When looking at content management systems (CMS), scalability refers to the ability to expand and grow your site with more content, capabilities, features, and functionality.
Your CMS is a long-term investment, and its scalability will have a strong influence on whether or not that investment is successful.
“When sustainable business growth is a top strategic objective, you need full confidence that your web presence can seamlessly scale and evolve to support that growth.”
This requires a platform that allows you to quickly and easily create new features and functionality. Ideally, you should be able to do this without having to invest significant time and resources into additional costly development work.
WordPress is One of the Most Scalable Platforms Around
Evidence of WordPress’s great scalability can be found in the fact that almost 45% of the world’s websites are built on the platform. That includes global enterprises such as investment firm Blackstone, research and advisory leader Forrester, the NHS England, and leading pharmaceutical company Hutch Med.
This is because WordPress websites can seamlessly scale as your needs change and your business grows. You can easily add a high volume of new content to your site at speed without compromising on quality.
WordPress is also renowned for how easily you, or your development partner, can build bespoke features and functionality, so your site can keep evolving with new capabilities to support more advanced requirements.
“No matter the size or complexity of your site, WordPress can provide fast, intuitive development capabilities with ongoing growth acting as a natural outcome.”
Using WordPress at Scale
Developing, managing, and maintaining a high-performance website at scale is a complex challenge. For that reason, it’s important to work with an experienced web design and development agency who can enable continual growth and support you through it.
Part of your agency’s services will include configuring your platform, and building your site in the back-end, in a way that encourages long-term scalability. We’ll explain our own approach to this in more detail in the next section. But first, let’s look at some of the fundamental ways to use WordPress at scale:
Bespoke Features and Functionality
If you want to build out your website with new capabilities, WordPress stands above all its competitors thanks to its ability to develop bespoke features that are unique to your site.
WordPress is built on PHP, which is the most popular development language around, as it’s currently used by over three quarters (77.5%) of all websites with a known server-side programming language. With PHP, WordPress has a significant advantage over other CMSs, because it allows you to create virtually anything and integrate it with the platform.
WordPress Plugins
WordPress also comes with a vast range of plugins, which can help with adding to, and enhancing, the existing functionality of your site. Plugins are an essential aspect of WordPress development, but it’s crucial that you only choose the most reputable, tested, and proven plugins.
Your agency partner should be experienced in this plugin selection and use their past experience to recommend the best ones to use for your specific requirements. Your agency partner should also be able to advise you on how plugins will scale with increases in website size or traffic volume to help preserve your site’s performance.
Using plugins that are not regularly updated, or that come from unknown development owners, could harm your site by making it heavier, slowing down your page loading times, and possibly even creating security vulnerabilities.
Using a particularly large number of plugins is another situation that could result in slower loading speeds or other performance issues. Be mindful that use of plugins can reduce the bespoke development time needed to build your site, and the use of too many plugins could cause performance issues. If you find yourself in this situation, it could be an indication that your development partner might actually be taking shortcuts.
The Importance of a Trusted Partner
Whether you’re using plugins or building new bespoke features, your agency will be able to take care of all of these crucial aspects of your development for you. Their support and guidance will ensure you can expand your site freely without running into any technical issues.
Once you have everything you need in place, your agency will then be able to accelerate the speed at which you can scale moving forward. A great agency partner will also provide you with ongoing education and support, allowing you and your team to build your site out easily and efficiently by yourself too, whenever you want or need to.
Taking a More Scalable Approach – Building with Blocks
While many agencies still use a more traditional method of developing sites with WordPress, taking a block-based approach provides even greater opportunities for dynamic scalability.
As an alternative to the time-consuming practice of inputting text and images into a rich text editor in your CMS, the block-based approach allows you to create each page on your site more easily with a set of pre-built components.
Components are blocks of code with pre-defined style and input types. You can use and re-use these components across multiple pages of your site to scale it at a much faster pace. Any time you want to create a high volume of new content, you simply pick your already-built components and place them in the correct positions.
This is an approach that enables virtually limitless growth of your website at speed with a high level of quality and accuracy. Building components that can be reused across your site will also deliver added benefits like increased efficiency and reduced costs. This in turn provides you with more time to focus on developing better services and experiences for your site visitors.
