Why? For far too long, the status quo of web development has revolved around marketing teams relying on developers to update website content. This leaves marketers unable to make on-the-fly updates and engineers unable to fully focus on core product builds and improvements.

At the end of the day, both teams want to support one another, but in a way that moves company and career growth forward. However, with outdated technology, your marketing team will lack the proper tools it needs to gain full ownership over your most powerful brand asset: your website.

This is what no-code is all about: freeing up developer time and empowering modern marketing teams to create, iterate, edit, and control your site. This doesn’t mean you have to say goodbye to marketing-engineering collaboration; it just means more efficient teamwork, improved employee happiness, and greater agility. Let’s jump into a few of the ways your team will benefit from bringing on a no-code visual development tool.

Removing development bottlenecks helps marketing teams become more agile 

Marketers and developers are wired very similarly. Both like building things and the glee of yelling “ship it!” when their creations are ready to be seen by the world. Both pay close attention to detail and enjoy seeing the results of their efforts. But sometimes this attention to detail requires quick last-minute changes, and that’s where the problems start. 

Agility stops when organizations don’t prioritize efficiency. Oftentimes, marketing teams groan at “development bottlenecks” — or roadblocks that slow down their process — push back deadlines, or kill projects altogether because of a “lack of resources.” But it’s not that developers want to stand in the way. They’re just wrapped up in either a backlog of last-minute requests or their own core responsibilities.

This is why we often see teams outsource some of this work. But traditional agency and in-house web design timelines rarely move fast enough to keep up with customer needs, marketing trends, and evolving brand guidelines. Marketing teams need a no-code platform that affords them autonomy and control they need with assurance that their changes won’t destroy your site’s development framework. Once they have that, time-sensitive edits, building and launching new landing pages, protecting brand identity, and more becomes a walk in the park. And perhaps best of all — their friends on the engineering team will be thrilled to have some much needed time back. 

No-code means marketers can have creative control over your brand’s web presence

Relying on third-party platforms for web design needs like one-off landing pages is not ideal. It’s a security concern and a branding consistency nightmare (who likes grainy logos and not-quite-right font weights?). Plus, the outdated drag-and-drop editors often found in landing page builders tend to be less responsive on mobile, resulting in either a poor end-user experience or your in-house team wasting its time duplicating efforts.

Today’s brands have mere milliseconds to make a good impression from a marketing campaign they’ve likely funneled thousands of dollars into, and no team wants (or can afford) to send users to a half-baked, half-responsive site. With no-code tools, however, marketing teams can link up with in-house designers to build stunning web experiences. Not only are they able to control the look and feel — ensuring it aligns with brand guidelines and resonates with your audience — but the content, growth, and SEO teams are also able to make changes and tweaks to the site, all without developer assistance.

Say goodbye to snail-paced launch plans 

More unicorns were minted in 2021 than the past five years combined³– making competition steeper than ever  — and speed-to-market a non-negotiable. Timing has become the ultimate marketing advantage, and the faster you can iterate and get something live, the faster you are able to get ahead of the competition.

Before any big web launch, businesses need to maintain quality control – ideally without compromising deadlines. However, flat web experiences just won’t cut it anymore, which is why we’ve seen a rise in experimental and immersive marketing content that hooks users. While this may seem intimidating (and a time suck), no-code visual development platforms help your marketing and design teams build and launch pixel-perfect designs quickly and without custom code. The people you know and trust can own key initiatives. Best of all, as time-sensitive ideas arise that will help your organization meet the moment, your team will be well-positioned to execute way quicker than any external agency could. 

It’s time to hand your marketing team the keys

Control, autonomy, speed, time – this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the benefits of arming your marketing team with a no-code web development tool. Don’t just take our word for it: teams at Attentive, MURAL, Shift, and more have seen impressive business growth after making the switch. By putting your marketing team in charge of your website, you’ll stop shying away from brand refreshes and site changes and always go full steam ahead, positioning your organization for sustainable long-term success.

So here’s our final promise: Give your marketing team no-code, and they’ll make your wildest dreams come true.

