By November 03, 2014
We hear a lot of feedback from our partners, and we like to ask them for words of wisdom to fellow agencies looking to scale and make better websites for their clients. Here are a few helpful tips from agencies that have seen major improvements after migrating to Pantheon.
Standardize on a professional platform to do better work, faster.
Developers at Kalamuna love the idea of getting to market faster—and empowering their junior employees to handle support tickets for things like one-click updates. Cofounder Mike Pirog suggests:
“If you care about doing great work, then you also care about saving money on repeatable things. Good clients hate inefficiencies just as much as we do. Standardizing saves you money so you can focus on things that make your work great. That’s the most valuable thing about Pantheon One for Agencies.”
Easily spin up demos and new client sites.
If you’re looking for a way to spin up many sites with out-of-the-box code, David Hickson’s advice might be relevant. His agency, Fullcube, cut time to market by an entire month after ditching Multisite for Pantheon.
“Consider Pantheon One if you want a turnkey way to spin up your platform for many different brands, with easy replication and scaling. It just makes sense for us to offload our infrastructure management, free up resources, and easily push updates to all our sites.”
Migrate the smart way—test the waters with low-traffic sites.
At Coalmarch, Creative Director Todd Robert advises other dev shops to test the waters with low-traffic sites. They managed to roll over 52 client sites after the initial migrations went well.
“We rolled out a couple very small, low-traffic sites first, just to get a taste for what that process looked like, and what tools were available after we got set up and running. You figure, if it works on a small site, it should scale up nicely. That’s definitely been the case.”
Convince your clients to take your advice when choosing a website platform.
John Studdard, cofounder at Big Couch Media, shared his script to get his clients to switch to a professional website platform. He makes his case, with a 90% success rate, with this argument:
"You're paying $150 a month for your smartphone. Wouldn't you do the same thing for the website that runs your business? You'll get everything you've been getting with us, plus this additional capability."
That capability is the ability to scale—to run their sites on infrastructure that can handle traffic spikes, relieve developers of server management tasks, and make it easy to add new developers or designers to the project.
When clients hesitate and ask for the files so they could find hosting themselves, Studdard helps them understand everything that would be required to migrate their site and to get the same level of performance as on Pantheon. Once they understand the work they would need to do without support, they typically get on board with Big Couch's recommendation.
For more on how agencies make the most of their resources and set the stage for growth, download the ebook Scale Your Agency, Rule the World. Rather watch a webinar? Great, sign up for the one on November 11th.
Topics: Education
