We've always had a need for speed. However, this whole 'AI era' thing has made it worse for marketing and digital teams than those Fast and Furious films ever did.
High-quality, agile, and truly powerful digital experiences took a backseat for some — but they're back with a vengeance now that everyone has had their fun with an overwhelming volume of unvaluable content.
Studio Science is one company that didn't let AI steal the limelight. As a leading digital experience agency known for UX, design, and digital strategy, they had a problem that will sound familiar to a lot of people reading this: their own website didn't reflect what they were capable of. As a consultancy that excels in digital experiences, UX, and design, these were areas that were, frankly, problematic.
This is the story of how that changed — in 90 days flat.
When your own website becomes the problem
For professional services businesses, the internal website is often the last thing to get love. Client work comes first. Budgets get redirected. And before you know it, you're a digital experience agency with a digital experience problem.
Studio Science's site had accumulated a familiar set of pain points: content updates that required developer involvement every single time, a design that had stopped keeping pace with the brand, poor connectivity with their marketing and sales stack, and zero room to personalise or scale.
Then came the hard deadline. Their existing CMS contract was expiring, and the clock was ticking — right through the holiday season, no less. A new site wasn't just desirable. It was urgent.
Betting on a brand new platform (and winning)
Studio Science had been working closely with Optimizely through a strategic implementation partnership, giving them first-hand knowledge of what the platform could do. When it came to rebuilding their own site, the decision was easy.
They chose Optimizely CMS (SaaS) — at the time, brand new to market — and built their entire site on it. A lean team of five to seven people across development, design, content, and marketing ran an aggressive sprint process to get it done.
What made the platform the right fit?
Optimizely's Visual Builder meant marketers could make real-time changes and see exactly what they'd get — without filing a request to engineering.
The block-based page architecture let the team push updates across multiple pages at once, keeping everything consistent without doubling the workload. Netlify-powered hosting kept performance tight from day one, and the platform's personalisation capabilities meant they weren't just building for now — they were building for what comes next.
It was also an opportunity to rethink everything: content strategy, site architecture, accessibility, integrations. Not a patch job. A proper overhaul.
90 days. World's first. Real results.
Studio Science launched in under three months, becoming the world's first organisation to go live on Optimizely SaaS CMS, and the first Optimizely partner to implement it for a client.
Steve Pruden, CEO of Studio Science, summed it up well: