SoBold has continued to be an accredited Living Wage Employer and has formally made a commitment to ensure all new and existing staff contracts are renewed at the Living Wage rate as a minimum.

SoBold has been a Living Wage Employer since 2019 and they are committed to ensuring that all staff are treated fairly and remunerated fairly in line with the Living Wage Foundation.

The new Living Wage rates were announced on Thursday 22nd September 2022 and SoBold ensured that all staff pay is in line with this. 

SoBold hope to see more agencies within the technology sector follow suit and become accredited.

SoBold Managing Director, Will Newland said:

We are proud of the people that work at SoBold and we truly care about them. Our staff have always been the life blood of our organisation and it is an absolute no brainer for SoBold to be a Living Wage employer. 

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We recently had a friendly debate in our office of which we thought was a better experience but putting personal bias aside there is no right or wrong answer. It all depends on the type of service you are providing.

Content is what defines your website and the reason why your audience will return again and again. Choosing the right browsing experience based on your unique content will enrich the experience rather than leave your audience feeling confused and frustrated.

What is infinite scrolling?

I think it’s fair to say at some point we have all fallen down the rabbit hole of endless scrolling. In short infinite scrolling is a technique used to fetch a continuous source of information as a user reaches the bottom of a page. Pinterest and Unsplash are great examples of the use of dynamic content.

What is pagination?

Pagination is the sequence of numbers used up to divide pages of content that a user can control, you’ll see this commonly used on large e-commerce sites or information websites that update content regularly. 

The pros and cons of:

Infinite scrolling 

Pros:

• Continually scrolling as we know is addictive, a pro…debatable but it does have a better usability experience than clicking

• There is a better chance of user engagement

• Users have the opportunity to discover new content with little to no thinking

• Thanks to social media continuously scrolling on mobile has become the prefered way to interact with content

Cons:

• There is no way for the user to reference or bookmark content of interest
• If done incorrectly it can have an impact on site performance as the page needs to load infinite content as the user scrolls
• Your user will never reach the footer which may house important information for them

Pagination

Pros:

• Your pages will have a good conversion rate because as people are searching it will show in a specific list of items
• It will give your users a scene of control and clarify how long it will take them to find what they are looking for.
• A returning user will be able to identify quickly where the content is

Cons:

• It obstructs the user experience which will lead to lower engagement rates
• If not implemented properly can cause confusion
• So which one is better for you? The bottom line is no ideal or stronger one, it all comes down to your UX and content requirements. The best thing to do is to analyse web and user goals and make decisions based on them. 

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When you’re responsible for managing a new website development process, you’ll have some difficult decisions to make. Two of the most difficult decisions will be finding an agency that you can trust, and finding a content management system (CMS) that will give you the flexibility and performance to drive your business forward online.  

Your CMS will play a significant role in helping you meet your specific website requirements and enabling you to achieve your strategic goals. 

We’ve compared lots of different CMSs in our recent series of articles, and each of them have their own strengths and weaknesses. In this article, we’ll compare WordPress and Craft.

Ease-of-Use

It’s vitally important to ensure that the platform you choose is straightforward to manage. You’ll want a platform that’s approachable, with a low barrier for entry, to avoid any challenges in the daily running of your website.

Craft’s Ease-of-Use

Whilst Craft is an open-source CMS, it requires technical development expertise in order to manage the platform once built. Management for non-technical teams will likely be difficult, thus limiting you in your ability to build out content and new features over time. 

If you do have expertise in-house, that will allow you to manage your website more easily, as the CMS itself is efficient for publishing and managing content.

Craft also makes it easy to collaborate and share responsibilities across teams without any interference or complications. For example, you can save draft versions of pages and share them with colleagues – with private links that don’t even require you to be signed in – before publishing live on your site. 

WordPress’s Ease-of-Use

Conversely, WordPress is specifically built so that content can be managed in-house. WordPress provides you with a convenient, intuitive user interface (UI) that allows quick and easy publishing, management, and editing of content on your sites.

Put simply, WordPress is a more traditional CMS that’s suitable for a wider range of users and teams. It allows you to easily manage the content on the front-end, whilst also facilitating a quick time-to-market for the development of your website.

This ease-of-use also helps to share responsibilities throughout your team.

