SoBold are delighted to become only the 3rd Platinum Certified Cookiebot Partner in the United Kingdom.
Cookiebot consent management platform (CMP) is a leading compliance solution that detects and controls all cookies and trackers in use on a website, and automatically manages end-user consents.
SoBold have been working closely with Cookiebot since the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into place on 24 May 2018 providing their clients with transparency and control over the cookies used on their websites. Since partnering with Cookiebot as a reseller, SoBold have worked with clients including Transport for London and the London Transport Museum to develop bespoke implementations of the Cookiebot CMP. More information on SoBold’s work with Transport for London can be found here.
In October 2022, Cookiebot launched a tiered partner and certification program. As a leading Cookiebot reseller SoBold has been named as a Platinum Certified partner, highlighting its expertise with the Cookiebot platform and data privacy compliance in general.
By becoming a Platinum Certified Cookiebot Partner, SoBold will be able to continue to offer more support to leading businesses needing bespoke Cookiebot solutions.
Cookiebot Sales & Channel Manager, Grant MacInnes said:
Congratulations to Sam Phillips & SoBold on joining our very elite group of platinum certified resellers. Looking forward to continuing to work closely with you and the team over the coming months and years.
SoBold Technical Director, Sam Phillips said:
By becoming just the 3rd Platinum Certified Cookiebot partner in the UK we have continued to cement our position as a leading Cookiebot reseller. Having been one of the first resellers of Cookiebot in 2018, our partnership with Cookiebot continues to go from strength to strength and we are looking forward to developing more bespoke implementations for Cookiebot’s enterprise user base as a fully certified partner.
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- Simple, intuitive navigation
- Clear, logical page and content structure
- Large text that’s easy to read
- Clear input boxes
- Helpful error messages
- Simple password requirements
- Large buttons and clickable icons
- Easy undo, edit, and cancel capabilities
- Reliable refresh and back buttons
- Refresh functions that retain any input information
- Tapping or clicking buttons, rather than hovering over
- The ability to pause and scroll through auto-rotating carousels
- Videos with the option of closed-captioning
- Auto-fill for information input in forms.
- Optimise your site to ensure its pages load quickly
- Make all your site’s content is easy to perceive and consume
- Be consistent
- Give your site a simple, logical structure and navigation
- Use responsive design to maintain usability across different devices and screen sizes
- Use proper headings and sub-headings to organise your pages well
- Make sure clickable buttons and links stand out
- Use distinctive colours and contrast on your pages alongside white space
- Avoid making any of the text, buttons, or other touch-points too small
- Provide clear, useful error messages.
- More efficient and effective digital processes and services (both internally and externally)
- Greater adoption and usage rates
- Quicker, stronger ROI
- Improved user or customer retention and loyalty
- Commercial business growth.
- Read our comparison between Sitecore and WordPress here.
- Read our comparison between Drupal and WordPress here.
Digital Business
9 February, 2023
Usability Explained – How Better User Experience Can Help You Grow Your Business in 2023
Usability is crucial to the success of any website, but it’s something that most businesses are still struggling to get right. This article explores what’s required to design a website with good usability, highlights common mistakes you should aim to avoid, and provides advice to help you improve the usability of your own site.
Digital Business Success Depends on Good Usability
Almost every business today has a website. At this stage, it’s safe to assume your business falls into that category. In addition, you may have gone beyond an ordinary website and carried out a bespoke development project to create something entirely unique for your business.
In today’s digital business landscape, having a great website is a necessity. And while developing a business website is no easy task in itself, it’s a challenge you’ve almost certainly already worked through. However, a challenge that you may still struggle with – like many other businesses we’ve spoken to recently – is mastering the usability of your site.
Providing a user experience (UX) in line with the standards of today, that meets the demands and expectations of your target audience, is a complex problem that may be holding your business back from achieving certain goals.
Of course, a complex problem is best solved by breaking it down into simple steps. So, let’s start by looking at the issue of usability, and why it’s so important to businesses today.
What is Usability?
According to ISO-9241, usability is defined as “the extent to which a system, product, or service can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use.”
In this case, the product in question will usually be a website. And, while user-centric design is an approach to creating a website that’s easy-to-use, usability is the measurement of how well that design has worked.
