Website Expert: These Mistakes will Make or Break Your Entire 2026

28:03And then inevitably, there's this question of like, OK, well, now, which is the source of truth? Which is the official document if we have to make a change? And, you know, I don't know how it is in your world, but in mine, oftentimes you get feedback from stakeholders after something is published because they don't get a chance to look at it first. And it's just this frustrating, you know, frictiony cycle of figuring out where you make those tweaks and how you reflect them back and who then has to re-approach, whatever, all those things. And so the content publisher is just let's make that a fully integrated process.

28:37And Google Docs has a nice little add-ons marketplace. So we built an add-on for Google Docs. You authorize it into the content publisher platform. The web team has to do a little work to make it work to publish to the website, obviously. But you can get started in a playground and just see how it works. And the neat thing is, not only does it fully eliminate that copy and paste air gap and all that rework, it also creates the ability to have real-time preview on the website. So real-time collaboration inside Google Docs is a great thing for teams as you're working, especially teams that have to work remotely.

29:11It's a great way to be productive. It's also really cool to be able to have a link that everyone can look at that shows you what will this be like if we hit publish and then to have it actually update in real time when you're like workshopping the headline to make sure that it doesn't wrap over three lines or whatever, right? That just brings this idea of real time collaboration into the content team, web team partnership. And that helps to make things a lot better because making these partnerships inside organizations really effective. You can have the best technology in the world. And if you don't have good organizational alignment and partnership, it's pretty hard to get great results.

29:50Yep. Yep. I mean, I love this tool because it feels like you all are really getting first principles of what are our customers struggling with and getting in their mindset of what are they copying and pasting multiple times? How are they not able to collaborate with their different team members. Like, I love this. And I can also see a whole suite of tools like this, where you're like, okay, eliminate all these extra steps. And let's just make, you know, it be seamless between IT and marketing and sales and just make it easy when it comes to like this website. So I love this. I'm excited to see where it goes.

30:22Yeah. Like I said, it's the first step. We have grand visions for what this means from a design standpoint. There's a whole world of, you know, you've got all these assets, you know, images, documents, and so forth. That's part of the vision, too, for how do we make all the, and our perspective, which is, this is the important, I think, difference from a lot of others that are working in this space. Like, we're not trying to replace any of these other tools that the teams currently love using. What we're trying to do is make them, those tools effectively integrate together. And there's also, there's like a little bit of Pantheon in there, but we're just the glue.

30:57We're just the orchestration layer. And people don't have to, like, we don't try to convince people to quit using Google Docs and start using some other cloud editor in order to be a part of this process. It's like, and by the way, the first feedback we got from a bunch of people was, well, we have to use Microsoft. And it turns out we'll be able to do the same thing with the Microsoft tool suite, too. But that's very much the vision. We want to meet these other practitioners where they are in their tools of choice, you know, unless they hate their tools, in which case that's a different conversation.

31:26But I think most people who use Google Docs, they like it. People use Microsoft Office. It's like pretty good and it works for them. Designers like to work in Figma. Like all these, like we're not going to replace any of these tools, but we can make them play nicer together. Yep. So exciting. Well, now that we're talking about different orgs coming together, I really wanted to talk with you about creating a nice relationship between marketing and IT and tech, like the CMO and the CTO. Friends, how do we make this work? Because I know you have a lot of opinions of like why this is a very powerful relationship to forge between the CMO and the CTO.

32:00So I'd love to hear your thoughts on like, first, why is this important to think about as a marketer? Well, I think this is one of the most critical partnerships for an organization overall to get right and for marketing to be successful. Because the reality is, without the ability to fully flex what you are doing digitally, you know, and that has to include the part of the journey that you own, which is going to, in most cases, be a web-based journey. Without the ability to fully flex that muscle and make it work the way you need to on your schedule, on your timeline, it's very, very hard to be an effective marketer now.

32:47This has been true for years, but especially now more than ever. And one of the interesting things about our business and what we see is, and it's a challenge too, is that everybody's already got something. Like you've already got the web as a channel. You've already got a website or maybe even websites like a portfolio of stuff that's out there. And a lot of it is from a prior era or it has roots in an earlier time when it was more static, when it was more of like, well, the job is just to have it be there and be stable and safe and secure. And that's all we need. And so that's all that was built for.