Flexibility

Flexibility will always be high on your list of priorities when looking for a CMS. Tailoring your platform to fit your own unique requirements is a crucial capability in today’s digital business landscape. 

How Flexible is Craft?

Craft is all code-based, which allows you to build virtually any type of website you want, with great flexibility. The only limitations, really, will be with the platform-specific development capabilities of your agency.

How Flexible is WordPress?

WordPress also offers a great deal of flexibility and customisation, but the difference here is that it’s unlikely you’ll need to alter much about WordPress’s pre-existing tools and features to be able to build a website you’re happy with.

With WordPress, you have everything you need to build a high-performance website. But that’s complemented by the flexibility to make enhancements and seamlessly scale the platform with new bespoke features if you wish to. 

Integrations

Before you select a CMS, you’ll need to ensure it can easily integrate with any existing systems your business has in place. Whilst most CMSs will be able to integrate well with a variety of third party systems, it’s important to be aware of any limiting capabilities of the platforms.

Craft’s Integrations

Integrations with the most popular third-party platforms are typically supported in Craft through plugins. However, you may need to integrate manually with platforms using API’s.

While this gives you more control over your CMS’s functionality and security, it’s another area in which you’ll likely have to spend more time and money on agency development work. Those integrations will also need to be maintained and updated manually as well, which may be a financial and time burden on your agency. 

WordPress’s Integrations 

WordPress’s global popularity means that it’s readily compatible with most of the third-party systems you’ll already have within your business. 

You’ll have a wide range of native plugins available that will integrate your WordPress site with virtually any other tool. Even if you have more advanced requirements, it’s usually easier for your agency partner to do this bespoke development work in WordPress than it is with other CMSs. 

Developer Communities 

Investing in a platform that’s supported by a community of developers will provide you with additional benefits and advantages. It’s always helpful to have other users working to continuously create additions and updates to help the CMS grow and improve.

Craft’s Community 

Craft has a passionate community working hard to help enhance the platform, but it’s only a fraction of the size when compared to more mainstream CMSs like WordPress. 

Still, size isn’t all that counts here. Craft’s community is very supportive and highly active on channels like Slack and Discord. Craft also has a StackExchange, which is a Q&A forum that many developers use to share learnings as they work through projects.

The WordPress Community

At 20 years old now, WordPress’s popularity and global market share means it has an enormous community supporting it. 

WordPress’s community consists of millions of users who work tirelessly to offer support, collaboration, knowledge sharing, events, and much more. 

Any questions, problems, or requirements you have are often answered very quickly by members of the WordPress community. This also results in exciting new enhancements and features being released on a near-constant basis to drive the platform forward. 

Being part of the WordPress community will also give you access to free events that help users learn to get as much value as possible from the platform. 

Cost and TCO 

Cost is a key factor when choosing a CMS. It’s also important to remember the up-front costs aren’t the only thing you need to consider here. Since your CMS is a long-term investment, you should be looking for a low total cost of ownership (TCO) for all your related costs over time.

Craft’s Initial Investment and Ongoing Costs

With Craft, you’ll need to purchase either the pro or enterprise plan. Pro comes with a one-time payment of £250 per project, and an additional annual payment to continue receiving updates. The cost of the enterprise plan will vary depending on your requirements and usage.

As mentioned earlier, the costs associated with the platform may also be high. This is due to the need for agency support across many aspects of your project, from setting up your website, to integrations, to ongoing maintenance. 

The actual costs of development with Craft may also be higher than with other CMSs because of the smaller scale and more specialist nature of the platform. 

It’s also worth mentioning that Craft CMS hosting services are more limited than those of WordPress, again likely making them more expensive.

WordPress Cost and TCO 

On the most part, WordPress is a more cost-effective platform than Craft, with a lower TCO.

WordPress is free-to-use, limiting your initial costs to just hosting, development agency fees, and post-deployment support. 

As touched on earlier, achieving a much faster time-to-market will allow you to launch a quality website quickly so you can begin gaining strong ROI right away.

Another cost-related benefit of WordPress’s ease-of-use is that if there’s bespoke development work you need your agency to complete, it will usually come at a reasonable cost. Because Craft is such a niche and technical platform, bespoke development work often comes at a premium in comparison to the more widely-used WordPress.

When the WordPress platform receives updates, it’s often fairly quick and straightforward for your agency partner to test and maintain your site.