Essentially, usability is about making the experience of using your website as convenient, simple, and reliable as possible for all your visitors. This is equally important for all kinds of users, whether they’re prospects you’re hoping to convert to customers, or employees accessing an internal process or system.
In a real-life example, if your business had built an internal site for your employees to access corporate resources and training material, usability would be determined by how easy – or difficult – it is to perform basic tasks. This includes actions like logging in, navigating the site across various pages, consuming the site’s content, inputting information into the system, and resolving errors quickly and efficiently.
We each have experiences with usability hundreds of times every day, as we access websites and apps like LinkedIn, Amazon, Gmail, and so on. But there lies the key
Good usability on a website is something you don’t even notice. Bad usability on a website is something you notice, and will remember the next time you have the option of returning to that site or looking for a better experience elsewhere.
Usability can often be the difference between users adopting or rejecting technology. It could be the difference between your website’s visitors bouncing off the home page or converting to become customers.
Common Mistakes with User Experience (UX)
One of the most common, and damaging, mistakes businesses make is assuming they know how their users will think, behave, and interact with their website.
It’s always a risk to assume your users will respond well to decisions you make because you feel they’ll make things easier for you, from the development or management side of things. You should also try to avoid assuming users will understand certain things just because you do.
Often, the opposite is the case.
For example, certain structure and functionality of website menus may be something you assume your users are comfortable with, but are actually difficult for some people to use. You may assume that your users are happy using a website that has pages that infinitely scroll, when in reality that causes a negative experience for them.
A common mistake we see lots of businesses make is deciding what kind of design and functionality they want, without considering who the target audience is and what they need from their experience.
Remember your users are the ones who will determine the success or failure of your investment in this site, so their perspective is the one that should be taken when making important decisions during the design and development.
By making those assumptions, not only will you provide your users with a more inconvenient or frustrating experience, but you may also drive them to find alternative means of completing their task at hand. If that task is purchasing a product or service, poor usability could begin to have a negative impact on your business.
What Do Users Want in 2023?
People expect a seamless experience when using technology, meaning they want websites to be simple, quick, and convenient.
This involves a lot of components, not just in your design and navigation, but also by finding the right balance with things like passwords, pop-up messages, audio and visual content, push notifications, and more.
Typically, a positive user experience will come from:
Users become frustrated when things are presented to them outside of their control or choosing. For example, some of the most maligned features of websites include push notifications, chat window pop-ups, pop-ups requesting feedback, prompts to install apps, requests for access to their camera or microphone, security questions, and so on.
It’s also likely to create a negative experience by presenting things in a way that doesn’t align with the logic of most of your target audience. For instance, if a website has an unclear structure and navigation, many users will be more likely to leave the site rather than persist in trying to use it.
A Word on Accessibility
Usability is sometimes confused with accessibility. While they are related, they are actually different concepts. Accessibility refers to the practice of making technology accessible and easy-to-use for everyone, equally, with a significant focus on those with disabilities and other difficulties.
Web accessibility is covered under the Equality Act of 2010 in the UK. Many organisations now have a legal – as well as a moral – obligation to ensure their websites are accessible, by following a set of principles and standards known as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). If you’re working with an agency, they should already have accessibility best practices included in their approach to design. Be sure to check this anytime you’re evaluating agency partners for a project.
While accessibility and usability are different, all websites should be designed and developed to be accessible to everyone. This will include some of the same conventions mentioned above, as well as ensuring you cater for people with impaired vision and hearing, cognitive difficulties, those that need to use assistive technology, and so on.
Keep an eye out for our upcoming article taking a deep dive into web accessibility.
Tips and Advice for Improved Usability
1 – Keep it Simple
When it comes to UX, the simpler the better. If something is complicated in its design or functionality, it will likely be complicated to use as well. Always try to keep things as simple as possible to give your site the best chance to achieve great usability.
2 – Get the Fundamentals Right
Similar to the issue of making assumptions about your target audience, it’s important to understand that certain aspects of usability are more objective than they are subjective.
Yes, some people may prefer to hover over a drop-down menu rather than click it, but there are some fundamental principles every website needs in order to provide a satisfying UX. Get these right, and your site’s usability will be in good shape:
3 – Learn from Experience
Draw on your own experience in your personal use of the web to put yourself in the shoes of your users. If you encounter a feature or process that gives you a bad UX online, make sure you don’t have similar features or processes within your own site.