33:24And if you think about the incentives of an IT organization, when they have non-negotiable imperatives around that kind of security, compliance, stability stuff. And so a lot of organizations historically really struggled to figure out how to fit together those IT imperatives with the need of a marketing organization to be able to move fast, react to changes in the market. And in many cases, that partnership turned sour at a certain point. So I think if you're in a situation where you feel like you don't have a great partnership or if you're coming in and you're coming in fresh or someone else is coming in fresh on the other side, it's always a good time to say, hey, we've got to work together to meet the needs of the business.

34:09Right. Like neither of us will be able to be successful on our own terms, because if we just lock everything down and keep it static and keep it, you know, in states, keep it like, you know, ensconced in in protective wrapping, but unchanging in order to make sure that one team's needs are met. the business is not going to get what it needs from that asset. And on the flip side, if you have a world where things are going willy-nilly, and some of those IT requirements aren't being met, then obviously you have a huge problem. There's a huge amount of risk there. But the good news is you can make this partnership work.

34:51There are good ways to get alignment between a CMO and a CTO or CIO on what are we trying to achieve for the business? Now, what does that mean for me as an organization and me as an organization lead? And how do we divide these responsibilities up so that we're working together versus across purposes? I've seen this like, again, this is something we facilitate with our platform. And I've seen it work inside many of our customer organizations. And it really does unlock. It unlocks the magic. And people are not only more productive, but they're so much happier when they have an aligned partnership versus, you know, constantly kind of bickering over the website.

35:29Yep. Okay. So I'm imagining, I mean, how do you broker this behind the scenes? And how do you have, like, as a marketer, how do you show, like, these are my goals and speak in a way that also the tech team is going to be like, okay, that makes sense. I know how to help you and you need to help me in this way. Like, what are best practices with brokering this relationship? So I think one thing that is important to start with is not just bringing your goals to the table and being clear about them. I mean, start by acknowledging that the other team has their goals and that those goals are valid. I mean, this is like a really basic human thing, but saying, hey, I understand.

36:08Friendship 101. Yeah, I understand that like, hey, you're under a lot of pressure and this is really tough. And I agree that your goals are very important. And I'm thinking about your needs and taking them seriously when I'm thinking about my plans. And so starting there. And then the other piece is to establish that the goals that are maybe more on the marketing side of the house around we're trying to achieve results. We're trying to drive growth. We're trying to build our audience. We're trying to drive more pipeline. Whatever it is, you have to figure out exactly what that is and how that resonates within the business.

36:45but you know make sure that you actually have buy-in on those goals from from a lot of different stakeholders because a world where you know you're just a service organization and people are coming to you with like hey can you fix this can you update that and like you just are going to drown in inbound requests from stakeholders that are that are trying to fix something that they see is wrong or achieve you know do something that they think will be neat on the internet and there's lots of things that should be fixed and there's lots of things that are neat but if you understand, I have to prioritize what's going to help us achieve our mission.

37:18And this is how the digital channel that we own contributes to that mission. Everything gets a lot easier. And then IT should, if they're enlightened enough, or even like they're listening, and you've established a little bit of like a connective channel, they'll say like, yeah, you know, it's important for us that we do create growth in the company. We want that to happen because things are much more exciting in IT if we're driving more growth. Hey, how can we help you do that? Is there something we could be doing that would assist with creating growth? And then you can start to like, that's the basis with which you can start to build a partnership.

37:53And then the good news is there's lots of ways if you set things up responsibly for both teams to get everything they want. Yep. Yeah. So it sounds like too, you're looking at high level company goals first and showing, hey, we're both plugged in to this same goal. Like let's also take ownership in this one goal together, like you said, driving certain growth, hitting a certain amount of customers and partnering in that way where you have a shared KPI that you both feel like you're the hero in that KPI and you both can come together to make it happen in some way. Is that kind of what I'm hearing?

38:23Yeah, absolutely. And what I will also say, I've seen it work out in a number of different ways. There are organizations where IT and marketing really do collaborate quite closely. They share goals because in organizations where IT is still going to own all the technical resources, they're going to have resources there that are going to be hopefully aligned with marketing and they're going to have shared KPIs or shared – it's kind of a tiger team style shared goals. There are other cases where what IT does is they say, you know, we want to set you up for success. We want to establish some guidelines and some guardrails, but let you make more of the decisions and own more of the execution.

