Summary
Despite being the most popular content management system in the world, many large businesses and organisations in strictly regulated industries are still asking, “Is WordPress secure enough for us?”
This article will give you a detailed explanation of how WordPress can provide enterprise-grade security, to help you make your own decision about whether it’s secure enough for your own business. We’ll also share some helpful tips to enhance the platform’s security and reduce its risks even further.
As technology has become more pervasive in our daily lives, cyber security concerns have intensified, especially in the workplace. Each year, we read about more high-profile cases of global brands becoming victims of malicious cyber attacks, most often with sensitive data being the real target.
As a business, you should be increasingly careful and vigilant about the technology solutions you deploy today. This is even more important for large businesses and organisations in industries with strict regulations, where the consequences of security issues can be catastrophic.
When you’re choosing a content management system (CMS) to build critical digital assets like your website, security must therefore be a top priority.
Despite being the most popular CMSs in the world today – powering almost 45% of the world’s websites – WordPress is still seen by some as the platform for smaller organisations. You’d think its popularity alone would be sufficient evidence that WordPress is secure, especially as a large fraction of that user base includes enterprises across both the public and private sectors. However, when it comes to WordPress security, there are still some question marks.
So, is WordPress secure?
Yes, absolutely.
But there are certain factors and potential pitfalls you should be aware of if you’re considering WordPress as your CMS of choice.
Understanding Security in a CMS
As business challenges with cyber security and data protection continue to grow, selecting a platform that offers robust security is crucial. But how does that work, exactly?
Ultimately, a CMS like WordPress is just a piece of software, and all software can be vulnerable to security issues in a variety of ways.
The most obvious of these is a cyber security attack, either by hackers, a virus, or malicious software (malware). Any CMS used in a business environment needs to be built to withstand these attacks on a daily basis, and WordPress is definitely capable of doing so.
Another significant risk is when software has accidental weaknesses, issues, or vulnerabilities – known as bugs – built into its code. Bugs are common in software, and they can manifest as anything from a box appearing in the wrong place on your website to a platform vulnerability that leaks mission-critical data to cyber criminals.
Bugs aren’t difficult to fix, and we’ll explain later in this article why WordPress users can be confident that these kinds of risks are minimal with the platform.
However, when it comes to a CMS’s security, it’s important to understand the following point:
The biggest security risks, and the greatest opportunities for cyber criminals, are unsafe user behaviour, lack of best practices, insufficient maintenance, and poorly built sites. Not the platform itself.
Your behaviour, and the behaviour of your end-users, is an area that can be exploited or cause problems if you don’t prioritise security. That’s why it’s necessary to take a proactive, rather than reactive, approach to protecting your data. The rest of this article will help you do that, and remove any concerns you still have about WordPress security.
Is WordPress Secure?
The misconception that WordPress isn’t secure enough for large businesses still lingers, but why? Well, the main reason is because the platform is free-to-use, and so it was initially most popular among B2C blogs and smaller independent businesses.
Today, however, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Industry-leading enterprises such as private equity advisory firm Rede Partners LLP, global investment firm Coller Capital, and global research and advisory leader Forrester use WordPress for their CMS, just to name a few. This goes a long way to proving the apprehension towards WordPress security is unnecessary.
So, let’s explore the WordPress platform in more detail to understand why these global enterprises have full confidence in the security of their data, as well as the data of their clients and partners.
WordPress is already a secure, stable platform out-of-the-box.. You can rest assured its core code is highly secure, because it’s overseen by a team of security experts who thoroughly test and quality-check it on a continual basis. They regularly release updates and reinforce any potential weaknesses before they’re exploited to protect you against any new-found threats.
A team of security analysts study the ever-changing cyber security landscape and respond to it with speed and precision.
While WordPress may be seen by some as a CMS for small businesses, the speed at which security updates are implemented is arguably the best in the world when compared to other platforms.
WordPress is also open-source software, which means all the code it’s built on is available to the public. Anyone from outside the WordPress team can view it, download it, and make adjustments to it. Users often suggest their own changes and updates to the code by submitting them to the WordPress moderator team for approval. If improvements are made to the WordPress code, these updates will be released to the global user base.
These people are part of a global community of dedicated, passionate users who work hard to ensure the platform is always developing into the best version of itself possible. Anything WordPress’s own team misses, the developer community will catch. This means users are often fixing bugs and shutting down potential opportunities for cyber criminals, keeping the platform safe for everyone else.
WordPress Security Vulnerabilities
While WordPress does have the support of some of the brightest developers in the world, who keep it as secure as possible, they can’t take care of everything for you. As mentioned earlier, your biggest security risks will probably lie within your own business, regardless of what CMS you’re using.
Additional security vulnerabilities can arise in certain scenarios, often caused by ignoring best practices or failing to take responsibility for simple maintenance of the platform.
Web Hosting
Your hosting environment is an important factor that can influence how secure and protected your data will be. Your WordPress websites will be hosted in a server that stores your files and data in a data centre.