There are now several different approaches to building a web presence for mid-to-large sized businesses. Choosing a content management system (CMS) is the first step.

There are three main approaches an organization can take:

• Customize a CMS: You choose a CMS and bring on front-end developers to customize your site.
• From the ground up: You hire full-stack developers so you can start from scratch, building your own CMS.
• No-code development: Non-technical teams can contribute to the site with some support from a developer if needed.

The CMS you select will heavily impact your workflow and influence the costs you’ll incur — both during the initial build and over the lifetime of managing your website. On top of that, there are more major costs traditionally associated with building an enterprise-grade website.

Let’s talk about tangible costs

Tangible costs — like the price of your software or the cost of hiring an agency — are easier to quantify, but they can also hide in unexpected places.

Let’s break down tangible costs into two core categories: Set up costs and recurring costs.

Set up costs

Set up costs run the gamut depending on your organizational structure and available resources, and at minimum, typically includes the following:

• Initial design and development labor to create designs, copy, photography, and illustrations — as well as general content for your new website
• A site domain and the purchase of similar variations
• A CMS to organize the data of your site
• A bespoke tech stack with tools, plugins, and services to get the functionality you need — from design to SEO — to operate a modern enterprise site

Teams have the option of managing all of the associated responsibilities with these costs in-house. This requires relying on existing creative, engineering, and marketing team members for website development and management. Or, teams short on resources have the option to outsource these costs to freelancers or outside agencies. Whichever approach your business takes, these costs will become line items in your marketing budget. 

Recurring costs

It’s no secret that website development is not a one-and-done effort. Businesses will need to foot the bill of recurring costs, and once your site is live, teams can move onto the iterative phase, focusing time and energy on maintenance, optimizations, updates, and more. 

Let’s start with the basics: software and tech stack fees. It’s almost guaranteed that your platform of choice, plugins, and tech stack components will come with good ol’ monthly or annual fees. A typical enterprise website, stable CMS system, hosting stack, and a front-end engineer will run you anywhere from $75,000 to $100,000 a year — and this cost compounds for high-traffic, content-heavy sites.

Then we have software version updates. Major updates, which typically introduce important security improvements and modernize their systems, are released every few years and can easily cost up to $60,000 for each version release and eat up hours of engineering time. For teams with complex websites and custom code, rebuilding it on the new software version may not be an option. Instead, you’ll have to undergo a slow, attention-demanding process of migrating specialty functions, user-generated content, and more. 

And we can’t forget about ongoing spend on site management. Depending on how developer-led your platform is, making changes to your site will run up a bill in labor and time. If you have an agency on retainer, the cost of small changes can quickly add up. An in-house team will make changes less expensive, but they’ll also likely need to turn to engineers for support, eating up their precious time.

And then there’s time

Your website is a living object, serving as a meeting point for you and your customers. Typically, several teams contribute to and develop the website as part of their day-to-day work, making time your biggest intangible line-item for site development and management. Not only does it demand the bandwidth of your employees, but it requires advanced planning, involves multiple stakeholders with potential third-party support, and puts your reputation on the line.

A few of the major areas your marketing team will spend its time on are:

• Finding developer talent, which may require your marketing team to spend time vetting external agencies if you choose the third-party route — or vetting engineers if you manage the build in-house
• Executing the initial site build, whether with an agency or an internal team, who will need to work it into existing programming and development calendars
• Optimizing the user experience, which require site changes and updates in order to regularly respond to the needs of your users 

For companies who choose to launch and manage a web development project in-house and with traditional tools, there will be a slew of pre-launch and recurring responsibilities that will sit with developers and engineers: 

• Site monitoring and maintenance, requiring regular developer attention for software that operates on a versioning and patch model
• Conducting site migrations, required for software version updates
• Troubleshooting issues and bugs anytime your tech stack breaks, to prevent or remedy outages that can result in lost business or customer trust
• Launch delays, aka bottlenecks, due to a limited number of people available to launch a final product (and can be true for teams working with external agencies, too)

Trim down your total cost and open doors with no-code 

Understanding the real, long-term costs to success is a crucial step any marketing team needs to take before embarking on ambitious projects. There’s so much to balance — time, talent, budget, urgency, business needs — and there’s even more at stake with a public-facing launch or site refresh.