39:07And in that case, IT is functioning more as like a productive business partner. But they're letting marketing, the marketing organization, become more technical themselves and take ownership over the channel. Both of those flavors can absolutely work. And it just depends on some on the size of the organization and the maturity of both departments and where their priorities are at. But it can be either like a really close collaboration or a business partnership where there's just a clear division of responsibilities and everyone's getting what they want. Yep. Yeah. Sorry. a clear a thing that i've heard on the show so far is that marketing is also being like forced to get more technical with you know vibe coding tools and everything they have access to now and they're kind of like merging into the it world more and more which i'm wondering how you feel about that like what's a good way showing like i'm now doing things that you used to do like creating apps really quickly and doing stuff like it seems like a tricky space to figure out who owns what, at least the space that we're in now with, yeah, how many more technical tools and capabilities marketers have that maybe a couple of years ago, they were still asking IT to do for them.

40:21Yeah. I think like that's where the, that kind of ongoing dialogue is super important. And like, you do like vibe coding is like a great example because, you know, it used to be that, like, I mean, this is still not entirely new, right? It used to be that you could, the marketing would just hire an external agency and they would whip something up really quickly. and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. And a lot of the question is, how good was your process for managing that kind of work and that kind of collaboration and the ongoing responsibilities of maintaining it if it has a longer life than just being for a time-bound campaign?

40:55With Vibe Coding, that's just made that all the more easy to effectively have a similar process. One, because agencies are all using these tools too, so they can do more work faster for less budget, But also, like, anybody could try Vibe Coding. And, you know, you don't have to be a software engineer to get pretty far. And I think the question is going to be, again, figuring out how to set up the framework and the guardrails of what you work on, what IT works on, what are the standards we agree to. You know, hopefully, you know, you have an IT organization that recognizes that they want to be high velocity, right, that it should be a goal of theirs.

41:36but to do so safely. You've got to move fast without breaking things. And there's ways of managing this across a number of platforms where if marketing wants to, they can be innovative and try experiments and do things pretty rapidly at low cost without necessarily having to engage resources from IT. But they're managing that work and there's some oversight and some governance so that it's not just, you know, throwing a bunch of random stuff out there and it's meeting, you know, the organization standards that they need to meet. So again, aligning on what those things are, what's the framework that gives you the freedom you need to operate?

42:18That's the really key thing to figure out. Have you ever wished that your entire video production workflow lived in one place? Well, you're in luck because that is LTX, the creative suite that was built by Lightrix, all for AI video production. It takes you from idea to final 4K video, all in one workspace. And under the hood, you've got LTX2, the next generation creative engine, powering native 4K, synchronized audio, and cinematic quality fast. So if you make content professionally, this isn't just another tool. This is your new creative home. Go explore it at ltx.studio. Okay, so you just mentioned vibe coding, which is a space that I'm like loving.

42:59I've already create a couple apps. It's really fun seeing how quickly you can do things and how quickly you can get to like the last 99 % and be like, dang it, I don't know how to get Stripe working. Dang, I don't know how to get this other thing working, but still fun. So I'd love to hear from you, like, what are you seeing in this world of Vibe Coding right now? Well, so the way that Vibe Coding is starting to play out, you know, one of the things, and everybody knows this, but it's worth acknowledging, it's incredible for prototyping, The ability to quickly get something up and running that communicates the idea of what the application could be so that you can get consensus around that.

43:35That truly revolutionizes the process of building these things, even if at the end of the day, the Vibe-coded artifact is something that is only treated as an example. So if people aren't using it in that context today, you should just start because, like you said, it's a lot of fun and it can provide lots of value. When it comes to actually getting from vibe-coded to production, there are new technologies for building software experiences that are emerging. Sometimes they're whole platforms, like Lovable, but there's also these rising open-source frameworks. Like, for instance, Next.js, which is just the fastest-growing framework for building interactive software-grade experiences on the web.