WordPress, like any platform, should be hosted in a secure environment, with an experienced provider who prioritises security as part of their services. This should include putting proactive security measures in place for scenarios like unplanned down-time or even natural disasters.
Secure hosting should also involve automated monitoring for malicious activity and vulnerabilities in your servers and software, as well as incident response.
Before choosing your hosting service, be sure to carry out some due diligence and look into the security best practices of your host. In many cases, it’s wise to work with an agency partner who will help you with this, but more on that later.
Plugins
While the WordPress community is one of the platform’s greatest strengths, interacting with unsafe additions to the software can also be its downfall for some businesses. It’s important to be cautious of the constant stream of new features, updates, and plugins being made available, because some of them could create issues for you.
To avoid these problems, you shouldn’t download plugins unless they come from recognised, credible sources. Furthermore, you should always ensure all your plugins are correctly tested, maintained, and updated.
We appreciate this may sound complicated. For that reason, you should entrust this responsibility to a partner. When using WordPress to build and manage websites, a good agency should help you ensure everything is secure and up-to-date.
Software Updates
When you’re running a website or application on WordPress, you’ll regularly receive software updates from the platform. Any time an update comes through, it’s because certain bugs have been fixed or some improvements have been made.
It’s crucial that you keep up with WordPress updates because they’re there to keep your site secure. By leaving your site running on outdated versions, you’re at risk of a known issue being exploited by cyber attacks. Again, this should be taken care of by your agency partner so you don’t need to worry about keeping your web platform up-to-date.
Tips to Strengthen WordPress Security
If you still have doubts, there are some simple steps you can take to further strengthen the security of the WordPress CMS. Some of these more general tips can also be applied to most website platforms and other software software products in general as well.
Use a managed hosting service that offers enterprise-grade security.
You wouldn’t rent an office in a building that leaves its doors unlocked at night. Why would you place your sensitive data in a data centre that isn’t fully secure?
Some things you should consider non-negotiable for a web hosting provider to offer include:
- 24/7 support
- Back-up and disaster recovery
- Fully-managed service
- Automated monitoring and alerts
- 99.99% up-time
- 100% pass-rate for data centre audits.
Put back-up and disaster recovery services in place to ensure you’re protected from all potential risks.
To build on the above point, ensure your hosting service has measures in place for back-up and disaster recovery. This fail-safe measure will give you a way to save and recover all your data in the event of any losses.
Do not use, or allow your agency to use, any plugins from unrecognised sources.
As mentioned earlier, only use plugins from sources you trust. You should also keep all plugins and additions to the platform up-to-date, and make sure they’re rigorously tested – or, rather, make sure you can rely on your agency partner to do this for you behind the scenes.
Use plugins alongside security-specific enhancements.
You can further bolster the security of the WordPress platform by leveraging security-specific plugins such as WordFence, Sucuri, and Defender Pro. These can inform you of potential vulnerabilities or incidents so you can respond quickly before they have an impact on your business.
Don’t use tools that enable direct access to your site database from within the dashboard.
Some digital tools or extensions give direct access to your site’s database or files from within the dashboard, to make managing your website easier. This is something to avoid, because they’re often a major security risk.
Enable SSL
Enabling SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) introduces a protocol which encrypts the transfer of data between your website and your users’ browsers. This makes it more difficult for cyber criminals to steal information and data online.
Encourage your users to follow security best practices.
You can put all the security measures and data protection possible in place, but they could all be for nothing if a weak password or bad behaviour compromises your website.
Some security best practices every business can easily implement include making strong passwords compulsory among all users and introducing additional measures like two-factor authentication.
Rely on an Expert to Minimise Your Security Risks
As touched on throughout this article, another factor which will determine how secure your WordPress platform is will be which agency you decide to work with.
While deciding whether to invest in WordPress is a big decision, don’t underestimate the importance of finding the right agency partner to support you with your CMS, especially when it comes to WordPress security.
Ultimately, you should understand that:
- WordPress by itself, out-of-the-box, is secure enough for most businesses to use.
- WordPress in the hands of an inexperienced or negligent agency will create significant security risks.
- WordPress is the hands of a dedicated, specialist partner is a platform you can trust and rely on without any concerns.
Your data will be fully protected if you work with an agency who takes security seriously and prioritises it at the core of every development task they deliver for you.
That means they should be capable of handling secure architecture, testing, monitoring, updates, and ongoing support for you as part of your service. You should always take the time and care to find a specialist agency partner who has a proven track record of building robust, reliable sites, to ensure you’re minimising your risk.
WordPress is a Suitable Platform for the Enterprise
Cyber security and data protection are critical for businesses of all sizes, across all industries. But it can’t be denied that large businesses often face more severe consequences by falling victim to a cyber attack or data breach.
Choosing a platform that you have total confidence in is a necessary factor in the process of evaluating your options for a CMS.
