Marketing Websites Should Be Led By Marketers
Catherine's team at Workleap had already made the big decision: migrate from WordPress to Webflow to give marketing control of their website. Leadership knew the team needed to move faster. Migrating from WordPress to Webflow was a deliberate choice to unlock speed and autonomy, putting website creation directly in the hands of marketers and content producers.
But after the migration, nothing had changed.
The marketing team still couldn't make updates without contractor help. The platform that was supposed to enable independence had created new dependencies. Quality issues persisted through QA. Strategic concerns went unaddressed.
The migration had swapped platforms, but it hadn't changed the underlying model: specialists built it, specialists maintained it, and marketing still needed external help for every update.
What Actually Needed to Change
Workleap's marketing team operates at the fast pace of most growth-stage companies: campaigns launching across multiple brands, positioning shifts to stay competitive, integrating acquisitions, constant testing. Every day they couldn't build directly for their website was a day they were executing someone else's timeline instead of their own.
We came on initially as one of several contractors helping manage the site. But after working with Catherine's team for a few weeks, it became clear what the original migration had missed: the site needed to be restructured so marketing could actually use it, not just look at it.
Over four months, we worked alongside Workleap's team to rebuild the architecture, clean up the technical approach, and train the internal team on how Webflow was designed to work. Not just "how to update a page", but how to think about components, structure, and workflows that wouldn't require a specialist every time they needed to move fast.
Because if they still needed us for every update, we'd just be trading one dependency for another. The goal was to build them a system they owned.
What Changed
Workleap moved from a website managed by a siloed internal team of specialists to an integrated marketing flow where the broader marketing team could operate confidently and autonomously.
Previously, progress depended on separate timelines and handoffs, which limited speed and iteration. The shift unlocked tighter collaboration across marketing, design, and content—without gatekeeping.
In 2025 alone, Catherine's team:
- Completed two major site clean-ups to reduce complexity and technical debt
- Delivered two redesigns to better support evolving positioning
- Ran ongoing CRO and SEO optimizations across key pages
- Executed multiple A/B tests across two major brands
- Integrated business-critical pages from two acquisitions into the core marketing site, successfully migrating their web content and sunsetting the acquired companies’ websites.
- Implemented positioning and messaging shifts without waiting on external or siloed teams
- Increased organic search traffic by 50%
But here's what Catherine Blair Timothy said mattered most:
"My team now has a Webflow setup we actually understand and feel confident working with."
That confidence isn't just about morale, it's about capability. When your marketing team controls their strategy and output end-to-end, you've fundamentally changed how marketing operates.
Marketing websites should be marketer-led.
What does this actually look like?
The Takeaway
Marketing controls the priorities, timelines, and day-to-day execution of the site. They work with a component system and documentation that lets them build pages, run tests, and ship campaigns without waiting. Developers stay involved, but their role shifts to setting up guardrails, building net-new features, and maintaining the infrastructure that keeps everything running smoothly.
Marketers focus on marketing. Developers focus on developing. Neither is blocked by the other.
This isn't about eliminating expertise, it's about eliminating bottlenecks. The website is a marketing tool, and marketing tools should respond to marketing timelines, not development sprints.
For growth-stage companies moving fast, that's the difference between executing your strategy and watching competitors execute theirs.
At BrightSite
We believe marketing websites should be led by marketers. If you’re ready for your marketing team to control the priorities, timelines, and day-to-day execution of your website, get in touch.