At the end of the day, human energy and attention are limited, as are funding and hours available for any single project in a given week. The core decision at hand is how to effectively allocate those precious resources. If marketing teams have their hands tied by slow development timelines, your speed-to-market will suffer. If engineers are always busy keeping the site up, running, and updated, they won’t have time to focus on improvements or innovation.

No-code visual development enables teams without coding experience to make their own changes to your website as needed. When multiple teams — such as marketing and design — can contribute directly to your website, they can be more nimble with customer needs and more visionary in their planning and execution. Plus, there’s priceless peace of mind knowing that a team can go off and build their parts of the website and not have to rely on a stretched-too-thin engineering team.

You could spend money on regular site updates — or you could use that budget on launching new features and keeping your web presence at the cutting edge. By choosing a no-code development platform that speeds up timelines and reduces labor costs, you’ll open up new opportunities for your business — ones that result in outcomes that are truly outstanding, unique, and will help differentiate your company and your brand in the eyes of your users.

Lingo Bingo

Track your team’s usage of these classic questions, buzzwords, and phrases over the course of one week. First to fill out an entire row, column, or diagonal gets BINGO!

It serves as a connection between your customers and your business, sharing details and resources about your organization, products, and services in order to prompt user engagement. The stronger the structure facilitating that relationship, the more effective your site will be.

Your site might begin with a beautiful landing page, compelling images, and informative content. These elements will always be essential. But as you grow your business, team, and customer base, the structures that support a captivating front page need to evolve accordingly.

The more users you have, the more you’ll need robust security, adaptability, and accessibility. With more information and features, it becomes more important for the architecture of your site to be intuitive and navigable. And as your business grows, your team will likely grow as well — meaning you’ll need systems in place that help them collaborate when building and marketing your business..

From the get go, any business website should be designed to be able to scale and support each of these functions so it can best serve your users and your team as your business grows. Let’s take a closer look at the pillars that make up a successful enterprise site. 

1. Scalability

Any business has aspirations for growth and success, which means the website will need to be able to scale in volume alongside any business growth it experiences. If your website isn’t prepared to support increased capacity, it can become slow, out of date, or compromised.

Growth means higher traffic — both from regular daily visitors and potential surges. Users have high standards for websites and will expect it to stay up and running no matter the circumstances. Make sure you have robust hosting that can withstand both steady growth and sudden popularity.

If you’re collecting user data, what’s manageable at a small scale may quickly become overwhelming at a high volume. Ensure that you have the resources to store and organize that data by building a reliable customer relationship management (CRM) system into your site. Your user data is incredibly valuable — you’ll want to be able to use it effectively as you grow.

A solid content management system (CMS) will also support growth by organizing the images, information, and other assets you use on your site. Systematic, predictable organization of content supports your designers and developers in building new areas of your website and in maintaining existing ones.

If a site isn’t scalable, it will need a refresh or expensive wholesale reworking once your business outgrows it. While waiting on developers to complete a site refresh, you risk downtime or being stuck with an obsolete site. No-code platforms can support scalability and avoid development delays. A scalable website can grow organically as your business does, seamlessly incorporating new needs and ensuring your website always represents you and your brand well.

2. Compliant security

An enterprise website’s design must be compliant with up-to-date security measures — not just for the sake of your business’s information, but also for the trust and confidence of your customers. A security breach, no matter how small, severely erodes customer confidence. Up-to-date security practices communicate professionalism and excellence.

There are certain industry gold standards around making a site secure. It’s wise to support single sign-on (SSO) or two-factor authentication (2FA) for user logins — these measures are the best way to protect a customer’s information. And SOC 2 compliance is the best way to evaluate whether your service provider is on top of security, because it involves a thorough outside audit and compliance in five areas:

• Security: Systems and information are protected from unauthorized access.
• Availability: Those systems are available to be used consistently.
• Processing Integrity: Systems operate in a timely and accurate manner.
• Confidentiality: Information designated confidential is protected.
• Privacy: Information is collected, retained when used, and then securely disposed of.

