SoBold are thrilled to announce that they have been shortlisted for the B2B Website of the Year at the UK Digital Growth Awards. 

SoBold and Kapow Primary have been working closely together since 2019 to provide teachers with rich lesson plans and engaging experiences for their classrooms.

This nomination is a proud moment for everyone at SoBold & Kapow Primary, highlighting their hard work and dedication.

Leonardo Esposito, Senior Back End WordPress Developer at SoBold.

“When Kapow started, I was just a few months in with SoBold, and I’ve been one of the main developers on the project ever since. It’s incredible how both the project and I have grown. As I became more experienced as a developer, learning new concepts and understanding new things, Kapow was evolving as a platform. The project is now very challenging as there’s more at stake, and it’s so rewarding to see any new feature released successfully, making both Kapow and our customers happy”.

Our Story

How it began

Our journey with kapowprimary.com began in 2019. At that time, Kapow Primary was in its nascent stages, serving 20 schools. Since then, they have grown into a comprehensive online platform, offering lesson plans, resources, and interactive features for primary school foundation subjects.

We joined forces, collaborated and actively contributed to the website design, development and SEO strategy to improve and enhance the website, ensuring it met the needs of teachers.

The dedicated Kapow Primary team at SoBold

What we achieved ⭐

Fast forward to 2024, and Kapow Primary has grown exponentially, now serving over 6,700 primary schools! 

This growth is a testament to the website’s value and the dedication of our teams. We’re excited about what the future holds as we continue to expand and grow. 👀

Here are some key highlights from the past 18 months:

Interactive History Timeline

This feature lets teachers and pupils explore historical periods interactively. It’s a fun way to engage with history, allowing simultaneous exploration of different periods and making historical events more vivid and memorable.

Presentation Mode

We developed a presentation view that streamlines lesson plans. This feature enhances the learning experience for students and saves teachers valuable preparation time, allowing them to focus more on teaching and less on admin.

Curriculum Hub – Coming soon!

The national curriculum can be quite overwhelming! To help with this, we developed a hub that houses national curriculum resources in one place and shows how they align with Kapow Primary’s lesson plans, taking the headache away!

At the heart of everything we do is the commitment to giving teachers the best experience possible. We have a dedicated team to make this happen. Each new addition is crafted with this in mind, ensuring that Kapow Primary remains a trusted educational resource.

Final thoughts

Being nominated for this award means a lot to our team. It’s a recognition of the hard work, dedication, and passion that everyone at SoBold and Kapow Primary has put into this. We are deeply invested in the continuous improvement and growth of Kapow Primary.

Winning this award would be an incredible achievement and well-deserved recognition for everyone involved.

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Technical Director, Sam Phillips and Managing Director, Will Newland were interviewed by Brent Weaver at Cloudways.

SoBold has been working with Cloudways since 2019 to help host development environments for all of their clients.

You can learn more about Cloudways, Managed Cloud Hosting services by visiting their website here.

See what they had to say in the video below.

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As a web developer team, our responsibility is in providing support to other companies. We make sure that websites look and work well for the businesses that need them. Our team serves as an expert extension of our clients so they can focus on their actual operations.

We take pride in our work and it looks like our efforts are paying off. We’re very happy to announce that we’ve been given an award. SoBold was named as a top UK web developer by Clutch for the year 2021.

Clutch is a ratings and reviews company that uses a unique verification process that ensures all of the content on their platform comes from legitimate sources. They then leverage this information to create ranked lists of the best performers in every industry around the world. The best of the best then get an award.

The best part of all this award is that it’s not decided by a panel of faceless judges. It’s based on the reactions of the people that worked directly with us. They’re the people in the best position to judge or critique our work. In fact, here’s what our Director had to say when we got the news.

“We are absolutely delighted to be chosen as one of the leading WordPress Development agencies in the UK by Clutch and look forward to continued growth and development to fulfil our potential.” Will Newland, Managing Director, SoBold.

If you want to partner with a team that will provide expert support and service to ensure your website is the best it can be, give us a call. Fill out our contact form and we’ll set up an appointment as soon as possible.

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Cyber security and data protection should be top priorities for your business right now. Of course, this is particularly important for large businesses, and those in strictly regulated industries like financial services, where the outcome of a cyber attack or data breach can be catastrophic. 

As these security concerns continue to intensify, you must be increasingly careful and vigilant about the technology solutions you use. You should also take more proactive steps to ensure everything in your tech stack is built and managed in a way that minimises your risks.

