Tom Willmot has WordPress running through his veins. He’s spent more than decade growing a heavyweight international WordPress agency and consultancy, Human Made, and is now focusing on giving digital marketers an edge by building the open source digital experience platform, Altis. Tom explains why digital experiences are more important than ever, reflects on the challenges faced in creating Altis, and gives a glimpse into the future of next-generation marketing technology.
What is the Main Problem You’re Solving by Building Altis?
Businesses love WordPress and rely on it every day, it’s the world’s most popular CMS by a landslide. However, it’s not living up to its potential with medium to large business. They need more than a CMS. We’re seeing the CMS market expand rapidly in scope, with headless, Personalisation, Marketing Automation, multiple channels, DXPs, Agile CMS’s and much more.
WordPress can be a fantastic solution to these needs, it’s flexible and open, quick to get started, has a huge ecosystem of integrations and agencies, and will scale with you no matter how large you grow.
At the moment the choice is either an expensive, all-in-one, often proprietary DXP, or do it yourself on WordPress. The WordPress solution and experience is fragmented and confusing.
Altis brings the best of WordPress to medium and large businesses together with the tools and integrations you need to deliver the ambitious digital experiences your customers demand.
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How Did the Idea for Altis Come About?
As an enterprise WordPress agency we’ve been in-the-trenches for 10 years helping medium to large companies use WordPress as their digital experience platform. We’ve directly experienced how transformative WordPress can be for Marketing, Digital, and IT teams, helping them do more with less, giving them tools they love, freeing them from the lock-in of the all-in-one proprietary suites.
We also saw how the complexity of the WordPress ecosystem was a barrier to adoption. Companies that choose WordPress often have someone on the inside who understands the ecosystem and how to fit the pieces together to achieve what they want. This shouldn’t be required.
We were motivated to take all we’d learned and use it to build a WordPress platform which does all the work to identify and select the best the ecosystem has to offer and builds on the core CMS experience to meet the needs of today, including native personalisation and multi-channel.
Did COVID Impact Demand for Digital Experiences and Features like Personalisation?
We’ve seen an explosion in digital more generally due to the pandemic as lockdowns pushed everything online. Now that the world is opening up, everyone is investing in digital. In such a volatile and unpredictable environment agility, cost, and speed to market are key. The pandemic only reinforced that we don’t know what tomorrow might bring and businesses need to be able to react quickly.
What New Altis Features Are You Most Excited About?
Our native Personalisation feature-set is really starting to mature, with the ability to personalise content at the block level and then track the impact of those personalised changes so you can quickly see what’s working and what isn’t.
Version 8 of Altis has recently gone live – check out the cool new updates here.