When you have your own role and responsibilities to focus on, the last thing you want is to be constantly worrying about the security of your site. Following the advice and best practices listed in this article will provide you with a highly resilient WordPress platform with enterprise-grade security. That will allow you to spend more of your time creating an outstanding website that differentiates you from your competitors and drives business growth.
If you need more help understanding and evaluating platforms to deliver a web design and development project, read our comprehensive guide to selecting the right solution here.
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- 1,920px – This covers most external computer monitor sizes
- 1,366px – This covers most laptop screen sizes
- 992px – This covers most Notebook and iPad devices
- 768px – This covers most other tablet devices
- 375px – This covers most smartphones.
- Keep your design simple and your content succinct
- Prioritise the preferences and best interests of your target audience
- Make your design elements as clear as possible
- Maintain consistency
- Ensure your brand, and your company’s identity, have been accurately represented through the design
- Use power of visual imagery to capture and retain your visitors’ attention
- Make your call-to-action as strong and compelling as possible
- Don’t create anything that interferes with the goals of your UX.
- Perceivable
- Operable
- Understandable
- Robust.
- Use contrast and blank space to make your content easy to perceive
- Use bold colours
- Use font sizes no smaller than 14px for desktop and 13px for mobile across the whole site (although, this does depend on the font you use)
- Use headings and structure correctly to organise content clearly on each page
- Make all your content easy to both see and hear
- Write all your copy in plain, simple language
- Avoid any flashing or blinking imagery or video content
- Write simple, clear, and helpful error messages.
- What’s the purpose of your project?
- What objectives do you want to achieve?
- What exactly are you looking to build?
- How much budget do you have to spend?
- What existing technology do you need to integrate with?
- What features and functionality do you need?
- What skills and expertise do you have in-house?
- Stick with your existing platform and update or build on to it
- Buy a custom, purpose-built, ‘out the box’ platform or piece of software
- Work with an agency to adopt a new platform and/or build something bespoke.
- Bespoke development
- Customisable design, features, and functionality
- Migration from legacy systems to a new platform
- Seamless scalability
- A secure infrastructure
- Performance in peak traffic volumes
- Integration with back-end systems like Salesforce, HubSpot, PowerBi, and more
- Ease-of-use in both the front and back-end
- Quick and easy editing capabilities
- Multi-site development for multiple languages across different countries
- Responsive or ‘headless’ design for web and mobile, enabling omni-channel customer experience.
UI Design
15 May, 2023
What Does Successful User Interface (UI) Design Look like?
As part of our web design series, we recently explained the process we follow when designing the UX of a website. If you’ve not read that already, it will be useful to go and have a look first before reading this article.
A study by Forrester Research has found that a well-designed UI has the potential to increase your website’s conversion rates by up to a 200% while UX design could raise conversion rates by a staggering 400%.
Whether you’re working with a web design and development agency or an independent designer, this process is equally important. Nailing the UI design process is a crucial step towards producing a website that will maximise engagement with your target audience and help you achieve your business goals.
So, let’s take a detailed look at how to run a successful UI design process.
User Interface (UI) Design at a Glance
The UI design process is the creation of the visual design elements of your website. Think about UI as the way in which you convey your brand’s visual identity and bring your UX to life. The UI is there to facilitate the UX.
How Does the UI Design Process Work?
Earlier in the process, we recommend conducting a visual exploration exercise, using mood boards to gain a clear understanding of how your brand will be conveyed and how your website will look and feel.
That visual exploration phase of the project is a pre-cursor to your UI design, as it creates the visual identity of the website, including use of colour, font, blank space, buttons, and more. Some agencies do this as part of the UI phase, but here at SoBold we like to keep it as its own stand-alone phase. You can learn all about the visual exploration phase and how it works here.
After you’ve been through the UX design process, you’ll have approved a set of wireframes, which give you a blueprint of your website’s structure and flow before anything is built properly.
Once you’ve approved those wireframes, then the visual design created with the mood boards will be applied to bring them to life. This is essentially how you create your UI.
Your agency will typically begin with the design of your website’s homepage. Like each phase previously, you can expect this UI design process to be collaborative. Be prepared to have all the stakeholders available to provide feedback to your agency, and work with them to perfect the design when it’s combined with the wireframes.
Once the homepage is approved, your design will then be applied across all the pages of your site. Again, this is an iterative, collaborative process based on feedback and revisions.
Responsive Design Testing
On completion of the desktop designs, your agency partner will work on designing the site across multiple break-points. To ensure your site is responsive across all the most popular devices, the following break-points should be tested as a minimum:
You’ll then reach the exciting part, where your website is fully designed for you to view, test, and play around with. Once you’re happy with the design across the different break-points, your agency partner will be ready to prepare the design for a development handover.
What Does Effective UI Design Involve?
Good UI design is something that should feel seamless and almost invisible to your visitors when they land on your website. The aesthetics and visual style should be simple and engaging, while not distracting from the UX.
These days, you only have a matter of seconds to make a positive impression that can retain your visitors’ attention, so it’s crucial you don’t over-complicate things. But what differentiates good UI from bad UI in practical terms?
