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No question about it, agencies launch new websites like restaurants introduce new menus.  Each looking to wow their customers and generate positive reviews, and each with a unique purpose guiding its development.

In the case of Marcus Thomas, the agency's purpose was to create a website that shined a light on the three things the agency has to sell: thinking, creative and culture. The trick was to do it in a way that didn't derail the agency's main line of business: working for its clients.

There are three things that need to converge to enable this strategy: architecture, content strategy and content management.

The site's architecture is intended to drive visitors directly to what's relevant to them as a prospective client or a prospective employee, and to enable some cross marketing from there without injecting hurdles in their journey. Our content strategy was all about simplicity too, adding Solutions and Markets to Work and Thinking (the blog; now Words). We also enhanced the content sharing mechanism, allowing Solutions and Words to be shared across cases using a simple tagging mechanism. 

Feeding all of this content requires a distributed content management strategy. Basically, everyone in the agency is encouraged to author content, with a master editor handling review and go-live duties. We also contemplated how this content would be used beyond just the website (like with internal digital signage and an intranet).

We chose the Kentico Cloud-First Headless CMS to drive all of this. The headless CMS gives us the flexibility to author content separate from the presentation layer, allowing the presentation to vary depending upon how the content is used. and on what device was using it.  (A side note: we're a Kentico partner and also wanted to experiment with the headless CMS.)

Certainly, a website still needs some care and feeding, but we do that, in this case, on the webserver. The CMS lives in the cloud and the team at Kentico does the care and feeding there. The Kentico Cloud-First Headless CMS gives us a number of significant advantages:

• We avoid having another CMS in our environment.
• Kentico updates the code in the Cloud every time there's a new release.
• It's more secure.
• It's fast, (not that an advertising agency is going to draw big traffic). Most of the work is done on the cloud CMS service, so even a modest configuration can handle huge traffic. 

Watch this great video from Kentico to learn more about the Cloud-First Headless CMS.