We are a marketing company, and as such tend to focus on the delivery and use of great marketing content. However to deliver & use this content you need your website to be technically up to date and flexible enough to develop as new technologies arise. This point is illustrated perfectly by a current change that is taking place with PHP, the software technology that drives the sites that we and many others develop. PHP is being constantly updated, adding features and addressing security issues as the arise. At the end of 2018, there is a significant event in the life of php in that v5 will die to be replaced by v7 (If you are interested to find out what happened to V6 read this). Whilst normally these version changes pass unnoticed. With the switch to PHP7, this may not be the case. The way the software interfaces with databases is changing significantly, such that sites written to use the old system will not work on php v7. Now v7 and the new technology it uses have been around for a while, and most of this technology works happily on v5. So developers have been updating their systems to use the new infrastructure for quite a while. The result being that for sites using these system – (WordPress is one such platform), the switch to php 7 will pass unnoticed (as it should be).
Marketing needs technology
Our philosophy is that marketing needs technology but should not be ruled by it. The technology should be in the background. One of our roles as a marketing partner in 2018 is to manage the technology. The aim is to ensure that it does not impact on the marketing activities. This is one of the reasons we love WordPress. Whilst open source & so not reliant on one company to develop it, it has a huge user base, and so is being constantly updated and improved, leaving us to focus on the Marketing, knowing that the core platform we use to deliver this is “keeping up with the times”
Technology needs updating
One downside of open source is that a website can rely on a number of different elements with different developers. And different developers have different update cycles. As such the process of keeping systems up to date needs constant focus. By having a process to manage this, we ensure that sites stay technically up to date. Ensuring that any issues that may arise from updates are taken care of in the background. Keeping the impact on day to day marketing activities to a minimum. Remember
Technology is a useful Servant, but a dangerous Master