Like with UX design, there are some best practices you can follow to ensure your website has an effective, attractive UI.
Follow these guidelines to create a UI that delivers the desired experience for your visitors and supports your website’s strategic objectives:
Check out our related article for seven helpful tips to ensure your website is designed with great usability here for additional guidance.
The Importance of Accessibility
Accessibility is the practice of making technology as easy to use as possible, and fully accessible to everyone. While web accessibility is largely intended to help people with disabilities gain better usage of technology, it’s also much broader than that.
There are people who have difficulty using certain types of, or aspects of, technology who don’t have a disability. For instance, someone with deteriorating eyesight may find it difficult to read small text on a smartphone screen.
It’s also important to ensure your website is as easy to use as possible for the average person as well, because you should always strive to deliver the best possible UX for all your visitors. Accessibility is a key driver of this.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which are used to define what constitutes good accessibility, lists four key principles of web accessibility that should be followed by all websites.
This means your website must be:
Web accessibility is an important topic, so we’ll talk more about that in a separate article. For now, it’s worth noting that any web design and development agency you work with should consider accessibility a top priority when designing the UI of your website. If they don’t, you should challenge them and ask why not.
Here at SoBold, this is built-in to all our design processes. We believe that all technology should be inclusive and equally available to everyone, regardless of their physical ability, location, personal background, or any other factors.
Some design best practices that we’d recommend you always follow to ensure your website is fully accessible, from a UI design perspective, include:
Preparing Your Website for Development
As you can see, UI design is mainly a case of applying the visual design that was created with the mood boards to your UX wireframes with the agreed flow. Good UI is no more than a clean, simple design that accurately represents your brand identity. While it sounds straightforward, it’s important to remember this is just one phase in the holistic, end-to-end process of web design.
To conclude the design process after the UI is complete, your agency will prepare your site’s designs for development. To learn how this process works, understand what to expect, and ensure your own web development process runs smoothly, read our next article in the series here.
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Digital Business
31 October, 2022
Understanding and Evaluating Enterprise Options for Bespoke Web Development
Evaluating and selecting the best option for a bespoke web development project is an important decision, with a lot riding on it. But with so many technology providers, platforms, and agency partners out there today, that decision can be overwhelming.
In this article, we’ll guide you through this evaluation process, explore the options available, and help you choose the right technology platform for your own web development project.
We all know that a large business or enterprise relies on technology to function. With dozens of sites across different countries, hundreds of employees, and thousands of customers, technology is the heartbeat of your organisation.
You need sophisticated technology to facilitate mission-critical digital assets like your website, mobile applications, staff portals, communications channels, and various other systems. Many businesses also leverage technology to facilitate processes or capabilities that are entirely unique to the organisation, like internal training platforms or bespoke tools for certain departments.
With that in mind, it’s important to find a platform that can meet your specific requirements and enable you to accomplish your strategic objectives.
Modern enterprise systems need to be dynamic, scalable, and intuitive, and achieving that involves some complexity behind the scenes. For that reason, it’s often necessary to take the route of a bespoke development project to ensure your business gains exactly what it needs in terms of both functionality and capability.
A content management system (CMS) is the most common technology platform for businesses to deliver these projects, with almost two thirds (63%) of all sites on the Internet powered by a CMS today. This is a type of software used to build websites and similar systems, allowing you to easily create, edit, and publish digital content across a range of online channels and devices. But determining the best CMS, let alone choosing the right one for your own bespoke development project, can be a daunting challenge.
So, let’s explore the situations in which it’s wise to adopt a CMS to deliver a development project. We’ll then walk you through the next steps, giving you the confidence to make the best decisions for your business along the way.
Enterprise Challenges with Technology
There are plenty of situations in which a marketing team might be struggling to identify the right technology platform for a project like this.
Perhaps you need to find a way to deliver something very niche, like building a new website or internal system from scratch. Maybe your project requires you to build a website on a new platform, and that platform needs to integrate with your internal systems like Salesforce, HubSpot, PowerBi, and other back-end applications.
Or, you may be trying to solve a challenge, like finding a suitable way to replace your current legacy systems. If, for example, your current website is built on a CMS like Drupal, and it’s no longer capable of meeting your requirements, you’ll need to find a new platform and migrate everything over.
A CMS is an ideal solution in each of these scenarios, and many others. Of course, with such a vast technology landscape to navigate, finding the right CMS is no easy task. It’s even difficult to know where to begin for most enterprise marketers.
So, let’s take a look at how you can approach this evaluation process in a cost-effective, efficient way.
How to Approach an Enterprise Web Development Project
Firstly, as an aside, it’s important to regularly review and reassess whether your CMS is fit for purpose, even if you don’t have an immediate requirement for something new.
Modern technology is advancing so rapidly. With that, your users’ expectations – both employees and customers – are evolving as well. You need to keep up with the pace of change and ensure your technology can still meet the current demands it faces from those users.
