Crafting a Technology Platform to Drive Your Business

PublisherSol Minion Developmenthttps:https://assets.solminion.co/logo.svgPublished Custom Software software developmentapplication development

In my previous blog, I talked about how we updated our client's technology platform and increased their site's visibility and conversion. Marketing was just one aspect of that project and it all tied together with necessary upgrades to address new regulations and reporting in the mortgage industry. We needed to meet a specific deadline to update the forms their platform generates.

If you're a mortgage industry professional, you probably already know about TRID. If you're not, it is new regulations which require you to collect additional information when pre-qualifying a home buyer. It was this new information that needed to be captured so that it could be shown on the updated PDF documents generated by the system. While planning this project, we uncovered a need to make it easier to market the product and deploy the application to their infrastructure. We decided to do this all at once.

The initial problem was brought about by the fact that, when Nestablish.com's platform was originally created, the marketing pages and the application itself were all rolled into a single entity. That's convenient for platform management, but makes adjusting the marketing message a daunting task - in order to update any marketing copy, the entire application had to be tested and validated, then deployed to the production system. Not exactly an agile solution.

We've seen this same issue with another client where the marketing components of their site were lumped into the same inflexible platform as their application. Down the road, these functions will need to be separated so that the right person can control the marketing message. While we can create an application, we know our clients are the best at capturing their target audience. It is the client that must be in control of the marketing message, which is why a separate content management system for marketing is key. An application framework is a great thing for running a business application, but without proper content management functionality, it's going to be a challenge to build and market the brand. As Web developers, we can help with both the marketing and operations components of your technology platform.

If you're creating a new digital product, make sure it is built for agility. The effort required to separate marketing and business operations after the platform has been launched to accommodate new business needs, tweaks to messaging, or pivots in a business plan is a cost no small business or startup wants to incur.