4 – Test With Real Users
Test your site with real end-users who are part of your target audience. The best way to give your website great usability is by asking people to test it out, gather their feedback, and put those learnings into practice. This is known as usability testing, and is a phase of the design and development process that should be planned into your timeline at the beginning of any project.
5 – Know When to Ask for Help
To ensure your site is built with usability as a priority, you’ll require the support of a good agency partner. Work with a web development agency who can provide guidance from their experience delivering dozens, if not hundreds, of similar projects successfully in the past. A good agency should also help you with crucial processes like usability testing and user acceptance testing (UAT).
6 – Use the Right CMS
Your selection of content management system (CMS) or platform is another decision that can have a significant influence on the UX your visitors will be given.
Some CMSs have a reputation for being clunky, difficult to use, and slow. Others, such as WordPress, are specifically designed to make websites as easy-to-use as possible for visitors. For example, WordPress is built with plenty of functionality that promotes accessibility for those with difficulties using technology.
For more insight into this issue, we recently produced a series of articles comparing the pros and cons of the leading CMSs available today. You can read that here:
The Benefits and Opportunities of Better Usability
Working hard on your usability to create a great UX is something all businesses should be prioritising in 2023 and beyond.
As technology continues to become more convenient and pervasive, people’s tolerance for slow, unintuitive websites and frustrating functionality is rapidly shrinking.
If you do create a site that provides your users with what they’re looking for and meets their expectations, your business will begin to benefit from a number of outcomes:
2023 Trends and Future Predictions
While users’ preferences for speed and convenience haven’t really changed much over the years, their frustrations with poor UX and their demand for greater usability have increased.
With technology now present in so much of our daily lives, people’s pateince for bad experiences is getting smaller and smaller. When it comes to web design, the best way to manage this is to stick to what’s proven to work and give your users what they want.
The most important usability trend in 2023 may be to focus entirely on those fundamentals we mentioned earlier. Keeping things clear and simple is likely to be the most effective approach to UX design for the majority of businesses right now.
Always Ensure Your End-User is Your Priority
You’d be surprised how many websites fail because they don’t provide their users with a straightforward experience that aligns with their expectations. When you’re investing a significant amount of time, effort, and money into building a site for your business, you can’t afford to overlook the importance of usability.
Whether your target users are prospective customers, existing customers, or your internal workforce, tailoring the UX to that specific audience is absolutely crucial. If you do, not only will your users have a better experience, but your business will also benefit from advantages that will begin to drive increases in business growth.
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Digital Business
5 January, 2023
WordPress vs Umbraco – Comparing Both Content Management Systems
When you’re tasked with selecting a content management system (CMS) for your business, you’ll likely appreciate that the number of viable options available can make things complicated. From Drupal, to Umbraco, to WordPress, there are plenty of quality technology platforms to choose from.
But finding the CMS that’s most suitable for your specific business is an important process that requires careful consideration and a lot of research. Of course, devoting sufficient time to this can be difficult when you have dozens of other priorities on your mind.
To ease this challenge for you, this article will make the process of choosing between two popular CMSs much simpler. In this new content series, we’re providing direct, objective comparisons between some of the leading options for CMSs today.
This second article of the series will look at the comparison between Umbraco and WordPress, and you can find links to the rest of the articles in this series at the bottom of this page.
The Platforms
A CMS is a software-based technology platform upon which you can build and manage websites and applications. While most CMSs are similar in terms of their fundamental functionality, they each have varying levels of complexity and development requirements.
Umbraco
It’s important to start by noting that Umbraco is a platform intended specifically for developers with a certain level of technical proficiency.
When you first set up Umbraco, it won’t be approachable for the average marketing manager or any other non-technical users. Initially, much of the key functionality expected from a CMS will be missing. The purpose of this is to encourage you to spend time and money developing the platform. Often, this has been known to rule out Umbraco as a viable option for a lot of businesses.
To get full value out of Umbraco, you’ll almost certainly need to hire someone – either an agency partner or an in-house developer – to help you get things up and running.
