That is the gap a CMS migration can leave behind: the technology has changed, but the experience of getting work done has not. For marketers, the value of a new content management system becomes clear after launch, when a campaign changes direction, a product needs updating or a deadline leaves no room for another workaround.
There are good reasons for technology teams to lead CMS selection. Security, integration, hosting and maintainability matter. Marketing does not need to become an expert in all of them to have a meaningful role in the decision.
The difficulty comes when marketers are asked to approve a platform without seeing how it will support their work. A polished demonstration can show what the software makes possible. It does not establish which capabilities will be included in the implementation, who will configure them or what the marketing team will be able to do independently.
For Mark Hawkins, director at Bluegrass Digital, project kickoff is where technical requirements need to be translated into practical outcomes for marketing. Before development begins, that means agreeing what the team must be able to do independently and making those tasks part of the brief.
“The technical brief might ask for reusable components. Marketing needs to know whether that means they can launch next week’s campaign without a developer. Unless those conversations come together before the build, both teams can think they’ve agreed on the requirements while expecting quite different things.”
A more revealing conversation starts with an actual campaign. Can the team create a page, reuse approved content, preview it on mobile, get approval and publish without developer support? Where do enquiries go, and how will results be measured? Those questions turn an abstract platform discussion into a practical one.
A contract renewal, a support deadline or a planned launch can make the migration date non-negotiable. Under pressure, moving what already exists can feel like the safest route. Reviewing the content, simplifying the navigation or changing publishing workflows becomes something to tackle later.
Moving the existing website to a new platform with minimal changes, often called lift-and-shift, is not automatically wrong. Sometimes continuity is the immediate priority. But it should be a conscious trade-off, with a clear account of what is being deferred. Otherwise, duplicated pages, awkward templates and outdated approval processes can become requirements for the new website simply because they exist on the old one.
Simon Buerger, Technical Director at Bluegrass Digital, cautioned against moving existing content without reviewing what the team actually needs: “If you do that, you're going to have all the same problems you already have with your current content strategies and platforms.”
The distinction is between protecting what the business needs and preserving everything it has accumulated. Marketing should be involved in making that distinction before the scope is fixed, not asked to resolve it while loading content before launch.
At RCS, the consumer finance business, a rigid website made routine changes difficult through its CMS. Bluegrass Digital built the replacement using Umbraco and reusable building blocks for pages, rather than relying on fixed layouts. The result was significantly quicker website updates and less developer involvement in basic changes. For marketing, the value was practical: a website its team could update more easily, not simply a newer platform.
Futureproofing needs the same discipline. A new CMS cannot anticipate every future campaign or channel. But the way content is organised, and the reusable building blocks used to create pages, should allow for foreseeable change. That does not mean buying every feature. It means understanding what the team is likely to need next, what can be added later and which decisions would be expensive to undo.
Selecting Umbraco did not settle how Sun International’s new website should be built. Initial work on its migration from Adobe AEM was already underway when Bluegrass Digital joined. Following a technical audit, Bluegrass recommended a fresh implementation and worked with Sun International’s marketing team to consolidate page templates and reusable building blocks and define the delivery scope. Greater control over routine content updates was an explicit objective, not an automatic consequence of changing the CMS.
As Simon explains: “How you thought about your content and structured your pages and your architecture is so much more important than your underlying platform choice.”
That work requires the people designing and building the website to understand the pressures marketing works under, from campaign deadlines and changing priorities to approvals and reporting. Whether delivery is managed internally or through an external implementation partner, those demands should inform the brief alongside the technical requirements. Marketing should be involved in discussions about what needs to change in the existing site, how forms and measurement will be tested, and how the team will be prepared to run the platform. A handover should establish who owns what and where support is still needed, rather than leave those boundaries to be discovered after launch.
Those checks help establish whether the finished website will support marketing’s day-to-day work. Without them, even a technically successful launch can leave the team with rigid pages, manual workarounds and another round of development requests. A platform’s capabilities are only useful if they are built into the implementation in a way the team can actually use.
Marketing does not need to own every technical decision. It does need a voice in defining what success looks like. Before signing off the migration brief, ask a simple question: when the next campaign is planned, what will we be able to do that we cannot do today?
Bluegrass Digital is an Umbraco Gold Partner specialising in CMS migrations, website replatforming and enterprise digital platforms. Its services span technical website audits, migration planning, user experience design, development, integrations and ongoing optimisation and support. Bluegrass works with marketing and technology teams to assess existing platforms and build websites that balance day-to-day content management needs with security, performance and long-term maintainability. Visit www.bluegrassdigital.com to learn more.