44:22we're just about to launch a beta for support for Next.js. I think it's this important. Because what we talked about before, the expectation for users is web experiences are app grade because it's on my phone. I just tapped a thing, a window popped up. I'm not thinking, oh, it's a website. Let me give it an extra five seconds to load. It's like, no, I want it to feel like I'm still in the app. And Next.js isn't the only way to do that, but it's like there's a convergence of next-gen development work being done around that. And it's a great platform for vibe coding in. Okay. Help me get there of, I understand lovable because I built apps in there.

45:02Explain to me what Next.js, like what is, how do I think about that? So you think of it this way. So what Next.js is, is it's an open source framework for building, you know, applications that you can deploy on the web or on your phone if you wanted to, but let's just say for the web. And because it's open source, at the end of your vibe coding process, a developer can pick it up and do that last 1 % if they need to. They can tweak things. They can fit and finish. Now, there's lots of if-thens. In certain cases, the output of the vibe-coded stuff is impossible for a human to read because it's all gobbledygook.

45:41But that's actually getting to be more and more unnormal. You see people whose jobs are now like, I kind of do cleanup on vibe-coded projects. And what they're doing is kind of that last one to 2 % or, you know, whatever. I asked the prompt five times to move the button over there, and it's always getting it in the wrong place. Like, let me just have someone do that. That's possible when you vibe code on top of an open source project. And so Next.js is just, it's not the only one, but it's the fastest growing one that offers this capability. And the other thing it lets you do to get back to like IT's imperatives is that once you're actually taking the real software output of the Vibe coding platform and then inspecting it and auditing it and making sure that it doesn't have that doesn't pose any risks to the organization and you sort of can track it, then it becomes a lot.

46:32People feel a lot safer deploying it. Right. Versus just treating it as a prototype. And this is where the cutting edge of the technology really is, because the key things are getting the output of your Vibe coding process to be clean and human readable enough for a developer to pick it up and take it that last mile. And then also the quality of what you can do from an auditing perspective so that you have a process to the chain of custody of where did this code come from? How did we verify that it was safe to deploy? And where did it go when we deployed it? like those operational things are starting to come together now and it's going to enable people to not in every case but i think in many cases and again the cost of taking it that last mile will not be zero but i think you're going to see projects that are able to move a lot quicker because they could go from prototype to production um you know particularly for something where you are you are not trying to build you know a massively complicated application like for marketing, this is really useful.

47:40Like I'm trying to build a really neat interactive experience that kind of leads down to a lead gen form, right? That's not that crazy complicated. And a web developer could solve all the, or like, we just need to get Stripe to work at the end of this. Like those are things that are, that are achievable and are going to be, I'm really excited to see what people come up from an innovation standpoint, because I think it's going to enable a lot more resources to go back to creative. Like what are we even trying to do in the first place? What is the experience we're trying to build? How do we really get people to sit up and pay attention and do something that's worth noticing?

48:12Because you'll have the ability to move so much faster with the technology that lets you express those ideas. The differentiator is going to be how good were your ideas in the first place. Yeah. No, that's why I'm very excited just looking at the space where now creatives used to have a hard time because they'd have to wait on hiring a developer to make something. And now it's just who's the most creative and who can type in prompts. And you're saying that next phase is not only creating a prototype, but then also having history of, you know, the different code that was being deployed just to be in a more secure location when it comes to like actually building out the full version of it, but keeping it within the low code or vibe coding tool.

48:53Or you're saying that's for helping like get it off. This is the part where I'm trying to still understand when it comes to these two different worlds because lovable for the most part or base 44 any of these a lot of them you just keep it in the tool yeah and then if someone tries to take it off that's actually when i get scared because i'm like where are you taking it why i don't know if i want it to live anywhere else but you're saying with the other one you do take it off or you keep it in there as well it's just more it's more for production basically and it's better for bigger companies and bigger applications so the the honest answer is we're the industry is working on figuring this out right there's a there's a world i'm having a hard time maybe understanding because i'm like everyone's trying to figure it out.

49:27That's right. Got it. That's right. And one of the things that actually is a real sticking point, like you're saying, once you take it out of the vibe coding environment, does that mean that you can no longer, can you vibe code a new feature for something after it's been deployed? Maybe. Like that's something where people have mixed success today. And so there is this really tricky question of when is it appropriate to take it out of that environment? and do you have to, right? And again, I think it's easier to answer these questions and I'm excited to see people make, you know, kind of quicker progress in answering these questions around, you know, sort of more tightly scoped, lower stakes projects.