Having said that, no matter which CMS you choose, you’ll be significantly better off working with a platform-specific web development agency supporting you. For most businesses, an agency plays a crucial role in helping you implement your new system and develop your site (but more on that later).
WordPress
WordPress is the polar opposite of Umbraco, in the sense that it’s designed so that anyone – even if you have no previous content management experience – can use it easily. That’s why it’s the most popular CMS available today, with around 45% of all websites on the Internet built using the platform.
Almost everything you need to manage the day-to-day responsibilities of your website comes readily available in the software, making it much more suitable for a wider range of businesses.
This allows you to begin building immediately and facilitates a quick time-to-market for your websites and applications. WordPress’s rich, dynamic features that come pre-existing with the platform “out-of-the-box” are to thank for that.
Content Management and Usability
You should consider ease-of-use as a key indication of whether or not you want to invest in a CMS. If a CMS doesn’t offer simple, intuitive usability, you’re probably better off avoiding it.
Umbraco’s Usability
As mentioned above, in its initial state, Umbraco can be very difficult to work with for the average user. It’s mostly intended for more technical users who have coding skills or some development experience to build the infrastructure.
However, once you’ve invested sufficient time and money into tailoring the platform to your own preferences, it becomes a great tool for publishing and editing content on a website. Umbraco has a wealth of features that allow you to create high quality websites and dynamic web pages.
On a side note, if you’re a Microsoft user, you’ll be pleased to see some similarities in the structure of Umbraco’s user interface (UI).
WordPress’s Usability
WordPress is far more straightforward when it comes to usability. It provides you with a convenient, efficient user interface (UI) that allows seamless publishing, management, and editing of content on your sites.
It’s simple editing content on a page-by-page basis in WordPress, which saves you valuable time, with a handy block-based design.
The ease-of-use makes it possible to share responsibilities across your team, even if some of you don’t have any previous experience with a CMS, unlike the more technical Umbraco platform.
Customisation
Customisation with Umbraco
Umbraco is known for being highly customisable and flexible. It’s best used as a clean slate for developers to tailor to the business’s requirements. However, this isn’t easy to do for the average user.
As mentioned earlier, Umbraco isn’t suitable for the average CMS user in its initial state. Unlike most CMSs, you’re required to spend some time customising Umbraco in order to make it into a platform that’s approachable and easy-to-use. Once you’ve done that, however, Umbraco can become an excellent CMS with great content editing capabilities.
Customisation with WordPress
WordPress allows you to customise it to your own liking as well. The difference here is that you don’t need to change much about WordPress’s set of tools and features before you can begin using it comfortably.
This allows you to create quality content from day one, with the freedom and flexibility to make adjustments to the platform as and when you require. WordPress is also an easier platform to upgrade with custom features due to the quality of its community-sourced plugins.
How Secure is Each Platform?
Cyber security is becoming a greater concern each day for businesses. Choosing a platform that delivers robust security should be a top priority, so you can have full confidence in the protection of your data.
Umbraco’s Security
Umbraco comes with a high level of in-built security. The software is based on Microsoft’s .NET platform, which gives it support from Code Access Security (CAS). Working alongside that CAS, Umbraco provides identity-based security, and that makes it considerably more secure than the average CMS.
Having said that, you shouldn’t let this act as an excuse for your agency partner to take security for granted. Every web development project should be approached with security at the core, no matter what in-built protection the platform has.
It’s also important to note that Umbraco is an open-source platform, meaning a community of developers regularly creates updates and new features within the software. This means that any new additions should be tested carefully for security in case they create new vulnerabilities.
WordPress’s Security
While it is generally very secure, WordPress is another open-source platform backed by an active developer community. It’s important to be cautious of the raft of new features, updates, and plugins that are regularly released.
From a security perspective, be mindful of plugins, both in terms of where they come from and ensuring they’re correctly tested, maintained, and updated. For any CMS, these issues are best left to an experienced agency partner who has the expertise to minimise these risks for you.
Aside from that, WordPress does offer enterprise-grade security, with organisations like globally renowned pharmaceutical company Hutch Med and leading venture capitalist firm Balderton Capital using it today.
How Scalable is Each Platform?
Scalability should be another important part of your criteria when selecting a CMS. Fast, agile expansion is crucial for the platform, just as they are for your business as it grows.
