Enabling Marketing Teams with Craft CMS

One area marketing teams can get stuck is with websites that don’t do what the team needs them to be able to do, whether it’s poor performance on the front-end for end-users, or limited capabilities for content managers.

When that happens, campaigns get delayed, leads are affected, and frustrations mount.

This is the story of how our client, Nurse.com, solved that problem.

What is Nurse.com?

In their own words, Nurse.com is “the No. 1 source of continuing education, job opportunities and resources for 1+ million nurses.” Nurse.com is one part of a family of brands owned by Relias, who were looking for a Craft CMS development partner when we first worked with them in 2022 on a different project. For Nurse.com, they were seeking a long-term partnership to meet their initial deadline and continue building out the site on an ongoing basis. 

Challenge

When the project kicked off in 2023, Nurse was an expansive web product offering free educational content, a job board, and continuing education courses, spread across three sites (WordPress, Magento, and a custom app).

A primary challenge was the WordPress site's inflexibility. Instead of having the tools to handle most requests themselves, Marketing often had to involve Product, UX, or Engineering (or sometimes all 3!) for straightforward tasks. And because those teams had many other responsibilities, the engineering and marketing roadmaps competed with one another for time and attention. Things got backed up. 

To solve the problem, Nurse.com required a modern CMS to align with marketing goals, to introduce a new design system, and to migrate blog content complete with SEO metadata on a can’t-miss timeline. No sweat, right?

Solution

Ok, actually a lot of sweat. And time, meetings, some late nights, and coffee. Typically, at this point in a blog post, I might talk about Feature ABC or Process XYZ that we implemented. But none of those examples would really communicate what made this project successful.

The real difference has been the partnership with the Nurse.com team. Typically, Zaengle doesn’t do staff augmentation. But over the years, we had some projects where we moved closer to it, and they were successful. Perhaps that softened our stance a bit.

For Nurse.com, they didn’t need a typical web dev agency relationship. Because they have in-house teams in Product, UX, Analytics, Engineering, QA, DevOps, and Marketing, they needed a Craft CMS development partner that could integrate into their teams and operate as a unit, rather than a siloed vendor. They also weren’t interested in building a fixed thing and setting it on auto-pilot. Instead, they wanted to constantly improve the site over time and were willing to invest in a long-term relationship with us to do so. 

What were the results?

Working together, we delivered the project on-time and on-budget, launching in December of 2023. Since then, we’ve worked alongside Product, UX, and Marketing to expand the design system, implement new features, stay on top of Craft versioning, and deliver an excellent editing experience for the marketing team via biweekly releases.

The site gives the marketing team freedom to build complex pages without assistance from other teams, and has freed up Product, UX, and Engineering to work on their own roadmaps. Importantly, the client’s website business KPIs are trending up significantly. The partnership has gone so well that we have been brought on to new site builds within Relias.