50:10Like again, a great creative interactive experience for marketing is different than an application that's going to handle like extremely sensitive customer information. So I think we can work a lot of these things out on our side of the fence and actually have an interesting role to play in advancing the industry because we do have a lot of cool projects where people can afford to take a little bit more risk, to be honest. Okay. Anything else in this vibe coding world? Just because I haven't had anyone on the show that's been able to dive this deep into it. Anything else that you're seeing that is interesting or that you're making bets on at Pantheon or just personally too?

50:45Yeah. The other thing that I think is really interesting is the ability to have a vibe coding approach to data analysis. And being able to, you know, if you're lucky enough to have an organization that has a good data platform and they've got a data lake and, you know, there's a lot of stuff in there. Still, very often, you have to make a request to somebody else to figure out how to actually query the data. And I've had some experiences, personally, where I know enough about our data model to ask some questions, but then I don't really... You can get the LLMs that are built in some of these platforms, like Snowflake or BigQuery, to actually complete what it is you need.

51:38or you can ask Claude to help you write the query you need and get really sophisticated analysis. Now, at this stage, I always still want to run that by one of the actual analysts. But the cycle time of, you know, I cooked this up myself, and I think this is showing us pretty interesting. Can you take a look and validate it? That's way quicker than, I have an idea for some analysis that might be useful. When will you have time to work on it? That's really interesting to me because I think that, again, that puts more agency and power in marketers' hands. And I do think that the profession is just – it's going to become more technical over time because so many more of these things are technology-mediated and we want to be masters of that.

52:19And it's going to become increasingly data-informed with more and more data available. Like that's a trend that – when will that reverse itself? Never. So I think this puts more power and agency in our hands, which is ultimately really a good thing. yeah i mean what i'm hearing from this and this has also been a theme that i've heard throughout many many episodes is like i'm hearing and maybe this is because i'm biased but it sounds like marketers get to lean into the more like entrepreneurial notion of you know working at companies because when i hear what you're saying i'm like oh this is what you do in entrepreneurship like you build the thing you figure it out you're like i think i have some data this like can someone else confirm this i'm gonna push something out to the market and test it And like, you kind of have to have your hands in a lot of things at once and be a little bit like good at it.

53:07You don't have to be the expert. You just have to have like enough to be dangerous to ask the right questions. And it sounds like that's what, you know, marketers of the future, they're going to be expected to be operating like this. I mean, so I'm super biased because I come, I'm a co-founder. We're both biased. We're in a bubble. But I think like, okay, but what's the alternative, right? I think the alternative is good marketing has always been like that. And even good brand marketing is like that because you don't just come up with an amazing brand concept that helps break through without having an entrepreneurial approach of understanding the market, understanding the customer, and then having that insight into how can we, again, in a very succinct way, because that's what brand does.

53:56is it distills it down to just like the essence of what you need that can actually break through. You know, I think in every sort of sub discipline of marketing, I think that entrepreneurial mindset is a tremendous asset. And I think, you know, it's just a and again, the bias that I have is I also think it's fun. No, I think you have to be the right person to think this is fun. I think where I'm looking at is a lot of marketers that I have worked with, this is very new for them because one, they've outsourced a lot of, you know, things to agencies. Data, they've outsourced. I mean, tech things, like a lot of things have been outsourced to others, I think, at least when it comes to bigger companies on marketing teams.

54:40So I do think it's a different skill set to be like, how do I get my hands dirty in a lot of these things? But what I also think is interesting is that it is unique to this role. Like if you think about finance, my background was in finance back in the day, like they're not having as big of a shift being like you have to understand more of these. Like you need to understand a little bit of marketing, a little bit of website development, a little bit more of like IT, like their role is pretty much still kind of similar. I mean, but if you look at other, you know, I mean, COO still kind of similar, like they're not having to get their hands on all the things.