Therefore, you need your digital infrastructure to be able to scale cost-effectively with more pages, additional functionality, and perhaps even more sites.
Scalability with Umbraco
Umbraco’s scalability is one of its strengths. With Umbraco, your site can seamlessly evolve as your business grows and your requirements change.
It’s especially useful for teams that need to manage a high volume of pages simultaneously, making it very suitable for large businesses.
Scalability with WordPress
In the past, WordPress mistakenly had a reputation among some for being most suitable for smaller businesses. However, its excellent scalability proves that to be nothing more than a myth.
Just like Umbraco, WordPress is agile and scalable enough to grow alongside your business and adapt to your changing requirements.
Cost and TCO
A CMS is a big investment, and should be considered a long-term one. In order to ensure you’re achieving a strong return on investment (ROI), it’s helpful to find a platform that offers good value and a low total cost of ownership (TCO).
When assessing this, it’s important to factor in costs such as hosting, licenses, agency fees, maintenance, bespoke development, and more.
Umbraco’s Up-Front Work and Ongoing Costs
Because it’s open-source, Umbraco can be free-to-use.
However, as mentioned earlier, it’s a platform that requires a great deal of technical expertise and initial development work. That will typically involve longer timelines with your agency than other CMSs, which inevitably mean high costs. Because it’s a complex platform, you’ll also face higher costs whenever you need to develop new functionality or work on integrations.
WordPress Value and TCO
WordPress comes with a far lower TCO than most other CMS options. Its ease-of-use and flexibility out-of-the-box make it a very cost-effective platform.
WordPress licenses are free, so your implementation costs would be limited to just hosting, agency fees, and post-deployment support.
Any plugins or extensions you want to apply to the platform will be licensed and paid for separately, but it’s unlikely you’ll need to add many new capabilities because it’s such a feature-rich platform by itself.
Developer Communities
If a technology platform is supported by a strong community of developers, that will be highly beneficial to your business. Dedicated users from around the world work hard to continuously create improvements, additions, and updates to help the software become the best it can be.
Umbraco’s Community
Umbraco has been around since the year 2000, making it one of the oldest CMSs. That means it’s had a long time for a large, skilled community of developers to grow around it.
As touched on earlier, Umbraco is built on a Microsoft-based infrastructure, using a C# framework, and is the most popular platform of this kind.
However, it’s important to note that Umbraco is facing some decline. More popular platforms, like WordPress, gaining widespread adoption have seen developments with Umbraco slow down in recent years.
WordPress’s Community
WordPress has a healthy global community devoted to constantly improving the platform.
WordPress developers are renowned for their creativity, producing a wealth of innovative new themes and plugins that can be used by any business with ease.
The WordPress community also regularly holds free events to help people learn more about how to use the platform. For instance, WordCamp is a non-profit event that has been running since 2006 across several continents.
The Important Role of an Agency
As touched on throughout this article, another factor which will influence the success of any projects with your chosen CMS is a development agency.
When finding the right CMS is such a challenge by itself, many businesses underestimate the importance of finding the right agency partner to support you with your CMS.
But as mentioned earlier, how well you handle critical aspects of the platform like security, testing, usability, and even your TCO are often determined by your agency.
With Umbraco, all the platform’s functionality has to be custom coded, which makes development time in the back-end longer than most businesses expect. This also makes Umbraco difficult to work with internally, as well as for any maintenance and updates. When working with an agency, this will see your costs increase when compared to WordPress technology.
Whichever CMS you pick, they’re all considerably easier to use, and to achieve healthy ROI, with a specialist partner supporting you. Finding an agency with the right experience and expertise to help you unlock the full potential of your platform should be another important part of your overall decision.
Making Your Decision
So, how do you take all these comparisons and decide which CMS is right for your business?
In all honesty, both Umbraco and WordPress are both good options that would work well for most businesses. Although, it is generally accepted that Umbraco is a less approachable platform than WordPress unless you have technical skills within your team.
In order to determine which one will be more suitable, it’s useful to look at each of the characteristics listed in this article in relation to your unique requirements and business needs.
Remember that every business, and every web development project, is different. Think carefully about your specific strategic objectives, budget, users, technical specifications, and any other important factors. That should make it clear which CMS is the better choice to deliver what you’re looking for.
