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

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

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

Leonardo Esposito, Senior Back End WordPress Developer at SoBold.

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

Our Story

How it began

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

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

The dedicated Kapow Primary team at SoBold

What we achieved ⭐

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

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

Here are some key highlights from the past 18 months:

Interactive History Timeline

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

Presentation Mode

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

Curriculum Hub – Coming soon!

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

Before you begin working on the design elements of a website project, it’s important to begin with, what we at SoBold call, a research and planning phase.

The purpose of a research and planning phase is to ensure that every single decision you make about your design will result in a more effective website, both in terms of your business goals and your users’ needs. 

During this phase, you’ll work alongside your chosen agency to define the full scope of your website and all its requirements. This phase will also involve looking closely at your target audience, trends in your market, your competitors, and any data available from your existing website. 

This research is extremely useful in shaping the direction you take with your website and helping you to capitalise on certain trends that may align with your strategic objectives.

In this article, we’ll explain how a research and planning phase works to help you know what to expect when entering your own website design project. 

If you’d first like to gain a better understanding of the full end-to-end process of web design, read our previous article here. 

Website Strategy Workshop

A research and planning phase usually begins with a strategic workshop. This workshop will bring all the relevant stakeholders together, either in person or over a video call, to agree on the goals and parameters of the project. 

A workshop is a great collaborative environment to help your agency become even more familiar with your brand, your target audience, and the outcomes you’re looking for from your new website. 

Your agency should work closely with you to determine how the objectives you have for your new website feed into your wider business goals. That will be the key to finding the right approach to designing your website. 

Once the workshop is completed, the research can begin. 

Leveraging Data to Dictate User Experience (UX) Decisions  

Every decision you make about your website’s design needs to be informed and justified by data. 

As it’s becoming increasingly difficult to capture and retain your audience’s attention, nothing can be left to chance. It’s also negligent to overlook the vast range of valuable insights available to you within your data, and the data in the public domain.  

Google Analytics

Your agency should begin by analysing the performance of your website in Google Analytics. This can help to help understand the current behaviours and trends from your website users. 

Most businesses use Google Analytics, but few understand the right things to measure. For many businesses, Google Analytics is an untapped gold mine of data and insights that can help you improve site engagement, retain more visitors, and ultimately grow your business. 

You can conduct a thorough analysis of things like: 

1 – Your Audience Acquisition

Google Analytics can help you identify where your visitors have found you and accessed your website from.

Whether through organic search, social media, direct, or referral, you’ll learn how all your visitors are acquired. This information is vital, as it can allow you to tailor different parts of your website to certain visitors at various stages of their journey with you. 

For example, if organic traffic is a key driver of your website traffic, it’s important for your agency to ensure that lots of the hierarchical structure of copy is maintained throughout the site.

This is also helpful in optimising your wider digital marketing strategy, by recognising what’s working well and what isn’t, from a web traffic perspective. 

Bonus Tip – If you’re running Google Adwords, make sure your agency partner is aware of all the URLs that need to be redirected, and that this doesn’t affect your ad spend.

2 – Your Visitors’ Demographics 

Google Analytics can provide detailed insights into your website’s visitors, with data covering everything from age, gender, location, language, and more. This helps you gain a clear, specific understanding of who’s coming to your website, and that can inform important decisions about your design. 

It will also help you determine whether or not you’re attracting the right audience, which could alert you to a need for changes in your design and branding.

Bonus Tip – If you have a lot of visitors from other countries, you may need to talk to your agency about setting up a content delivery network (CDN) on the hosting server to deliver content from that location. 

3 – Your Visitors’ Interests 

You can use Google Analytics to view information about your visitors’ interests, past searches, and other online behaviour. This can help you identify what they’re looking for when they’re visiting your site. You can then tailor your design and content to match any unaddressed questions, challenges, or needs they might be looking to meet.

4 – Your Visitors’ Behaviour 

Google Analytics can give you a graphical representation of your visitors’ behaviour when interacting with your site. This includes where they’ve entered your site, where they went next, what their whole journey through your site looks like, and where they eventually left. 

This provides great opportunities to optimise certain pages that aren’t performing well enough. You can also learn what your visitors respond well to from pages that already have strong engagement.

Mapping your users’ journeys may also uncover insights to help you create links between certain services, hone in on special offers that will drive increased conversions, and many other ways to boost engagement.

5 – Your Conversions  

Your conversions are a critical measurement of your site’s success. Whether you’re aiming for subscriptions, demo sign-ups, contact form submissions, downloads, or anything else, failing to achieve your conversion targets means something isn’t working. 

You can use Google Analytics to set goals for conversions, monitor performance, and highlight areas where you need to improve. 

Taking this analytical approach will ensure your website’s design is tailored to supporting your strategic objectives.

Bonus Tip – On July 1, 2023, for continued website measurement, you’ll need to migrate your original property settings to a Google Analytics 4 (GA4) property. Your agency partner should be on top of this though. 

Data Tracking

Next, if applicable, your agency should review any existing tracking resources you have in place on your website. 

A successful website design is based on many different factors, each an important component in engaging your audience, converting them into clients, and growing your business. 

This is why it’s useful to look into key metrics you may use to measure your success against, then use the related data and analytics to inform your design. Tailoring your UX based on your findings will ensure your website is designed specifically to optimise your user behaviours. 

