GOAT

How did Goat get into Craft CMS?

Goat’s life as an agency started in website design, and it’s still one of our core offerings. As with many agencies and web designers in 2015, we were WordPress power users, and we still work with WordPress to this day when needed.

However, at a chance meeting in 2017, our founder heard rumblings of an emerging content management system that wasn’t capturing massive market share but was capturing the attention of developers who wanted to create the best digital products possible.

At this point, Goat was transitioning from an agency building simple websites to an agency being asked to deliver a strategy-first, problem-solving approach to support our clients’ digital and communications efforts.

We began exploring the power of Craft, and haven’t looked back to this day.

Client-Friendly Administration Interfaces

No matter how much experience a client has with technology and or navigating a CMS, we strive to create the best experience possible. As Craft CMS allows our clients to structure their pages and content however they need, we can help them turn complex user needs into intuitive user experiences. If you're tired of being boxed in by a theme or a template, we can help you make the move.

Small Business and Complex Institutions

Craft is a great choice for setting up landing pages because it combines power with ease-of-use. A non-developer created this page, and they only needed to reach out to one of our devs to request a few updated features inside content blocks. That workflow allows writers, designers, and marketers to do the heavy lifting on landing page design, giving our devs more time to focus on complex problems.

Whether you're a large institution, government entity, manufacturing company or a small business, Craft CMS can scale to your needs. 

Managed Content Systems

Craft CMS has excellent user management systems out of the box, and with a little modification, can be made to suit almost every scenario. With SFU Beedie, we were able to build customizations that allow faculty and supporting staff to suggest edits and create content, within the confines of a marketing team's approval workflow. This means more collaboration, more content, and more opportunities to provide users with information they need. 

Internal Systems and Intranets

Because of Craft's built-in user management features, it's great for setting up resource & documentation portals, intranet systems, or course delivery systems. This allows clients to manage multiple user groups with varying levels of access to paid content, or set up a particular order of events for training. 

Craft CMS is Customizable

Could we have built Seeking Blue in WordPress? Yes, says Goat developer Tim Lu, but it would have been slower to build, slower to load, and had a harder-to-customize backend user interface. Craft gave our strategists, designers, and developers the smarter, more flexible tools needed to take Seeking Blue from ‘a website that exists and looks good’ to ‘the website we are most likely to submit for awards consideration.’

Craft CMS is Stable

Whether it’s the ability to create and manage a large number of users with varying levels of permissions, or the desire to build engaging content with very little knowledge of HTML, Craft CMS remains reliable. This is especially important for larger educational or government organizations that can’t have downtime or instability. 

Craft CMS is Fast 

Search engines care about speed, and no organization should ignore the opportunities of organic search to drive traffic and results. As a testament to the speed of Craft CMS, Google Pagespeed Insights ranks beedie.sfu.ca (built with Craft) as significantly faster to load and deliver content than www.sfu.ca (built with Adobe Experience Manager), even though they’re the same top-level domain.