands of custom fields and field descriptions

The team was also able to break up all of their content, from photographs to test results and surveys, to support more efficient content reuse and the data-driven approach that iSchemaView strives for.

Everything is an independent object. Everything is editable. There’s hardly any static text at all. Angular is creating our pages from a whole bunch of Butter API calls. Butter calls in our header, our footer, all the result loops that populate dynamically—all of our content.

Todd Dunning | Senior Analytics Engineer

Finally, the staging functionality gives the entire iSchemaView team the confidence that multiple content updates carried out by multiple contributors are happening securely and properly, without the risk of blowing anything up. “You can’t accidentally push the wrong button in our Butter deployment,” says Dunning. “That was a serious limitation in the past.”

For a single-page application, the iSchemaView website is quite complex on the backend. With ButterCMS in place, marketers, developers, and other stakeholders can now easily navigate to the content they need to update and get the job done with the confidence that they’re not going to break anything.

Now that iSchemaView runs on a cloud delivery network, uptime has remained close to 100% and performance has far exceeded the past deployment.

Our company is now ten times the size it was just a couple of years ago. We’re adding a lot of content, content that our customers depend on to assess stroke risk in the field. Uptime, website performance, and data security are absolutely essential, and we’ve improved in all three areas with ButterCMS.

Todd Dunning | Senior Analytics Engineer

Scalability is important too. Since launching ButterCMS, Dunning and the iSchemaView team have completed multiple total website rebuilds to accommodate the massive expansion of their business. “We needed to get it right, without cache issues or performance degradation, in a quick and manageable way that met all of our requirements.” Interestingly enough, for all the updates, rebuilds, and additional content, the entire website build itself is still quite small.

Finally, content updates are now far more efficient. Because the content is broken out, it allows for easier reuse of the same piece of content across multiple channels—no need to waste time reinventing the wheel each and every time. That means that people like Dunning, who used to spend too much time handling content updates, can rely on other teams—and the stability of ButterCMS—to handle 100% of content updates