55:09So I just feel like marketing right now looks like it's having the biggest shift when it comes to expectations. And maybe it's always been that way for your company, but for other companies, it just seems like a big shift. Yeah, I think this is – I mean, when did Scott Brinker start writing about like MarTech as a thing and create that category? That's been going on. It's been going on for a while. But I will say it's intensifying. There you go, intensifying. I like it. Yes. And I will say my colleagues on the sales side, their world is getting changed dramatically as well. I think because go-to-market in general, because so much more of what go-to-market means, where you meet customers and prospects, it is digitally mediated.

55:58Being excellent in that practice demands that you're fluent. You can't outsource your understanding of that. You may still actually need a ton of help and expertise that's external. But if you don't have – you can't just say, oh, yeah, they do that for me. I'm just the ideas person right that because their ability to have the ideas that are going to break through requires you to be fluent in the medium where these things are actually occurring and that I think has become went from being you know in the sense I'm saying it's intensifying I think that went from being like oh well if you're one of those people you're like a special unicorn and maybe you can get a lap or two ahead of the competition that was 10 years ago now it's like if you're not fluent in those things I you're like you you're like how do you even do your job yeah it's tough yeah I agree okay I want to I know we have a couple minutes left and I do want to do a lightning round with you awesome so the lightning round I'm going to send a question your way you have a minute or less to answer are you ready I'm ready okay if your website ships updates annually you're probably blank uh stuck in a waterfall process there you go what is your most controversial marketing opinion that you believe but you rarely say out loud most digital demand budget is impossible to conclusively attribute Yes.

57:36Facts. What is a guilty pleasure metric that you still peek at, even though you'll tell your team that it's vanity and not to look at it? Top line website traffic. I like it. I think you said you went to drama school before, right? I did. Okay. What's the weirdest thing from drama school that actually helps you as a marketer?

58:05it's it's not a weird thing but just uh zero stage fright um i can feel that i can definitely feel that with you you're like i'm here yeah it's good well or just like someone's like hey um you i know you're not prepared but there's a thing at this conference there's gonna be like 200 people there do you just want to get up on stage and talk about something i'll be like sure sounds like fun oh my god do you do any like training with your team to also kind of like pass along this to them as well you know that's a great the answer is no but that's a that makes me feel sad to say that like there but i don't know how like like this really was a whole other subject like like four years of intensive conservatory training is pretty hard to distill into like a brown bag um it's just you kind of have to have a lot of it beat into you uh and then you you emerge changed as a person um okay a cmo and cto they're up on stage doing a keynote what is their walkout song together oh

59:09I mean maybe like we found love in a hopeless place that's good I need that to be in this episode somewhere yeah make it sound like I didn't have to pause that long to say it and it'll be it'll be killer yeah yeah no he'll do the editing after this to make it sound fire lightning fast. What is the smallest quality bar on a website that you just refuse to compromise on? Where maybe your team is like, dude, that's like not a big deal. And you're like, this has to be better. For me, it's when the website loads that it doesn't keep jiggling around as other things pop in. Wait, tell me more. I'm having a hard time imagining what's jiggling and what's popping in?

59:59This happens so often where you have your core actually existing website and then your layers of Martech. And you see this all, I mean, it is kind of almost impossible to avoid in when you're consuming articles or media online. It's like, I load the article, and then the headline jumps down because ads are very intrusive this way. But Martech does the same thing very often where it's adding elements to the experience and they show up late and then they push the words around or move the experience in ways that you didn't intend after the site loads. And I just think that actually for people with certain accessibility issues, that can make it almost impossible for them to even comprehend your content.

1:00:41But I also think it's just very unpleasant and it shows like a lack of regard for the user. Wow. Okay. That's a good hot tip. I feel like we can have a whole nother podcast episode just talking about details like this. That's good. Well, Josh, this was super fun. Thank you for coming on Marketing Trends. Thank you for telling us all these amazing secrets, especially thinking about websites and CTO, CMO, conversion and friendships and all that. Where can people learn more about you and what you're up to at Pantheon? Well, Pantheon is easy to find at pantheon.io. And I am around the internet as Outlandish Josh.

1:01:16I try to post spicy takes on LinkedIn under my own name from time to time. So yeah, check us out and if people have any questions, I'm happy you can always reach out to me Through LinkedIn or other places. I'm happy to chat with folks and offer advice Amazing. Thank you, Josh. Well, thank you so much for having me on. This is really fun conversation