When it comes to WordPress, there’s a common misconception that the platform isn’t secure enough for large businesses. This misunderstanding tends to come from the fact that it’s free-to-use, so it was originally more popular among smaller independent businesses and B2C blogs. 

Today, however, WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system (CMS), and for good reason. Considering a significant percentage of that user base includes global enterprises, you’d think such popularity would be enough proof that it’s a secure platform. 

On the contrary, large businesses still ask us on a regular basis, “Is WordPress secure enough for us?” 

Is WordPress Secure? 

The answer to that question is, yes, WordPress is a secure, stable platform, even in its “out-of-the-box” state. WordPress’s core code is thoroughly tested and quality-checked by a team of security experts continuously. Not only that, but the same team regularly releases security updates and reinforces any potential weaknesses before they can be capitalised on by cyber criminals.

In fact, the speed at which security updates are implemented in WordPress is arguably the fastest in the world today when compared with other CMSs.

Additionally, WordPress is open-source software, meaning all its code is available to the public. Users are constantly suggesting changes and updates, often to fix bugs in the code and minimise opportunities for cyber criminals. This keeps the platform safe and secure for everyone else. 

But while WordPress does have the ongoing support of some of the most talented and devoted developers in the world, it’s not immune to security vulnerabilities. No software is, unfortunately. 

That’s why it’s important to be aware of, and work with, some fundamental best practices for security. Listed below are some steps you can take to further strengthen the security of the WordPress CMS.

Best Practices to Strengthen WordPress Security 

1 – Secure Hosting

The hosting service you choose for your platform will determine how secure and well protected your data will be. 

It goes without saying that WordPress should be hosted in a secure environment, overseen by an experienced provider who prioritises security within their services. 

Some things you should consider essential for a hosting provider include: 

• A fully-managed service with 24/7 support
• Automated monitoring and alerts
• Back-up and disaster recovery
• 99.99% up-time
• 100% pass-rate for data centre audits.

Before choosing your hosting provider, do plenty of research to ensure they’re able to provide these measures. Most businesses will work with a development agency partner for WordPress, and that agency should be able to help you with this process.

2 – Back-Up and Disaster Recovery 

Following on from the previous point, any good hosting provider should also offer back-up and disaster recovery services. These are like safety nets that will allow you to protect, save, and recover all your data in the event of any losses. 

3 – Be Careful with Plugins 

Plugins are a great way to enhance the WordPress platform with new capabilities and features. But you should only ever use plugins from reputable, credible sources, otherwise you could experience security problems.

It’s also important to keep all your plugins regularly tested, maintained, and updated. Again, this is an area where a WordPress agency partner will help you.

4 – Always Keep Your Platform Updated 

When you’ve built a website with WordPress, you’ll often receive software updates from the platform. Any time this happens, it’s because a bug has been fixed or some improvements have been made to the software.

Keeping up with these updates is so important from a security perspective, because they’re designed to keep your site secure. By letting your site run on an outdated version of the platform, you leave yourself at risk of a known issue being exploited by a cyber criminal or some malware. 

This is another thing that a good agency partner should take care of for you, so you don’t need to worry about keeping your platform up-to-date.

5 – Never Auto-Update Your Plugins 

You have the option to enable auto-updates within your WordPress platform. While this may seem like an easy way to keep your CMS up-to-date, doing so can create technical issues and security risks that simply aren’t worth the convenience. 

Each plugin you use will have its own button for you to turn auto-updates on or off. Any good agency will advise you to turn those auto-updates off and instead opt for a more secure approach to your updates, to maintain the resilience of your platform. 

6 – Use Security-Specific Plugins

Another way to reinforce the security of WordPress is by implementing security-specific plugins like WordFence, Sucuri, or Defender Pro. 

These handy tools will do a lot of the hard work for you, monitoring your platform and spotting potential vulnerabilities so you can fix them before they’re allowed to have any negative impact.

7 – Enable SSL 

A secure sockets layer (SSL) is a protocol which encrypts the transfer of data between your website and your users’ browsers. Enabling SSL makes it more difficult for cyber criminals to steal or compromise data online. Don’t worry, though, as this will be taken care of by your hosting provider as a standard practice. 

8 – Avoid Tools that Open Direct Access to Your Site Database from the Dashboard 

Some tools and plugins will enable direct access to your site’s database from within your CMS dashboard. While this can make certain aspects of website management easier for you, it also creates security vulnerabilities. This is something you should always avoid, because these additions are often severe security risks.