The block-based approach to building websites is another way to make your WordPress platform leaner for better performance as well, because it removes the need for a bloated library of unnecessary plugins and features.
An Enterprise-Grade CMS
Scalability should be a key aspect of your criteria when selecting a CMS to build a website. Rapid growth and flexibility are crucial for your platform of choice.
Despite some still mistakenly thinking it might not be up to the task, you can use WordPress to build large, robust, high-performance sites at speed, and easily adapt them as your requirements change.
This arguably makes WordPress one of – if not the – best CMS options available today. When you look at some of the world’s leading businesses currently using the platform to great success, that argument becomes much easier to appreciate.
Like with any CMS, though, the key to successful scalability is having the support of an experienced, trusted agency partner behind you, ensuring you’re leveraging the platform to its full potential.
Would you like these insights straight to your mailbox?
- In-depth research and careful planning
- Visual exploration and mood boards
- User experience (UX) design
- User interface (UI) design.
- 1,920px – For most external computer monitor sizes
- 1,366px – For most laptop screen sizes
- 992px – For most Notebook and iPad devices
- 768px – For most other tablet devices
- 375px – For most smartphones.
- Plugins
- Bespoke development.
- Does it have a large number of positive reviews?
- Is it built by an author with a good reputation?
- How active and trusted is the author in the WordPress community?
- When was the last date the plugin was updated?
- Has it been updated regularly enough in the past?
- Does the code quality meet our standards?
- Does the code align with modern WordPress development best practices?
- Is the plugin compatible with the WordPress block editor?
- 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.
UI Design
17 May, 2023
Preparing Your Website for Development after the Design Phase
The end-to-end process of web design is made up of a number of different phases that should all inform and complement each other.
When working with a web design and development agency, they should use their expertise and experience to guide you through this process, which consists of:
Once you’ve completed each of those phases and you have a design that you’re proud of, your agency partner will be tasked with preparing your website for development.
This article will explain the process of preparing a website for development, helping you understand what’s involved, what to expect, and how to approach it.
Designing Your Website Across Different Break-Points
In a recent article, we explained how the purpose of your UX is to help your visitors complete a task or process on your website as easily as possible, ultimately leading them to follow a call-to-action.
Your UX is brought to life by your UI, which includes all the visual and interactive elements of your website, from colour and font to buttons and scrolling.
Towards the end of the UI design phase, the next step will be to roll out your designs across a number of break-points.
Break-points are the screen sizes of devices that your design will fit within. This allows your website to be designed as responsive and optimised for use across a wide range of different devices and channels.
This is important because certain aspects of your site may not translate down perfectly across different screen sizes.
Here at SoBold, we design sites across the following break-points, but this may vary from agency to agency:
If you want your website to be designed as mobile-first, it’s important to raise it at the beginning of the project so your agency can create your wireframes in that context. However, you should only ever make that decision based on real data regarding your target audience’s preferences.
In this case, your agency should work with you to conduct some additional research and determine the best screen size for your particular audience. This will ensure the UX designers work with the right starting point for your high-fidelity wireframes.
A Thorough Hand-Over from Design to Development
This phase of a website project involves a process that takes a lot of careful work and close collaboration between the different teams within an agency.
Here at SoBold, we make a point to ensure the design team talks the development team through all the work they’ve done on your mood boards, UX design, and UI design in detail. This includes explaining the decision making process behind everything they’ve designed.
While a lot of agencies will just hand the designs to the developers and ask them to start building, we believe this is something that should be treated as more of a team effort. Doing so as a core part of our process has proven to add tremendous value to the work our clients have received in recent years.
It’s beneficial to the overall project for the developers to fully understand why the decisions have been made about the designs. It’s also important that they’re given a detailed run through of what they’re building within the context of the whole site.
For example, there may be a fairly complex block which is built early on in the development process. If the developers are made aware that slight variations of this same block will be used several times throughout the site, they can save valuable time and work more efficiently by repurposing the first block when it’s first built.
This hand-over is crucial in ensuring the development process runs smoothly, providing you with a high-performance website that meets your expectations, delivered on time and within budget.
A Well Designed Website Ready to Be Built
After the hand-over is complete, your agency will be able to export all your design assets and the developers will begin building your website.
While web design may seem straightforward when explained like this, in reality it’s a complex process that requires a great deal of specialist skills and expertise. That’s why it’s so important to have the support of an agency partner you can trust and rely on to guide you.