If you need more help in your evaluation of the various CMS options:
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Latest from agency
3 August, 2022
Celebrating 3 years with Leonardo Esposito
A fresh-faced Leo joined SoBold in August 2019, with a big booming smile and speaking in broken English. It was immediately clear how driven he was to learn and pick up new skills and it was a no-brainer to offer him a job to join our development team.
For much of his first year at SoBold, Leo was glued to Google Translate to try and properly understand the tasks he had been set, but each and every time the output of his work would be the same, outstanding.
As Leo’s English picked up, as did his confidence and skill-set and he made it clear that he wanted to focus on Back-End Development and he really wanted to take SoBold forward. Leo championed innovation in our development approach and much of the workflow we do today has been driven by Leo’s desire to set the highest of standards.
He is a key figure at SoBold and we are very fortunate to have him.
We caught up with Leo to find out more about what he get’s up to in his day-to-day life!
At what point in your life did you decide to become a developer?
During middle school, I tried to learn how to make games, which led me to development. I started exploring different languages and realized I really liked learning the syntax of as many languages as I could. Eventually, I got into web development, and since then I have tried to expand my knowledge of web development languages, trying out new frameworks, and both front and back end sides.
Describe your typical day
As of now I’m trying out double gym days, which means an early wake up (5.30am), gym at 6am, and finishing at around 8am. Then I go to work, have my day, and when I finish I go home and back to the gym. When I get back home it’s circa 8.30pm, so I have dinner, watch something on Netflix (not too much otherwise I end up snacking), then go to my room, and if there’s time and I’m not too tired I play piano, otherwise I go to bed ready to do it all again.
What’s your favourite project to date
Favourite project to date is Rede partners
Any advice for junior developers?
Never stop learning, be curious, and be always ready to challenge yourself, and question what you do. Change your way of doing things if someone else out there is doing it better.
If you had to change careers what would you do instead?
Theoretical Physicist or Volleyball coach
What was your most recent challenge and how did you overcome It?
Hit a plateau in terms of motivation, but managed to overcome it by getting less on my plate, and focusing on meaning, eventually, it became better.
What’s your favourite thing to do outside of work?
Workout, play music (piano, guitar), play video games (fav ones are Skyrim, Horizon Forbidden West and Fallout)
How do you think the designer/developer relationship could improve?
The main thing is communication and chemistry, once those are there the relationship improves by itself.
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Industry News
21 June, 2022
Pixel Pioneers Bristol 2022
If you’ve never been to a conference of any type before, you possibly think you already know the important areas of your profession and can find out any developments from your colleagues or the internet. At least that’s what I thought prior to attending Pixel Pioneers 2022.
Which option sounds more appealing to you? Pick up extra skills on occasion, or go to a conference and absorb a mega-dose of industry knowledge, make connections and enjoy exploring fresh surroundings? Luckily at SoBold we have the opportunity to do both.
The conference covered both ends of the telescope – from broad topics such as energy consumption, to a fifty minute talk about the brief three milliseconds your screen goes blank in between webpage loads. How the visually impaired experience the internet, to technical developments in styling / fonts.
My personal hero was Chris How – his mantra of valuing your customer’s time and giving them small moments of delight strongly resonated with me. In accordance, I want to guide you through the content of the conference, with links to the core material that will best replicate what the SoBold team saw, whilst valuing your precious time.
GAVIN STRANGE : Less Thinkering, More Tinkering
A must watch to boost your levels of creativity. Gavin shares his personal and professional projects with Aardman Studios. Lots of useful insights into reaching the pinnacle of creativity. Highly engaging delivery, visuals and plenty of ‘further reading’ material. Definitely worth watching in entirety. Gavin Strange website – will give you a sense of his creative flair and influences. https://www.jam-factory.com/
“It’s better to beg for forgiveness, than ask for permission.”
Gavin Strange
BIANCA BERNING : Variable Fonts – WTF?
