A growing imperative for media companies of all sizes is to directly manage first-party audience data so they can own the customer journey, so selecting the right providers for performance, value, and flexibility is top of mind. The first choice organizations make is often the warehouse, and the second choice is a visualization tool that…
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The latest from Alley’s team of experts.
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Alley has been in business for more than 15 years now, many lifetimes ago in the fast-paced world of web technology and the evolution of the media industry. Some of the challenges in scaling digital platforms we faced back then have become table stakes for any website in 2025. As the industry has evolved and…
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Technical debt is one of the most apt metaphors in software development. It’s so apt, in fact, that it might deserve an accounting system of its own. The widespread use of AI coding tools has made technical debt cheaper than ever to accrue, but skills gaps and a lack of awareness could make it harder…
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How people find information, including your site’s content, is changing—fast. AI search tools like Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity AI’s Deep Research, and Grok DeepSearch are redefining the way we search, summarize, and discover content. Being a “power searcher” used to mean knowing your Boolean operators. Now, it means knowing how to ask an AI to…
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Does this sound familiar? You are in a deadline-focused organization and the work to maintain and improve your website is ruled by the tyranny of the urgent. You’re constantly in reactive mode, responding to bugs, maintenance issues, and urgent feature requests. As a result, seizing opportunities to build greater value into your website go unexplored…
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Attempting to build and maintain your audience as a digital publisher is like trying to walk on unstable ground. You rely on social media and search to drive users to your website, but the status of these platforms is constantly evolving. From ownership changes to black-box algorithms and the changing tastes of users, every platform…
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The challenges faced by news outlets and their teams are well documented: vanishing print subscriptions, limited ad revenue, the domineering whims of search and social media, and doing more reporting with fewer resources. Maybe these are all too real for you and your organization. But one topic rarely explored is the connection between these challenges…
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One of WordPress’s greatest strengths is its massive plugin ecosystem. As a team that builds bespoke solutions for clients, we often find ourselves working with plugins that either get us 90% of the way toward a feature request, or end up providing more features than we need, leaving us wanting to disable some. Or, perhaps,…
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Once just a tool for bloggers and sole traders, WordPress has rapidly evolved into a leading CMS for enterprise brands, with big names such as The New York Post, Vogue, and the White House now counted among its regular users. To explore why and how large-scale organizations are making use of the publishing platform, we…
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Alley recently contributed, along with several other enterprise agencies, to a guide for prospective buyers looking at WordPress as the CMS for their enterprise publishing technology stack. We were happy to join this conversation and help people understand how WordPress has helped some of the biggest brands on the planet simplify their publishing workflow and…
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As developers, we’re often asked to implement features that would be slight variations on features that already exist in WordPress core. Since building things is our forte, it can be reflexive to start from scratch, but that isn’t always the best route, and it can cost you precious time and resources. In fact, there’s a…