Working with a talented agency will ensure you’re able to create a unique design that will resonate with your target audience and help you achieve your strategic business goals through your new website.
Keep an eye out for our upcoming blog series where we’ll walk you step-by-step through the web development process, making it far more approachable and easy to manage for you.
If you’d like to discover how generative AI technology is transforming the web design and development space, read our recent article here.
Would you like these insights straight to your mailbox?
Development
21 June, 2023
How to Determine When to Use WordPress Plugins and When to Use Bespoke Development
When developing a high-performance website with WordPress, certain requirements will demand that your agency partner goes beyond the “out-the-box” functionality of the platform.
There are two main ways your agency partner may work with you to build out custom functionality:
While plugins are the go-to option for many small and medium-sized businesses, it shouldn’t always be such a quick decision between those two options. If you’re working on an enterprise-grade website, your agency should always give careful consideration when determining the best approach in every scenario.
In this article, we’ll help you understand how to determine the right option between plugins and bespoke development for your own WordPress website.
Why Are WordPress Plugins so Popular?
Since WordPress is an open-source platform with a very active global community of web developers, there are tens of thousands of plugins readily available. For almost any use case you can think of, there’s almost certainly a plugin for it; probably even several.
Plugins serve so many businesses so well because they’re pre-built functionality that quite literally plugs into your platform.
One of the main reasons plugins are so popular, especially for smaller businesses, is because they’re usually free. This provides a great cost benefit over bespoke development, on top of the obvious benefits in the speed of attaining the new functionality as well.
Why You Should be Careful with Plugins
Despite their popularity, there are downsides to plugins too.
Relying on too many plugins, or using low quality plugins, may slow the speed of your site down significantly. A good WordPress development agency will try to keep the use of plugins at a minimum to ensure the speed and performance of your site isn’t compromised.
Poorly built plugins, or ones that aren’t maintained sufficiently, could also cause glitches and errors to occur with the functionality they’re adding to your site.
Security is another concern with certain plugins. If a plugin isn’t maintained and updated regularly, this will create vulnerabilities in your platform that could be exploited by malware or cyber security attacks. These vulnerabilities could also creep in if your plugins are auto-updated and left untested by your agency partner.
Some less experienced agencies often fall into the trap of using too many plugins, while others are simply unaware of the risks associated with plugins from untrusted sources. This has given a bad impression of plugins in some circles. The missing ingredient there, however, isn’t the value of plugins, it’s the agency’s best practices.
When to Use WordPress Plugins
If there’s a feature you need to add to your site that’s already been built perfectly in a trustworthy plugin, it’s worth considering that approach instead of building something from scratch.
However, here at SoBold, we ensure a strict set of best practices are followed, and due diligence conducted, every time we’re considering using a plugin.
We’ll always make thorough checks to ensure any plugin we use is best-in-class, aligned with our high-performance standards, and so should any other agency you work with.
This will include asking questions like:
Before implementing a plugin on your platform, your agency should also use it in a local testing environment to ensure it functions as expected.
The majority of plugins are reliable, offering a quicker and easier approach than building something bespoke. However, there are many cases where bespoke development is the more suitable option.
When it’s Better to Use Bespoke Development
When it comes to sophisticated, dynamic websites, plugins may not be capable of delivering the required level of performance, security compliance, or functionality.
In these cases, your agency will turn to bespoke development to deliver what you need. This is often the necessary approach, because high-performance websites do require some complexity behind the scenes. And WordPress is arguably the best platform available today for bespoke web development.
Building out your platform by creating new features completely from scratch, tailored to your exact need, brings with it a wealth of advantages over using plugins.
This is particularly beneficial in terms of flexibility and customisation, giving you something entirely unique to your website. You’ll have complete control and ownership of your bespoke features, which provides greater security and seamless integrations with the rest of your technology systems.
Performance will almost always be superior with bespoke development, delivering a far greater user experience (UX) and improving your customer engagement as a result.
Bespoke development could even be more cost-effective in the long-run too, when compared to plugins that turn out to be problematic or aren’t updated past a certain point.
Rely on Your Agency’s Expertise
Determining whether to use a plugin or build something bespoke will be a decision your agency should guide you to make correctly.