Back to the task at hand, though. Before you begin looking into different CMS, you should try to define exactly what it is you need from them.
Whether you’re building a bespoke website or migrating an existing site to a new platform, make sure you know exactly what you want to achieve by doing so.
Start by asking questions like:
Make sure you have a very specific brief and clear set of requirements to take to whichever solution providers and agencies you’ll be speaking to. If you don’t, you’ll struggle to fully understand whether the platforms you’re evaluating can actually deliver what you need.
Once you’ve got that, you can decide which approach is the best for your project. This could be:
It’s worth noting that most web development projects for large businesses will have complex requirements that are almost impossible to achieve without strategic guidance and ongoing support from an experienced partner. An agency partner will work closely with you to understand your strategic objectives and requirements, then provide you with platform-specific skills, tools, and expertise to achieve those. We’ll look at this in more detail later in the article.
Defining Your Requirements
As mentioned above, it’s important to have a specific set of objectives for your project and know what requirements are necessary to achieve those. These will also ensure the partner or agency you work with understands your brief and is able to deliver the exact finished product you’re looking for.
When scoping this out, there are some common capabilities and qualities most enterprise-grade platforms should have in order to meet expectations. Here are some things you should ensure your new platform – and the agency you work with, if you decide to go that route – can provide for your business:
Your Options for Enterprise CMS
Drupal
Drupal is popular among enterprises because it’s a highly secure platform. It’s also great if your team contains technical resources with good coding ability, as it’s very intuitive for people that have more advanced content management skills.
On the other hand, Drupal can be very difficult to get up and running, and is lacking in terms of simplicity. Because of this, your agency costs will also likely be higher than with other CMSs if you take that route.
Even if you do have that technical skill in your team, however, the platform itself is somewhat limited with customisation. It’s also worth noting that the version of Drupal most businesses currently use (Drupal 7) is soon reaching end-of-life. This has caused many Drupal users to migrate their existing sites to new, more intuitive platforms, such as WordPress.
Sitecore
Sitecore is a robust CMS that provides more capabilities than the average platform. It’s popular because it actually offers a fully-managed ‘digital experience platform’ that delivers most of the qualities mentioned in the previous section.
Sitecore comes with a good level of personalisation and is well suited for bespoke development projects. However, it’s an expensive system, requiring the procurement of licenses to begin using it. It also restricts certain capabilities unless you progress to higher tiers (and costs) of your licenses.
From a practical perspective, Sitecore operates on quite hierarchical, complex workflows, which may not suit more agile or smaller teams.
Umbraco
The scalability of Umbraco is great for large organisations, as it allows you to manage a high volume of pages and build out your website to meet the changing needs of your business.
Similar to Drupal, Umbraco is mostly suitable for users with more advanced content management skills and some development experience. This makes it difficult to use for the average marketing team, which increases the likelihood of higher costs, either through more expensive agency projects or even the need to hire someone in-house.
WordPress
WordPress is the platform that powers almost 45% of the world’s websites. It’s so popular because it’s affordable, flexible, dynamic, and very easy to use.
There is a common misconception that WordPress isn’t robust or scalable enough for large businesses. However, this continues to be proven as a myth, as some of the biggest brands in the world are now using WordPress for their CMS, from Nike to Bloomberg.
We’ll provide a detailed breakdown of the benefits and advantages WordPress offers in the next section.
Which is the Best Option?
It’s important to remember every web development project will be different, and each of these platforms are good options in their own way. That’s why you should make your decision based on the solution that best aligns with your objectives, requirements, budget, and other factors.
One common point related to all these platforms that’s worth noting is that each of them are exponentially easier to use, and will deliver far greater return on investment (ROI), if you have the support of an experienced specialist partner to guide you. An agency with platform-specific skills and expertise will ensure your business gains the maximum value from the platform you select, and help you leverage it strategically to harness its full potential.
Business Benefits and Opportunities with WordPress
Using WordPress is an excellent option for any business. For large organisations in particular, there are a number of qualities that make it particularly beneficial.
Scalability and Agility
The WordPress platform is highly scalable. This means that the size and complexity of your website, and the amount of traffic passing through it, won’t be a concern. WordPress can also grow with your business and easily adapt to continue meeting your changing needs. Scalability is one of WordPress’s most prominent advantages for enterprises.
Low TCO and Strong ROI
Of all the options listed above, WordPress comes with the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO). Unlike most platforms, you won’t need to bolt on new features or capabilities with WordPress, nor will you have to worry about costly extra work to manage platform upgrades or updates. Additionally, because WordPress is so flexible and rich with dynamic features and capabilities, it’s proven to deliver strong ROI.
Flexibility and Customisation
WordPress is ideal for a bespoke development project because it’s highly customisable. You can use its flexibility to build bespoke features and functionality into your website or create an entirely unique system.
Fast Time-to-Market
Because of its great usability and simplicity, WordPress allows for a very fast time-to-market, meaning you can deliver your project quickly and efficiently. However, it should be noted that most businesses will need the support of a skilled agency to be able to achieve that.
