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: 

• 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?

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: 

• 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.

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:

• 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.

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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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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As we’re now into the first week of 2023, this feels like an appropriate time to reflect on what was another thoroughly successful year for SoBold in 2022.

We’re now working with enterprise clients and providing them with excellent website design and development services. We’ve also continued to grow our client base and are proud to have consistently produced outstanding work on their behalf throughout the year. 

We’re pleased to have strengthened our presence in the healthcare and financial services industries. Now, we’re looking forward to building and managing more scalable products for our clients in the year ahead. 

Our High-Performance Team

The definition of “high-performance” will vary from person to person, and you may have your own idea of what it means to you. For us, as an agency, it means every member of our team holds each other accountable to always perform at the highest possible level, so we can achieve a standard of excellence for all our clients. 

We’ve used “high-performance” as a core value of our company since day one, and have worked very hard over the years to build a “high-performance” team. In 2022, this continued to develop and has allowed us to push those standards even higher, which is something we take a lot of pride in. 

We were excited to see all three of our business teams grow in 2022: design, development, and operations. Over the past year, we also made a conscious effort to ensure the whole agency is working closer together as a more functional unit, for the benefit of our clients. 

As the team has grown, we’ve had to implement more processes, which has allowed us to scale, and will enable us to continue to scale, as we move into the next cycle of our business. 

Congratulations to Ivo Georgiev, who’s coming to the end of a successful apprenticeship scheme, which he did with us and the help of QA’s Tech, Digital, and IT Apprenticeship.

The SoBold Website! 

In 2022 we launched our new SoBold website. Finding time to do this while continuously delivering projects for our ever-growing client base was a challenge, but one I’m really proud of the team for managing so well. We used this as a beta project to roll out a new SoBold workflow, and whilst there’s still some way to go to perfect this, we’re really happy with how it’s looking on the front-end! 

Every member of the team worked on this in some way or another, and we’re already getting considerably more inbound leads and exposure from it. 

We’ve been working hard on becoming more active in the online community as well, and this is notable particularly over the last quarter where we’ve increased our marketing. We were fortunate to be interviewed by Cloudways, who are a cloud hosting service provider we work closely with, and you can see this interview here. 

Clutch has continued to be a new business driver for us and our profile has gained more exposure amongst the country’s best website design and development businesses. 

We’ve also begun producing a selection of in-depth guides and blog articles to help our community more easily navigate the current technology landscape. You can find all that useful content on our blog.

Our Clients

We’re grateful to have worked with so many wonderful people from some brilliant clients over the past 12 months, and have built an array of different sites each with their own unique brief and challenge. 

If you’d like to gain insight into the process we follow with our clients for project briefings, check out this recent article, which also includes a helpful brief template.

This is a great chance to showcase below some of the work we’re most proud of in 2022, for a selection of companies who are doing some very interesting things to make positive change in their respective industries:

Built and Live

Jamie and the Jam – Jamie and the Jam conceptualise, create, deliver, and manage beautifully bespoke content for their clients and their audiences.

Amplitude Clinical – Amplitude is a leading UK Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) and clinical outcomes platform.

Arenko – Arenko is a market-leading technology provider enabling the clean energy transition.

Dictate.IT – Dictate.IT helps healthcare organisations across the UK and Ireland harness the power of speech to deliver seamless, efficient, and effective document management.

Edgerley Simpson Howe – Edgerley Simpson Howe are specialist out-of-town retail, leisure, and commercial roadside property consultants.

Pippo – Pippo lets you book your GP appointments whenever and wherever suits you.                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Common Purpose – Common Purpose offers exceptional personal training in the heart of Mayfair. If you’re looking to start with a new gym or PT in the new year, Common Purpose are your guys to speak to! 

Still Waiting to go Live! 

Coller Capital – Coller Capital is one of the largest global investors in the private equity secondary market.

Healthlink – Healthlink connects more than 15,000 medical organisations across Australia and New Zealand.

Konnect Net – Konnect Net helps businesses in the insurance and health sectors exchange data in a quick and secure way.

Turvec – Turvec is a bike parking company specialising in designing, installing, and maintaining secure and user-friendly bicycle storage solutions and two-tier bike racks. 

There’s also a handful of special clients listed below that want to highlight, either because of the longevity of the relationships or the positive impact our work has made on their businesses:

Kapow Primary

Kapow Primary, whom we’ve been working with since 2018, is now used in almost one third of all UK primary schools, with over 30,000 primary school teachers using the Kapow Primary platform each week. 

Our amazing Kapow team has been working on some really inspiring projects over the past few months particularly, and we cannot wait to share more when we publish these live. 