9 – Encourage Your Users to be Mindful of Security 

The biggest security risks, and many opportunities for cyber criminals, come from unsafe user behaviour, poor platform maintenance, and badly built sites.  

Your behaviour, and the behaviour of your end-users – and your agency – should always be mindful of security. If it’s not, sooner or later you’ll encounter problems. Some security best practices you can introduce include making strong passwords compulsory for all users and implementing measures like two-factor authentication.

10 – Find a Trustworthy Agency Partner to Support You 

We understand that following all these steps sounds like a lot of work. Of course, when you’ve got your own job to focus on, the last thing you need is to be spending time struggling through complex website security processes.  

That’s why it’s so valuable to find a reliable, trustworthy agency partner when using WordPress to build and manage websites. A good agency will ensure everything is secure and up-to-date for you, so you can spend more time providing outstanding services and experiences to your customers.

It’s always worth taking time to find an experienced agency with a strong track record of building robust, secure sites, to give you the peace of mind you deserve. That means they should handle your secure architecture, testing, monitoring, updates, and ongoing support for you as part of their services.

Being Truly Secure is an Ongoing Process 

When you’re selecting a content management system (CMS) to build critical digital assets like your website, security must be a top priority. It’s for that very reason more and more large businesses are looking to WordPress as their platform of choice. 

However, it’s equally important to choose an agency you can trust, and one that has these security best practices incorporated into their approach. This doesn’t just stop at the delivery of your website, either. True security is a constant ongoing process, and your agency partner should help you through that. 

Following the tips listed here will give you everything you need to build a resilient, secure website on WordPress, suitable for the enterprise. 

Interested in learning more about WordPress? Discover how a global enterprise achieved game-changing results by using WordPress to build a secure, innovative, bespoke solution. Check out the story of RedeWire from Rede Partners LLP here. 

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SoBold, the High-Performance WordPress design and development agency, has delivered an industry-first portal for Rede Partners, a private equity fundraising advisory firm that provides fundraising services to PE funds across Europe, North America and the APAC region. 

This bespoke portal, built on the WordPress platform, allows institutional investors to navigate upcoming funds advised by the placement agent.

Rede approached SoBold wanting to create a better user experience and improve fundraising outcomes for its customers. Rede wanted to achieve this by replacing its ‘Current Fund Offering’ mailout and PDF with an interactive, personalised, and secure online portal. Rede and SoBold worked in close collaboration to devise a simple, bespoke solution capable of delivering on a complex set of requirements, and that online portal soon became RedeWire.

RedeWire was fully integrated with Rede’s CRM system, Dealcloud, passing back data on user interactions and page views, allowing the team to follow up with interested clients.

RedeWire has been built fully personalisable for users, meaning that limited Partners are able to set all their preferences on first login, and through their account, allowing them to tailor the funds they see on their fund offering dashboard. 

As part of the RedeWire platform, SoBold also designed and developed a bespoke front-end editing and approval interface to digitalise their offline fund approval process. This process has enabled Rede Partners and their clients to send out live previews of how a fund will appear on RedeWire, gather real-time comments, or make fully audited edits to a page’s content before submitting it for approval and publication on the RedeWire portal.

RedeWire has now launched to Rede’s full customer base and initial feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. The platform has already seen a high number of account activations and interactions within its first full week of use.

SoBold and Rede will continue to work together to develop RedeWire’s capabilities further and improve the portal’s user experience. SoBold will provide ongoing support to manage the platform and deliver enhancements on a monthly basis.

You can read more on our working relationship with Rede Partners here.

Gabrielle Joseph, Head of Due Diligence and Client Development for Rede Partners said,

“The SoBold team has been a real pleasure to work with and has successfully made our vision a reality. Originally conceived as a game-changer within our industry, we are thrilled with the outcome of RedeWire and have had several clients highlight how intuitive and easy-to-use the platform is.” 

“Throughout the project, SoBold clearly understood our vision and provided thoughtful solutions to our needs. Choosing to partner with this team was one of the best decisions we’ve made, and we couldn’t be happier. We look forward to continuing to work with the team as the site evolves.”

Will Newland, Managing Director, SoBold said,

“We’re delighted to see such high early adoption of the new platform. The user feedback has been excellent so far, and this is the first of its kind in the private equity space, creating a personalised experience. We’re continuing to roll out enhancements on a monthly basis and can’t wait to grow the platform further.”

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