Integration
WordPress is very easy to integrate with other systems, such as HubSpot, Salesforce, and others. This means your business will experience minimal disruption due to integration, whether migrating to WordPress or starting a new development project from scratch.
Usability
In the back-end, WordPress is renowned for its usability. As a CMS, it’s extremely easy to use, meaning you can get up-to-speed quickly and share responsibilities across more members of your team.
Performance
The performance, speed, and ease-of-use with WordPress are all enterprise-grade when building websites on the platform. This means user adoption and retention will be high, ensuring the success of your project and driving greater ROI.
Long-Term Value
When working with WordPress, you’ll also gain advantages that will deliver added value to your business, especially if you have the support of a specialist partner who can help you unlock the full power of the technology.
The project doesn’t stop with the initial implementation of WordPress, either. As your requirements change, or your project evolves, WordPress is the best platform to adapt with you and deliver value to your business in the long-term.
Why WordPress is the Future of the Enterprise
WordPress is the most popular and widely used CMSs in the world today. And that popularity has been consistently spreading into the enterprise market over the past decade or so.
This is no coincidence, either. It’s unsurprising to see how quickly WordPress is growing in popularity, as more and more businesses realise the vast potential of the platform and the benefits it can deliver.
When taking into account its unprecedented scalability, flexibility, and usability, not to mention its low TCO, WordPress is one of the leading options for bespoke web development projects for large organisations.
When it comes to evaluating the options for your own project, remember to carefully consider how each platform aligns with your requirements and objectives. Once you’ve identified the CMS that is most suitable to deliver what you’re looking for, consider the value that could be added to your project by working with an agency partner who specialises in that technology.
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Digital Business
8 March, 2023
5 Women To Shape the Design and Tech Worlds
March 8th is still an important date to remind us of the brilliance of being a woman in our society. Even though it can be a struggle every day, we know that women are capable of anything and we are very proud to celebrate the achievements of these creative and intelligent women.
Hedy Lamarr
Who can live without Wi-Fi nowadays? In 1942, Hedy invented the technology that later helped the creation of wireless signals.
Rear Admiral Grace Hopper
If you’re not in the programming world, you may not have heard of COBOL. This programming language created in 1952 is still used on business applications to this day. Grace was one of the first ever compilers and her work led to the creation of COBOL.
Margaret Calvert
Even in the age of Sat Nav, you’ve probably relied on a road sign at some point, right? Either driving or walking down the street, the reliable signs are a source of comfort when technology fails. Margaret was part of the team that redesigned the whole UK road sign system. It all started in the late 1950s and her work still guides us even to this day.
Carolyn Davidson
‘Just do it’ – the famous tagline from a brand you might have heard of, called Nike. The tick logo was first developed by Carolyn when she was just starting design and the idea behind it to represent speed and motion. Even though the Nike tick is now one of the top 10 most recognised logos worldwide, Carolyn has only made $35 from her design.
Susan Kare
We all know Apple. We all know that they’ve conquered the world of technology by consistently presenting unique designs with both their hardware and software. What you probably didn’t know was that Susan was the designer responsible for developing all the typefaces, icons and other elements that serve as the core for what we now know as the Apple brand.
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Development
9 June, 2023
Craft vs WordPress: Which Platform is the Best Option for Your Business?
When you’re responsible for managing a new website development process, you’ll have some difficult decisions to make. Two of the most difficult decisions will be finding an agency that you can trust, and finding a content management system (CMS) that will give you the flexibility and performance to drive your business forward online.
Your CMS will play a significant role in helping you meet your specific website requirements and enabling you to achieve your strategic goals.
We’ve compared lots of different CMSs in our recent series of articles, and each of them have their own strengths and weaknesses. In this article, we’ll compare WordPress and Craft.
Ease-of-Use
It’s vitally important to ensure that the platform you choose is straightforward to manage. You’ll want a platform that’s approachable, with a low barrier for entry, to avoid any challenges in the daily running of your website.
Craft’s Ease-of-Use
Whilst Craft is an open-source CMS, it requires technical development expertise in order to manage the platform once built. Management for non-technical teams will likely be difficult, thus limiting you in your ability to build out content and new features over time.
If you do have expertise in-house, that will allow you to manage your website more easily, as the CMS itself is efficient for publishing and managing content.
Craft also makes it easy to collaborate and share responsibilities across teams without any interference or complications. For example, you can save draft versions of pages and share them with colleagues – with private links that don’t even require you to be signed in – before publishing live on your site.
WordPress’s Ease-of-Use
Conversely, WordPress is specifically built so that content can be managed in-house. WordPress provides you with a convenient, intuitive user interface (UI) that allows quick and easy publishing, management, and editing of content on your sites.
Put simply, WordPress is a more traditional CMS that’s suitable for a wider range of users and teams. It allows you to easily manage the content on the front-end, whilst also facilitating a quick time-to-market for the development of your website.