You can learn more about our work with Kapow, and how we first started, in our case study here.

Rede Partners

We started working with Rede Partners in late 2019 to help bring their vision ‘RedeWire’ to life. RedeWire is a new interactive online limited partner (LP) portal, providing instant access to Rede’s current fundraising offering.

RedeWire has had a closed launch, so we’re really excited for it to launch to their wider audiences in Q1 of this year. 

Transport for London

Transport for London has renewed its cookie management contract with us for a fifth successive year. This highlights not only the great work we’re doing with them, but the importance of the relationship we’ve built with them.

We recently became only the third Platinum Certified Partner with Cookie Bot in the UK and this is a service we believe will continue to grow into 2023 and beyond. 

You can learn more about our work with Transport for London here, and you can also read about our contract renewal in our press release here. 

Clanwilliam 

We’re proud to have been working with Clanwilliam since 2017, and our relationship has flourished each year since then. We initially started working with their Global HQ, before being rolled out across their three divisions Clanwilliam Ireland (site being redesigned in Q1 2023!), Clanwilliam UK, and Clanwilliam ANZ.

We work with over 15 of their brands designing, developing, managing, and hosting their websites. We also work closely with these brands to help them with their branding and print design activations. 

2022 saw Clanwilliam take a major shift in their global brand, choosing us to help them rebrand from Clanwilliam Group, dropping the ‘Group’. We worked closely with their Global Brand and Communications Director, Lauren Turner, to help bring this to life. 

We all went into the process looking to rebrand Clanwilliam in its entirety, changing the logo and creating a completely new brand. However, we quickly realised the logo was going to stay and the brand needed to change around this. 

We uplifted Clanwilliam’s colour pallet and fonts, creating a new brand that much better reflects their company’s values and ambitions.

You can see a more detailed case study about what we did here.

It’s Not All Websites Though! 

Our talented Graphic Design Team was busy in 2022 too, across multiple rebrands and supporting various Knight Frank divisions. Some of our Knight Frank work is highlighted here. 

We’ve also successfully managed to move all our clients into our Positive Park Hosting environment, which is based in Cambridgeshire. This has meant all our sites are running on a more optimised and bespoke server, tailored to their needs. Our VIP enterprise-grade support at the hosting park has made a positive impact, ensuring all our clients have peace of mind that their sites are secure and stable. 

The hosting environment is an eco-friendly data centre that uses 100% renewable energy and is certified by the Green Web Foundation. 

You can learn more about our hosting solution on our WordPress Website Hosting service page.

In addition to working with our clients, we’ve also been working hard on improving our processes, becoming more compliant and becoming a more reputable company across the board. 

We became ISO 90001-compliant in 2022 and have successfully put our project management systems in place. Our Project Manager, Anna de Moraes, has been instrumental in implementing processes to optimise our workflow, and she’ll continue to drive the business forward into 2023.

We were absolutely delighted to work with Nation.Better to get a Skilled Licence VISA sponsorship as well, which opens up opportunities for us to hire more global talent. This is something as a business we’ve been looking forward to for a while now. Getting this licence and already hiring two people, and giving them the opportunity to work in London, is something we’re really proud of. 

We also renewed both our Living Wage Accreditation and Cyber Essentials certification. 

2023 and Beyond! 

2023 is only going to be bigger and better for us here at SoBold. We have big plans to execute on our hiring strategy and intend to grow the team across all areas of the business. Doing so will help us continue to improve the service we provide to our clients.

We’ll continue to work with key clients in our industry focuses: healthcare, finance, real estate, and SaaS. As we work with more medium to enterprise-sized clients, we’re confident we’ll become more recognised as the High-Performance WordPress agency. 

Thanks for reading. We hope you have a great year in 2023! 

To keep up with all the latest news and updates from our agency, and gain priority access to our weekly learning resources, please do join our community by subscribing to our newsletter below.

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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. 

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SoBold announce their Cyber Essentials certification for the third consecutive year which demononstrates their commitment to delivering secure technical solutions to their new and existing clients. 
Cyber Essentials is scheme which helps guard your organisation against a range of common cyber threats. SoBold’s resilience across a range of internet facing devices was tested and approved, ensuring there were not any major critical vulnerabilities discovered

SoBold Technical Director, Sam Phillips said:

With an ever growing cyber threat, Cyber Essentials certification is becoming more and more important to maintain. Protecting both our clients data and websites is of the upmost importance and successfully passing the more thorough Cyber Essentials guidelines new for 2022 shows our commitment to this.

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