A Q&A With Artwork & Science

Within the dynamic world of digital advertising, staying forward of the technological curve is crucial.

That is a part of what drives Artwork & Science, a full-service digital company and the winner of WP Engine’s inaugural Company Accomplice Awards for “Headless Challenge of the Yr.”

To be taught extra concerning the progressive work Artwork & Science does and the small print behind the company’s award-winning mission, we spoke with Artwork & Science Technical Director Peter Toi to have a look at what’s behind his company’s success. 

Thanks, Peter, and congratulations in your Company Accomplice Award. Earlier than we get into these particulars, please inform us extra concerning the origins of Artwork & Science and its core competencies.

Artwork & Science began again in 2011 as The Juice Company, a digital advertising agency sitting on the intersection of technique, person expertise, and expertise innovation. We rebranded as Artwork & Science following the acquisition of a number one Toronto-based search engine optimisation/PPC agency in 2013. Artwork & Science brings collectively the artistic inspiration of the artist with the analytical rigour of the scientist. 

Over the past 13 years, we’ve grown right into a full-service digital company. We’re proud to be Clutch’s #1 digital company in Canada, a 2023 Google Premier Accomplice, and ranked as considered one of Canada’s Prime 500 Rising Firms 4 years in a row.

Our core competencies embrace model technique, artistic promoting, web site growth, eCommerce technique, search engine optimisation, and CRO efficiency, media plans, buys and reporting, and progressive, experimental initiatives.

How has your partnership with WP Engine affected the company’s progress and success?

Artwork & Science has been a member of the Company Accomplice Program since 2018, however our relationship with WP Engine simply goes again numerous years to after we first began utilizing WP Engine as our main WordPress internet hosting platform. Humorous sufficient, I nonetheless recall the primary time I used to be launched to WP Engine as each sponsor and speaker at a Toronto WordCamp a few years in the past. From that first interplay, I thought-about WP Engine to be the gold commonplace of managed WordPress internet hosting and so they’ve lived as much as my first impressions ever since.

Internet hosting with WP Engine offers us peace of thoughts and permits us to give attention to areas the place we deliver worth, reminiscent of offering purchasers with strategic insights, artistic considering, and constructing award-winning websites. As a artistic company, we don’t essentially wish to be spending our time engaged on infrastructure and managing internet hosting.

On the identical time, lots of our options are extremely technical and require help for Git workflows and pipelines, high-performance CDNs and caching, and enterprise-level safety. WP Engine has offered us with right-sized options for all of our WordPress initiatives.

It’s been nice seeing  WP Engine’s options develop with us and proceed to help companies like us. Add-ons like Sensible Plugin Supervisor enable us to focus our vitality on creating worth for our purchasers somewhat than sustaining the established order.

The help we get as an company by way of our membership within the Company Accomplice Program has completely contributed to our progress and success. The help we obtain from WP Engine, each for technical and gross sales help, is constantly top-notch.

The account administration and gross sales help groups have been instrumental companions on pitches, serving to to craft internet hosting options the place safety, visitors, or enterprise necessities are scrutinized. Direct entry to tier 1 help has additionally been invaluable, whether or not we require efficiency profiling or different troubleshooting. 

And I can say, with out hesitation, that the help from our account supervisor and entry to key members of the Atlas group was essential to with the ability to construct and launch the Embark web site below tight time constraints.

May you share insights into the Embark mission, which was a headless WordPress mission, and the decision-making behind it?

The Embark mission is an ideal instance of our full-service capabilities. Our consumer wished to  rebrand, specializing in a brand new messaging platform to distinguish itself within the RESP monetary providers sector. This required complete help, together with branding, campaigns, and web site growth. 

With that in thoughts, the choice to go headless was apparent. As a contemporary monetary providers firm, our consumer’s digital footprint included a web site, consumer portal, and the potential for a cell app sooner or later. Headless structure permits for the syndication of content material from a single CMS to a wide range of platforms. That flexibility in content material distribution and supply was actually one of many essential causes we selected headless and WP Engine Atlas for this mission. 

Moreover, our consumer had already talked about headless early on within the discovery course of as an method they wished us to contemplate, so it was a reasonably simple dialog.

The choice to make use of WordPress was made as a result of it was a platform the advertising group was conversant in. WordPress is, in fact, ubiquitous throughout the Web and amongst advertising groups and firms around the globe. So familiarity, ease of content material enhancing, and the evolution of API integrations, each RESTful and GraphQL, have been good causes to decide on  WordPress. 

 Headless was additionally enticing for this mission due to the elevated safety we achieved due to an API-only content material answer. 

WordPress—when deployed appropriately on a platform like WP Engine and dealt with by a growth group who is aware of what they’re doing—is a really safe platform. Understanding that we’d be capable of prohibit entry to the backend, due to delivering all content material by way of an API, allowed us to implement extra safety measures, decrease the plugins, and impose stricter guidelines for growth. 

What have been a number of the technical challenges and triumphs within the Embark mission?

One of many essential challenges was making certain excessive efficiency, which was difficult given our four-month timeline. 4 months is tight to construct a website of this measurement and complexity, and even tighter once you embrace efficiency optimizations, content material entry, and implementation of search engine optimisation and monitoring. And all of this was carried out on a comparatively new platform and new expertise. 

What stood out right here was the help we received from WP Engine. I can’t thank our account supervisor sufficient for the associate help that was offered to us and the WP Engine technical group we labored with. They have been instrumental in serving to us preserve to our timeline and keep away from weeks of trial-and-error to develop greatest practices and optimizations. We had direct contact with help who have been extremely responsive—our success is actually owed partially to the excessive degree of help we acquired.

This was very true with regard to attaining spectacular API efficiency with < 100 millisecond response instances. It was additionally the case as we leveraged WP Engine’s caching mechanism and WPGraphQL Sensible Cache. As soon as we had that complete caching pipeline activated and refactored our construct course of and code in a method that every part was appropriate, we noticed an enchancment of 6,000 instances higher efficiency between our first builds and our final. The positioning is blazing quick due to all of that work.

Are you able to inform us extra about profitable Headless Challenge of the Yr? What’s the impression of this recognition? 

Profitable this award is a testomony to our group’s arduous work and dedication. It acknowledges our efforts in staying updated with the newest in internet growth, lowering technical debt for our purchasers, and setting them up for long-term success. It’s additionally a recognition of our dedication to retaining our abilities present and making certain our purchasers obtain fashionable options that assist them future-proof their digital presence.

However the web site is only one a part of this huge endeavor. Actually, the complete group at Artwork & Science needs to be acknowledged for the arduous work they put in to make sure this mission was successful.

Everybody at Artwork & Science–beginning with the strategic and artistic groups who developed a lovely model with a journey metaphor, to the technical groups who introduced it to life, and the consumer providers group who managed the mission all through–collaborated to make this mission successful. I additionally wish to thank Embark Scholar Corp. for inviting us to associate to form the way forward for college students on their post-secondary journey. Nice visions assist make nice work potential.

Because the technical director, I’m over the moon that we gained an award for headless mission of the yr!  We’re all the time adapting to modifications within the expertise ecosystem and surroundings. It is a big validation of our efforts to adapt and innovate in our trade.

Thanks, Peter, and congratulations to Artwork & Science on this well-deserved award! 

Discover out extra about WP Engine’s Company Accomplice Program—the most important WordPress company ecosystem—right here, or go to WP Engine to be taught extra about our absolutely managed WordPress platform.