This ease-of-use also helps to share responsibilities throughout your team.
Flexibility
Flexibility will always be high on your list of priorities when looking for a CMS. Tailoring your platform to fit your own unique requirements is a crucial capability in today’s digital business landscape.
How Flexible is Craft?
Craft is all code-based, which allows you to build virtually any type of website you want, with great flexibility. The only limitations, really, will be with the platform-specific development capabilities of your agency.
How Flexible is WordPress?
WordPress also offers a great deal of flexibility and customisation, but the difference here is that it’s unlikely you’ll need to alter much about WordPress’s pre-existing tools and features to be able to build a website you’re happy with.
With WordPress, you have everything you need to build a high-performance website. But that’s complemented by the flexibility to make enhancements and seamlessly scale the platform with new bespoke features if you wish to.
Integrations
Before you select a CMS, you’ll need to ensure it can easily integrate with any existing systems your business has in place. Whilst most CMSs will be able to integrate well with a variety of third party systems, it’s important to be aware of any limiting capabilities of the platforms.
Craft’s Integrations
Integrations with the most popular third-party platforms are typically supported in Craft through plugins. However, you may need to integrate manually with platforms using API’s.
While this gives you more control over your CMS’s functionality and security, it’s another area in which you’ll likely have to spend more time and money on agency development work. Those integrations will also need to be maintained and updated manually as well, which may be a financial and time burden on your agency.
WordPress’s Integrations
WordPress’s global popularity means that it’s readily compatible with most of the third-party systems you’ll already have within your business.
You’ll have a wide range of native plugins available that will integrate your WordPress site with virtually any other tool. Even if you have more advanced requirements, it’s usually easier for your agency partner to do this bespoke development work in WordPress than it is with other CMSs.
Developer Communities
Investing in a platform that’s supported by a community of developers will provide you with additional benefits and advantages. It’s always helpful to have other users working to continuously create additions and updates to help the CMS grow and improve.
Craft’s Community
Craft has a passionate community working hard to help enhance the platform, but it’s only a fraction of the size when compared to more mainstream CMSs like WordPress.
Still, size isn’t all that counts here. Craft’s community is very supportive and highly active on channels like Slack and Discord. Craft also has a StackExchange, which is a Q&A forum that many developers use to share learnings as they work through projects.
The WordPress Community
At 20 years old now, WordPress’s popularity and global market share means it has an enormous community supporting it.
WordPress’s community consists of millions of users who work tirelessly to offer support, collaboration, knowledge sharing, events, and much more.
Any questions, problems, or requirements you have are often answered very quickly by members of the WordPress community. This also results in exciting new enhancements and features being released on a near-constant basis to drive the platform forward.
Being part of the WordPress community will also give you access to free events that help users learn to get as much value as possible from the platform.
Cost and TCO
Cost is a key factor when choosing a CMS. It’s also important to remember the up-front costs aren’t the only thing you need to consider here. Since your CMS is a long-term investment, you should be looking for a low total cost of ownership (TCO) for all your related costs over time.
Craft’s Initial Investment and Ongoing Costs
With Craft, you’ll need to purchase either the pro or enterprise plan. Pro comes with a one-time payment of £250 per project, and an additional annual payment to continue receiving updates. The cost of the enterprise plan will vary depending on your requirements and usage.
As mentioned earlier, the costs associated with the platform may also be high. This is due to the need for agency support across many aspects of your project, from setting up your website, to integrations, to ongoing maintenance.
The actual costs of development with Craft may also be higher than with other CMSs because of the smaller scale and more specialist nature of the platform.
It’s also worth mentioning that Craft CMS hosting services are more limited than those of WordPress, again likely making them more expensive.
WordPress Cost and TCO
On the most part, WordPress is a more cost-effective platform than Craft, with a lower TCO.
WordPress is free-to-use, limiting your initial costs to just hosting, development agency fees, and post-deployment support.
As touched on earlier, achieving a much faster time-to-market will allow you to launch a quality website quickly so you can begin gaining strong ROI right away.
Another cost-related benefit of WordPress’s ease-of-use is that if there’s bespoke development work you need your agency to complete, it will usually come at a reasonable cost. Because Craft is such a niche and technical platform, bespoke development work often comes at a premium in comparison to the more widely-used WordPress.
When the WordPress platform receives updates, it’s often fairly quick and straightforward for your agency partner to test and maintain your site.
These advantages add up to create a lower TCO for WordPress than you’ll have with other enterprise CMSs.
Conclusion
Both Craft and WordPress are both great CMSs in their own right, and would serve most businesses. Although, it’s difficult to deny that WordPress is a much more approachable platform than Craft for the average user.
If you’re a team with a great selection of existing development skills, Craft can provide you with some innovative capabilities and could be the right platform for you.
The key thing to remember when making this evaluation is that you should select the platform that directly aligns with your own specific circumstances and requirements.
