UK-based Diffblue, the maker of AI tools for software testing, had a problem familiar to many digital enterprises: Its marketing site just didn’t work hard enough. Built on Squarespace, it suffered from structure, design and content limitations. To help it grow, the Diffblue team needed a site that could handle deeper customization and perform at scale. Late in 2019, it made a new site a top priority and the first task for Liz, the incoming designer and front-end developer. The mandate: Build a website that had better design and development control, was editable and relatively inexpensive.

CloudCannon is so easy and intuitive to use that even a non-tech person can go in and make changes without wrecking the system. It’s an amazing product that has made my work and life significantly easier.

There was no argument from Liz, who quickly grew frustrated with the limitations of the existing system’s drag and drop design. “With the existing CMS, we could only have a certain look and anything else required a manual workaround. Which was not fun,” she explains. ‘We needed something that was easy for me to maintain and made it easy for people to add content.”

It was time for a new CMS. Liz started with a clean slate, researching widely and trialling a number of options. That search led her to Jekyll and to CloudCannon, a combination that both matched her requirements and was endorsed by a peer who was well used to it. “I went and sat with him and he showed me his CloudCannon set-up,” she says. “He sang its praises.”

A super smooth transition

Liz built a “really quick dummy website on CloudCannon” for her content team to check out, got the thumbs-up, and shifted into transition mode.

The shift, Liz recalls, benefited from prompt and helpful CloudCannon support and was “super smooth”. She took the opportunity to update the design of the site, which by then was several years old, refreshing the best of the existing content while retaining most of the blog archive.

Documentation joins marketing on CloudCannon

The next inflection point came with the addition to the Product team of Jenny Sykes, a technical writer, in mid-2020. It took Jenny less than two days to realise that updating Diffblue’s documentation, which relied on an old open-source version of GitBook, was clunky. Documents were so strongly linked to the app that only one person could update them. “I spent at least as long battling to get my change through the doc system as I did actually making the change,” Jenny recalls. The system itself fell over too often and there was no option for Jenny to create document changes locally.

Liz, whose ambition always had been to make life easy for her content team, built a demo version of an alternative doc system in CloudCannon. The team loved it. Later that year Liz implemented a production version and, over the course of two weeks, migrated Diffblue’s entire library of documents into it.

I'd say it is a system that makes it really easy for a developer to have control of what they do.

The confidence to make the changes you want, when you want them

The new system, Jenny says, saves her a lot of time and has given her confidence that she can make the changes she wants, when she wants. “I really love that I can make all the changes, experiment with them and then decide whether I want them or not, without any effect on the main site,” she explains. “And obviously I can keep those changes by merging them in. CloudCannon is so easy and intuitive to use that even a non-tech person can go in and make changes without wrecking the system. It’s an amazing product that has made my work and life significantly easier.”

For Liz, the original choice of CloudCannon has paid off. “I'd say  it is a system that makes it really easy for a developer to have control of what they do,” she says. “It also gives control to the user. And all without making it difficult. It's just super easy to set up and get ready.”

“And it's getting better all the time, because CloudCannon keeps adding new features like array structures. Changes like that have solved so many of my problems and I’ve been like, oh my God, this makes my life so much better.”