These advantages add up to create a lower TCO for WordPress than you’ll have with other enterprise CMSs.

Conclusion 

Both Craft and WordPress are both great CMSs in their own right, and would serve most businesses. Although, it’s difficult to deny that WordPress is a much more approachable platform than Craft for the average user.

If you’re a team with a great selection of existing development skills, Craft can provide you with some innovative capabilities and could be the right platform for you. 

The key thing to remember when making this evaluation is that you should select the platform that directly aligns with your own specific circumstances and requirements. 

Every business, and every web development project, is different. Carefully consider your objectives, budget, users, in-house skills, and any other factors that may come into play. That should allow you to determine which CMS is the right one to deliver what you need. 

If you need more help finding a CMS for your new website project, read our comprehensive guide to understanding and evaluating the options for large businesses here.

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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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The type of hosting environment you select will have a strong influence on the success of your website. It’s important for you to find a secure, scalable web hosting service that you have 100% trust in to deliver high-performance at all times.

To simplify the options available to you, this article will break down the various types of web hosting services, and explore the non-negotiables we believe you should be considering in your criteria when making your decision. 

The Fundamentals of Enterprise-Grade Hosting 

Some of the most important things to look for with your hosting environment include: 

Security – Cyber security is obviously an essential priority, and this should be top of your list of criteria in the current climate.

Performance – Your hosting environment should be set up in a way that makes your site capable of handling large surges of traffic.

Scalability – As your business grows, it’s likely that your site’s audience will grow. You need a hosting provider with the capacity to scale your services seamlessly to meet your needs, both now and in future. 

Resilience – It’s important to ensure your hosting infrastructure is robust, and that it can gauruntee you certain performance levels and up-time.

Support – If anything does go wrong, you need to be assured that you have a quick, efficient support service in place to get your site back up and running as soon as possible.

Sustainability – With sustainability a growing priority on the corporate agenda, the carbon footprint of your data centre may be another important factor in your decision.

Option 1 – Shared Hosting Services 

Shared hosting services can provide you with a basic secure server for your website. However, as the name suggests, these servers will be shared with a large number of other businesses. You won’t have any dedicated server of your own with shared hosting. 

This approach does have some advantages, particularly in the area of cost. These shared hosting environments can cost as little as £1,000 per year.  However, the down-sides to this often outweigh that cost benefit. 

In many cases, the low cost of shared hosting services can often be reflected in the performance levels. This is because, with such a high volume of websites hosted on the servers, your performance has no protection if other sites are experiencing high volumes of traffic. 

It’s also likely that you’ll only have access to limited support services when any issues arise. Many of the shared hosting options will have a ticketing system for support, where you’ll be at the mercy of the number of requests ahead of you in the queue. This could result in your website being ‘down’ during times where it’s business-critical.

Option 2 – Private Servers with Shared Hosting Providers 

Most shared hosting providers will offer the option of having your own private server for an extra cost. This is often referred to as a VPS, which stands for virtual private server. 

Rather than sharing a server with thousands of other businesses, you’ll only be sharing with a few others. While this is significantly better than the regular shared hosting options, you can still end up facing similar problems with performance and scalability.

This is another cost-effective approach, though, with some improvements over standard shared hosting. If you rely on an agency to set this up for you, they’ll likely put their smaller clients on a shared VPS and give their larger clients their own dedicated servers to minimise any potential problems.

Option 3 – Enterprise-Grade Private Web Hosting

Often the most reliable and trusted approach to take is to have your own dedicated server, which comes with a wide range of additional benefits. 

With this option, your website is placed on its own private server in the cloud, managed by a dedicated team of specialists who offer personalised, hands-on support and ongoing optimisation.

Security

Enterprise-grade security should be a core part of the hosting service you choose, regardless of whether it’s private or shared. However, you’ll be guaranteed far greater security, with drastically reduced risk, when you work with a private hosting service.

For instance, a hosting provider should offer robust protection for your site, including: 

• Configured firewall options, IP access lists, and anti-phishing attack technologies 
• Full responsibility for rapidly patching OSes and libraries 
• Long-term-supported Linux distributions for maximum security. 