Each website and each business are different, so the right option will be unique to your own requirements and circumstances. Therefore, it’s also worth mentioning that this must be specific to each individual requirement as well, rather than taking a blanket approach.
The decision shouldl be based on the most straightforward way to give you the capability you’re looking for. It will also involve ensuring that your site’s security, performance, and UX are maintained. Another important factor to consider are your circumstances, such as your budget, timeframes, the amount of traffic your website is likely to encounter, and so on.
For example, if your agency knows that one of your top priorities for your website is excellent performance, they’ll make different decisions in that case than they would if you were more concerned with the fastest possible time-to-market.
Some businesses even use plugins in the first phase of their website, then look to rebuild their plugin-based functionality with bespoke development when their business grows, or when they have more time and resources available.
It’s important to trust your agency partner with this decision and rely on their advice. This is why it’s so valuable to work with an experienced agency who understands your needs, so they can help you make the right choices and take the best possible option.
Finding the Right Balance for Your Website
Plugins can be very useful, and it must be said that many WordPress plugins are outstanding in their capability and quality. However, if your specific requirements demand more than a plugin can deliver, bespoke development will be the correct approach.
Regardless, it’s crucial to find the right balance to ensure your site’s performance, speed, and security are maintained.
Ultimately, your agency partner should always consider the specific requirements and circumstances of your project before deciding whether to use plugins or build bespoke functionality for your site. This makes it even more important to work with an experienced agency you can trust to guide you.
Discover more about the scalability and flexibility of the WordPress platform, and its ability to deliver complex requirements for enterprise websites, in our related article here: Just How Scalable is WordPress?
Would you like these insights straight to your mailbox?
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.
Would you like these insights straight to your mailbox?
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.
Would you like these insights straight to your mailbox?
Latest from agency
24 November, 2022
SoBold obtain Skilled Worker Sponsorship Licence
SoBold are delighted to announce that we have obtained a sponsor licence in order to sponsor international skilled workers to come and work at SoBold.
SoBold have always put heavy emphasis on hiring the best global talent for our needs, and we have strengthened our ability to do this by obtaining a Skilled Worker Sponsorship Licence.
With all sponsorship licences that the Home Offices grants they need to be reassured that the sponsors can live up to the “significant trust” that the department places in them. The Home Office further made checks that SoBold is a “honest, dependable and reliable” workplace, and capable of meeting the responsibilities that it expects from sponsors.
Since being granted our Skiller Worker Licence, we have been fortunate enough to put it to use to hire two new team members.
Anna de Moraes, joined SoBold, from Portuguese company, SpringParrot. Anna had been able to work remotely, and was living and working from the UK, when she got in touch with SoBold. Anna, who is natively from Brazil, said of the process:
“The steps were pretty clear and the whole process was quite simple. I’ve had friends waiting years for their visas to be approved while we were able to complete everything in a short period of time! I was already excited to start and, in a blink of an eye, I was finally part of the SoBold team!”
More recently, SoBold hired Santosh Gajera as a Back End WordPress Developer. Santosh has relocated from India in order to provide his services to SoBold. When asked about the process behind him getting his Skilled Worker VISA granted, Santosh said:
“To keep my IT career moving forward, I needed sponsorship from an organisation that sponsored my visa. SoBold has been an invaluable help in obtaining my Tier-2 (Skilled worker) visa. I am very thankful to their hard work and professionalism. My documents were handled very scrupulously by them, and they provided full support throughout the whole application process . I got my visa approved in two days, which is amazing, and they handled everything for me.”
SoBold worked with all-in-one digital platform, Nation Better in order to achieve our sponsorship licence and the process was streamlined, affordable and transparent.
SoBold already have a diverse talent pool, with staff from all over Europe, and with the help of Nation Better, we have been able to improve the way in which we hire international talent and open up opportunities further afield. We look forward to continue growing our team with exceptional overseas talent and have access to a wider talent pool.
SoBold Managing Director, Will Newland said:
We are absolutely delighted to welcome both Anna and Santosh to the SoBold team. Without our Sponsorship Licence we would be missing out on a large pool of talent that is the future of our business. We very much look forward to continuing to use our Sponsorship Licence to our advantage and giving skilled employees the opportunity to come and work here at SoBold.
For more information on what current vacancies we have, please visit our website careers page.