Don’t forget: Security also involves people, not just software. Make sure your team knows about common scams, such as phishing emails, and aware of the best ways to avoid spyware and malware. Having your IT team teach security best practices and promote awareness will support a more secure company.

3. Clear information architecture

Like the layout of a building, the architecture of your website should follow a clear logic, anticipating the way customers will naturally want to use the site. An enterprise website design with a strong information architecture will feel effortless for the user and help connect them to the insight and features they’re looking for.

A good way to do this is by building for users' Mental Models — the assumptions they have about where to find what they’re looking for on your site — when designing navigation, buttons, and forms.

4. Conversion-focused design

A key function of a business website is user conversion. The features of your site design should attract, educate, and convert visitors into loyal customers. This makes it one of your most powerful marketing tools.

Keep in mind that your website is interactive and receives as much information as it transmits. Empower your marketing team to harness the power of user data submitted through your site to execute marketing initiatives that elicit conversion.

Businesses spend a lot of energy attracting potential customers to the site — and just as much attention should go toward converting those site visits into loyal users. When you allow your marketing team to glean customer behavior insights from your website and implement strategies in real-time, they’re able to better respond to feedback and continually improve their approach.

Conversion can also be driven by simple, effective changes in your website design, such as site search. Not only do you gain actionable, high-intent data from that search behavior, but if that search is well-designed and returns relevant results, it will also satisfy customers and drive conversion.

5. A unified design system

A design system contains internal guidelines and pre-built elements that keep your website design consistent and unified. It’s a single source of truth any department can draw from when building materials for your web presence.

Building a distinct style guide can be an effective approach. This can be a hidden page linked to your main website containing guidelines and explanations of your company’s design approach. It can also take the form of a separate internal website anyone in the company can access for reference. All in one place, you can outline typography and layout choices, color schemes, and stylistic approaches.

Another approach is to create pre-built templates to use anywhere on the website. This is easy to do with a no-code design program that enables the creation of repeatable Symbols and Classes. Your marketing and design departments can then assemble pages and new parts of the website with pre-established, pre-approved, pre-built components. This helps effectively close the design development gap — empowering your designers and freeing up your developers for more pressing and business critical functions.

6. Responsive design

Responsive web design enables your enterprise site to be legible and easy to use across many different browsers and devices. 92.1% of internet users⁴ now access the internet via mobile, making it essential that your business website is just as beautiful and functional on a smartphone as it is on desktop.

Responsive design ensures:

• Layout changes accommodate screen size and orientation, aka horizontal or vertical
• Typography size scales so it’s comfortably readable on all devices
• Images adjust to remain fully visible and are the correct file size for faster load times
• Buttons and navigation operate well on a small screen and with touch operation
• Gesture functionality (swipe, pinch, tap) works on touchscreen devices

Responsiveness is also an element of search engine optimization (SEO), which Google now rewards in its search rankings.

Responsive design is achieved by using relative units and media queries that trigger your layout and design to adjust with the user’s screen dimensions. This can be coded with CSS, but no-code platforms have responsive design built into their templates, making the process much easier and more seamless for your team.

7. Accessibility

Making your site accessible for people with disabilities is a crucial element of good design.  Having an accessible site will also benefit those with situational limitations, temporary disabilities, age-related challenges, and even internet connectivity issues. Having an accessible website serves your users, helps your business, and may even be required by law depending on where you’re located.

A thorough and up-to-date look at current web accessibility guidelines can be found at the Web Accessibility Initiative, but ultimately it’s broken down into four categories:

• Perceivable: Users can identify content on the page, whether visually, sound, or touch.
• Operable: Users can identify controls and successfully use them with voice commands and their keyboard as well as the mouse or trackpad.
• Understandable: Your site is comprehensible by the audience without undue effort. It features consistent structure, a clear layout, and easily understandable language.
• Robust: Your site supports the use of assistive technology and is IT-standards compliant.