Of course, compliance and certifications are another crucial aspect of cyber security these days. While some shared hosting providers may have the basic levels of compliance in place, most private hosting services will boast: 

• Compliance with ISO 27001/PCI-DSS/TIA-942 
• A 100% pass-rate for any data centre audits 
• 24/7 data centre staffing with experienced engineers and specialist security teams 
• Document review services for your external audits 
• Bespoke consultancy available if you have any major certification requirements. 

Performance 

When taking this approach, you’ll receive your own bespoke service and will be provided with a hosting environment tailored to your specific requirements. 

This will optimise everything included in your hosting package, from your preferred caching, loading speeds, performance requirements, up-time, and more.

You’ll also be able to set up a content delivery network (CDN) to make your website faster and more readily available to all visitors around the world. 

Scalability 

Private hosting gives you the capacity and flexibility to scale seamlessly anytime your website’s traffic increases, or if you have peak times for traffic.

This is an intelligent way to future-proof your investment, with the confidence that your website’s performance will be consistently excellent as the size of your audience increases and your site expands. This also applies to situations in which you need to scale unexpectedly due to short-term increases in demand, ensuring business continuity is always maintained on your site. 

Resilience 

Private hosting providers have guarantees for their resilience, and for your site’s up-time, covering all possible bases. This even counts for unusual scenarios like floods or fires.

It’s wise to look for a provider who offers back-up and disaster recovery services for the maximum resilience. 

Back-Ups: Managed back-up services provide you with a tailored regiment, alongside rigorous testing, for guaranteed restorability. 

Multi-level back-ups are taken for you, both locally and remotely, to minimise risk. You’ll also be able to choose from a range of replication technology options for your load-balancing and various fail-over scenarios. 

Disaster Recovery: Private hosting providers will also use disaster recovery measures, such as geographically-distributed platforms and back-up data centres, providing you with full assurance that your performance and up-time are always maintained.

Your primary hosting platform will be replicated to a disaster-recovery platform, which means that if the primary data centre is ever out of action for a prolonged period of time you can fail-over to the back-up systems. 

While the more basic hosting services can take days to recover in similar situations, which could result in losses of business and even reputational damage, disaster recovery can often be done in a matter of minutes with a private hosting environment.

Support and Optimisation

Trust and confidence in your provider’s ability to deliver on your requirements are a vital part of your hosting service. 

It’s highly beneficial to take an approach that gives you – or your agency partner – a close working relationship with your hosting provider. Availability and accountability are much greater with a private hosting service than with a shared approach. 

A close working relationship provides other advantages as well. For instance, anytime you want to make upgrades to your hosting environment, they can analyse your traffic and identify the best time and date to do that with minimal disruption. 

This is all part of collaborating with your agency and hosting provider, so they understand your unique business and tailor your hosting services. This is all done based on the conventions of your target audience and your specific requirements to deliver the best possible service. 

In terms of support, private hosting providers will have powerful automation tools to proactively, continuously monitor your environment. That allows them to resolve the majority of issues before they’re able to have an impact on your site. 

This can also involve 24/7 custom alerting systems, as well as a fully customisable monitoring portal, and multi-channel systems to alert engineers rapidly in the event of any problems. 

In terms of your overall service with an enterprise-grade private hosting provider, you should also expect to gain: 

• A fully-managed service provided by a team with decades of experience 
• Round-the-clock, hands-on assistance, 365 days per year 
• Deep technical understanding and expertise 
• Proactive support from dedicated engineering teams and account managers 
• High-level consultancy, including advice on new projects and technologies. 

Sustainability 

If your business has sustainability as a priority or core cultural value, then this is another reason to opt for a private hosting service. While it’s not impossible to find shared hosting services with carbon-neutral data centres, it’s much less common. 

Sustainability is also a key focus for us here at SoBold as an agency. As a result, we’ve worked hard to ensure we have an environmentally-conscious, carbon-neutral service offering.

The Verdict?

Having a fully dedicated, bespoke private server is usually the preferred choice of web hosting services. This is due to the unmatched levels of security, scalability, and performance that come with private hosting providers. 

Of course, it’s important to note that this does also come with a higher cost than other options. However, the benefits and trust gained through their strengths in these key areas ensure strong ROI. 

Not only do their flexibility and optimisation provide you with a high-performance website set up for success, but enterprise-grade security and resilience will also minimise your risk and save you significant costs in the long-term. 

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