Every business, and every web development project, is different. Carefully consider your objectives, budget, users, in-house skills, and any other factors that may come into play. That should allow you to determine which CMS is the right one to deliver what you need.
If you need more help finding a CMS for your new website project, read our comprehensive guide to understanding and evaluating the options for large businesses here.
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UX Design
11 July, 2022
Speak our language: UX/UI Glossary
For designers, it’s almost an impossible task to effectively deliver a project without understanding the joint language of design. This terminology and jargon can often get thrown around in meetings, although it’s good practice to read the room and speak a mutual language it’s good to get a little insight. Below is a glossary of essential UX/UI terms grouped into topics.
General terms
Accessibility
A measure of a web pages usability for a range of people, including people with disabilities.
Design system
A document that houses design components and styles to use across a website or product, ensuring consistency.
Design thinking
The process of creating and executing strategic ideas that solve problems.
Flat design
A form of design that focuses on minimalism using 2D elements and strong colours.
Human-centred design
An approach that finds solutions with a human perspective in every step of the design process.
Information architecture
Or otherwise known as a sitemap, is the structural design of information.
Landing page
A stand-alone page that a person lands on after clicking from a digital location.
Onboarding
A flow that guides the user through a set of instructions such as choosing preferences, product usage and UI elements.
Responsive design
A design and usability process that adjusts content based on the device screen size.
UI Design
This determines how an interface will look and guide the user on how to interact with a product such a colour choices and layout.
Usability
The quality of the start-to-end user experience.
UX Design
The process of determining how a digital product should work based on relevant user research and best practices.
Acronyms
CTA (Call to action)
A graphical component that guides the user through the main flow and encourages them to take a specific action. Normally it will be the element that stands out most on a page.
CWV (core web vitals)
Are three metrics that score a user experience loading a page, those are: how quickly content loads, how quickly a browser loads the webpage and how unstable the content is as it loads.
GA (Google Analytics)
A web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports web traffic.
KPI (Key performance indicators)
A Performance measurement approach based on certain metrics over a certain time period.
MVP (minimum viable product)
A version of a product that is released with just enough features that deliver on the initial user needs to then improve and develop further.
PM (Project manager)
A person that leads a team in order to achieve all the project goals in a set of timelines.
SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic)
A two-dimensional vector-based graphical element that is scalable and widely supported across the web.
SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats)
A marketing tool that identities assess your business and analyse your competitors.
Design Process
A/B testing
A UX method that involves showing two versions of a specific page or product to see which one works better.
Card sorting
A technique that can be used by both UX designers and users that help determine the information architecture of the product based on logical ordering.
Cluster mapping
In other words, an affinity diagram is for sorting UX user findings into organised sets to lay down the foundations for desirable features.
Competitor analysis
A research method that shows strategic insights into a competitor’s features, functions and even visual positioning.
Eyetracking
A study that allows researchers to evaluate the movements of a particular user when they are using a product.
Focus group
Typically a researcher will talk to a group of people to find out opinions and generate ideas on the product or service.
F shaped pattern
Is a layout designed to guide the user’s eye to specific information based on human behaviour.
Mockup
A visual representation of a product in an environment could be a concept or the finished product.
Moodboard/style scape
Is a collection of visual inspiration gathered from an initial concept to visually communicate an idea.
Prototype
Is an early version of a product that is simplified to test main user journeys and functionalities.
Sketch
There will always be a place for pen and paper. At this stage in the prototyping process, a researcher can quickly come up with design solutions and compare them to determine the best one.
Storyboard
A visual way of communicating the user journey.
Usability testing
An approach that is done typically throughout the whole design process, ensuring that the product has ease of use and matches the user’s requirements.
User flows
A flow that represents a users task from an entry point to a desirable end one.
User interview
A one-on-one chat that can gather information for a user persona and insight on their behavioural habits on a product and or service.
User journey
Like the user flow, a user journey is a route that maps out their journey from beginning to end, the difference is that a journey includes emotions and behavioural choices.
User Stories
A narrative-based resource that sums up the patterns of how they interact with the product, focusing on motivations and frustrations.
Wireframes
A low-fidelity design that focuses just on structure and layout without clouding the mind with visuals. Its purpose is to ensure the interaction between user and interface is solid.
Design elements
Breadcrumbs
A layered component that allows users to navigate through multi-level pages.
Contrast Colour
Ensuring there is enough visibility between two colours to the layer or text is legible and ideally meets WCAG standards.
Grid
Is a layout system with rows and columns, making it easier for designers and developers, also for making clean and symmetrical interfaces for users.
Layout
The order of certain content such as text and images are laid out on a page.
Navigation
An organised hierarchy of information allows the user to find the information they are looking for.
Typography
Typeface or Font. there is a difference. A Font is a weight or variation of a typeface and typography is the arrangement of those styles to ensure it’s legible and appealing.
White space
Or negative space is the strategic positioning of elements on a page so they have room to breathe and for people to absorb content.
Widget
A self-contained design component that has certain functionality.