Structure your enterprise website design to support customers and your organization

Building an enterprise website that includes these features means your site meets professional standards and is prepared to accommodate expansion. These seven elements build a foundation that’s secure, accessible, and able to serve the needs of both your users and your teams. By ensuring you’ve met these standards from the onset, your site and your company can scale safely and focus on growth instead of playing catch up.

When you build your website with a no-code visual development tool, designers can be confident the content they add will be easy for users to find — and they can play with innovative looks for your site without worrying it will alienate users with accessibility needs. Marketers can draw on user interaction to gain insights and create exciting new initiatives to engage customers. Engineers are freed from site maintenance and able to focus on perfecting your product and developing new elements for your web presence across platforms.

No-code takes work off your team’s plate during the times when growth is at its most pivotal points. These are key moments of opportunity. With a solid site foundation, your design, marketing, and engineering teams are free to innovate, experiment, and improve your web presence — and to position your business for long-term success.

As text message marketing platform Attentive became more well-known — and innovative brands like Urban Outfitters, CB2, and Rebecca Minkoff were running successful programs through their platform — the design and marketing teams knew it was time to elevate their brand. And what started as a small refresh in WordPress due to platform constraints became a complete brand and website overhaul with Webflow.

Going into the rebrand, their website lived in WordPress. That meant any changes they wanted to make would need to go through their external agency, dramatically limiting their autonomy and speed. Plus, their design department couldn’t really be a part of the process.

Using Webflow as a catalyst to dream bigger

Our options were to polish and refine, or grow and mature. When we discovered how easy it was to use Webflow, we said let’s do it — let’s do a full revamp of our website.

Max Valiquette, Director of Brand, Attentive

Initially, the Attentive team wasn’t planning on doing anything to the website except changing type and colors because of the massive effort it took to work with an agency and because it took a ton of engineers to code everything. Outside of accessibility improvements, the brand team found that any changes they wanted to make weren't even worth the time and effort.

Everything changed when Attentive’s Director of Brand, Max Valiquette, presented Webflow to the team as an alternative to WordPress.

Following the initial introduction to Webflow by someone on their brand team, the team spent a weekend trying it out. By Monday morning, they had a fully functional, fully responsive website. The team saw the power and flexibility switching could bring them, and from there, they started to dream even bigger for their rebrand.

With any website migration, questions and concerns are expected. But with the Attentive team, there weren’t any. Their fairly lightweight V1 site took months and months to build, so when they saw what they could do in just one weekend with Webflow, it was all the confirmation they needed to do to get the whole team on board. And any questions or technical challenges were solved easily with the help of Webflow’s Customer Success team.

Breaking through the limits of their old site

Once they dug into the larger rebrand, the design and marketing teams managed the rebuild independently, without engineering. Because of this, they could keep it under wraps internally, effectively empowering their teams to do their best work autonomously.‍

Webflow allowed us to design and build new pages so quickly that, when we decided to add a number of new pages close to our deadline, we were able to easily finalize them in time for launch.‍

Emily Tarbush, Strategic Design Manager, Attentive

Throughout the entire design and build process, there was a continual collaboration between the design and marketing teams. As they got closer to launch, Marketing spent significant time in the Editor building out the site’s content library, while the design team worked in the Designer to build out the site layout, design system, and templates.

Webflow enables the Attentive team to:

• Get more creative with interactions and animations‍
• Ensure their website meets AA accessibility standards
• Build a scalable, component-based design system
• Make site maintenance more efficient and scalable

Instead of building all new pages every time, Attentive repurposes basic layouts and elements across different pages. They used symbols to build out three different “mega navs” that dynamically change across tablet and mobile. And additionally, the ability to build complex animations in Webflow was a game-changer for the team.

Webflow for growth

Now that they’re using Webflow, the design and greater marketing team can make changes quickly, efficiently, and completely autonomously. Small changes to the site can take place in less than an hour and require little, if any, planning in advance. 

With the help of Webflow, Attentive is planning on expanding their design team and “can’t wait” for their next web project — a far cry from how they felt about their site at the start of their rebrand.