From a technical and design standpoint, learning about variable fonts is incredibly useful. Towards the end Bianca veers into the potential application of variable fonts – imagine a world where your computer mutates its content to fit the viewer’s specific needs. If you’re looking for new avenues for unique artistic features for your website – this talk is for you. Everyone should have a play with variable fonts – try it here https://v-fonts.com/
CHRIS HOW : You Got to Fight for the Right to Delight
Chris’s choice of examples and commentary is intentionally entertaining and eclectic. His approach to design changes your criteria for success and also would decisively influence your next project. Essential viewing. Whether you’re a seasoned designer or developer short of a design, this talk will give you a guiding direction. Information on the Kano product roadmap here. https://www.productplan.com/glossary/kano-model/
LÉONIE WATSON : Accessibility: The Land That Time to Interactive Forgot
Visually impaired people experience the internet through screen readers – the internet described in words. Léonie’s valuable insight will definitely re-balance your priorities and appreciation for how websites should function. Some of the technical history she overviews was a bit lost on the audience but the switch in mindset is valuable. Important to dip into, especially for gleaming a deeper understanding of how a web document is compiled and loaded. It might sound ‘techy’ but it’s like understanding how our lungs work – illuminating. If you haven’t viewed any of your own websites using a screen reader – you definitely should. For a great sense of how the net is best experienced for visually impaired users – just check out her website – tink.uk
LUKE MURPHY : Lightning Talk: Design Tokens – Searching for a Source of Truth
Design Tokens act as a very useful tool for blending the boundaries of where design and development meet, in fact, they act as a technical element that affect design and development in equal measures. If you have no idea what a design token is – this talk could unlock a tonne of structure for your product. Here’s an overview article on design tokens
HANNAH SMITH : How to Make Digital Services More Sustainable
Hannah Smith’s talk invited us to critique our energy consumption and make changes to our habits as both consumers and producers of digital content. She makes the case that space travel is a waste of resources, and that using less lays the path to fulfilment. See if her arguments resonate with you. Hannah’s book recommendation – Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth
JHEY TOMPKINS : Supercharge Your Skills with Creative Coding
A mad professor of CSS and JavaScript – Jhey has a mixture of technical tricks and interesting libraries for speech recognition. Deadpan yet full of colourful examples, Jhey clumsily demonstrates his collection of magical creations and challenges you, the developer, to break out of your ‘siloed’ mentality for visual presentation. Check out his catalogue of wondrous CSS/JS creations here
STUART LANGRIDGE : You Really Don’t Need All That JavaScript, I Promise
Painting with the broad brushes down to the nat-hair infinitesimally small details, Stuart reminds us of the importance of returning to the basics in order to best utilise the web. Unfortunately some of the libraries he suggests do not have extensive compatibility and thus aren’t for mainstream production… yet. His insight does provide a deeper understanding of the mechanics of the tools we use, although the message is quite drawn out. Example of the shared transitions js library https://codepen.io/drenther/pen/NjzeOO
RACHEL ANDREW : What’s New in CSS?
Rachel Andrew – new css features either in or emerging from or newly arrived from CSS-land. Truly at the coalface of emerging CSS features. For a frontend developer it was akin to being shown new letters in the alphabet that were being proposed. A summary of similar information can be found here – https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2022/03/new-css-features-2022/
Bristol itself is well worth a visit – a centre for nightlife, hedonism and youthful idealism. Simply walking around the harbour area in the daytime will refresh your appreciation for one-of-a-kind shops and overflowing street art. Make sure you have plenty of free space in your phone for all the photos. The SoBold team had a very enriching experience and bonded even tighter as a team. I hope to see you at the next one!
Links to the conference videos will be available via the Pixel Pioneers website.
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Company Milestone
8 June, 2021
SoBold is a Proud Clutch 100 Fastest-Growing Company for 2021
Clutch is a B2B review and rating platform that spans the IT, marketing, and business services industries. The site annually holds an awards cycle to celebrate the best and brightest service providers from the aforementioned sectors. SoBold are delighted to be one of the Clutch 100 fastest-growing companies for 2021!
“The Clutch 100 growth lists represent the top service providers based on revenue growth over the years,” said Clutch Founder Mike Beares. “Their recognition is only possible because of their willingness to participate and their commitment to delivering the best services to their clients.”
“We are delighted to be recognized as a Clutch Leader. This award highlights our consistent project success and growth as a business,” said SoBold Managing Director, Will Newland.