Bonus Tip – If you don’t have any additional tracking in place, both HotJar and Crazy Egg are great tools to use.

Analysing External Factors 

Understanding Your Target Audience

One of the most important parts of building a new website is understanding the preferences of the audience you’re targeting. You know what your ideal customer profiles (ICP) look like, but do you understand how they behave when interacting with websites online? 

Every decision about your website’s design must be made with consideration and empathy for your users. As touched on in the previous section, audience research will include a wide range of variables, including: 

• Demographics
• Goals
• Challenges 
• Motivations
• Preferences
• Frustrations.

This part of the research will contribute towards building user personas and user journeys at a later stage of the design process. 

A user persona is a fictional person that you can use to represent the target audience of your website. These personas will help you focus on the desired interactions between the ideal user and the website you’re building. Creating personas also helps to map the users’ needs to your goals for the project.

A user journey is a path that a user may take to reach their goal when using your website. Hypothetical user journeys are created at this stage, as they help to identify the different ways the site’s design needs to enable the user to achieve their goal as quickly and easily as possible.

With these, you can begin to paint a picture of how your target audience will interact with your website, allowing you to create a satisfying user experience. 

Industry Landscape

Researching your industry landscape will reveal a great deal about what to do, and what not to do.  An analysis of the wider market you operate in will help you benchmark yourself against industry leaders, and highlight mistakes being made by any businesses lagging behind. It’s useful to be aware of any industry trends or points of influence that may inform your website’s design as well. 

Bonus Tip – You’re an expert in your industry. Your agency is not, but they are experts in web design and marketing trends. Work closely together by leveraging each other’s knowledge and expertise to paint the full picture of what makes modern websites successful from a design perspective.

Competitor Research 

It’s also crucial to conduct a thorough competitor analysis to see what the benchmark is for a successful website in your industry. Conversely, some competitors may provide examples of bad design that can help you identify pitfalls to avoid with your own site.

Around five of your competitors is usually a good number to look into. To do this, your agency should work with you on assessing their websites in key areas such as: 

• Design look and feel 
• Structure and navigation
• Features and functionality
• User experience
• Content and layout
• Calls-to-action
• Speed and performance 
• And anything else relevant to your project.

This research will allow you to recognise opportunities, gaps in the market, important trends, and any other insights you can gather.

Making Data-Driven Decisions 

Following all this research, your agency will work on developing a strategy for your website, recommending the optimum route through the rest of the design process. 

Your agency will provide a report detailing all the findings from the strategy workshop and research. This should often include a sitemap document and a content framework for your site as well. 

An agency should always provide the opportunity for feedback and iterations on crucial documents like this, so you should then be given time to review this and provide feedback. 

Bonus Tip – Don’t be afraid to ask questions, challenge things you’re unsure about, or change your mind during this feedback and revision process. These are big decisions, and it’s important to be 100% sure about the direction your website’s design is being taken. 

Once you’ve worked through this feedback with your agency and you’re happy with everything they’ve planned, you can then move into the phase of the project that focuses on the visual identity of your site. 

Bringing it All Together in the Design

A thorough, well managed research and planning phase is an essential part of designing a successful website. By having a strategy backed up by tangible data in place, you’ll be able to work through the remaining phases of the overall design process in a more efficient and effective way.

It also helps anticipate any challenges or potential issues in the design process and allows you to mitigate them before they arise, saving you time and money in the long-run.

This phase is arguably the most important in ensuring your agency can meet your specific requirements and expectations, on time and within budget.

If you’d like to discover what’s involved in the next phase of a web design project, exploring the visual identity of your site, read our next article here. 

As technology continues to evolve and advance rapidly, more of our daily lives are taking place in a digital-first context. When marketing your products and services, this means:

• Your target audience now has a shorter attention span, and less patience when browsing websites and services online.
• Your target audience also has more choice of options than ever before when choosing who to buy from. 

Modern users demand the same speed and convenience they get from the industry-leading sites and apps they use every day. That means you only have a matter of seconds to make a positive, memorable connection with your visitors. 

UX design, therefore, serves as a critical phase within the end-to-end process of web design. This is essentially the practice of creating a website that allows your visitors to complete a process, take an action, or fulfill their need in as few steps or clicks as possible.

Despite its ever-increasing importance, UX design is a process that many businesses, and even many agencies, still struggle to get right. 

To ease this challenge, and help you ensure your own website’s UX is designed effectively, we’ve written this article to outline the process in detail. We’ll also provide advice and tips to help you ensure your website can provide your target audience with an experience that drives them towards your desired outcomes.

What is UX Design?

The aim of UX design is to make it quick, easy, and convenient for your visitors to complete a task or process, or follow a call-to-action. Your UX involves everything from functionality, navigation, accessibility, layout, structure, and even the site’s content itself. 

Designing your website in a way that’s intuitive and easy-to-use will provide your visitors with a satisfying UX. It’s important to note here that UX design shouldn’t be confused or bundled up with user interface (UI) design. UI design is its own separate phase of the process that comes slightly later. 

Understanding the Design Process as a Whole

Research and Planning 

Earlier in the overall design process, before you approach the UX, you should’ve gone through a thorough research and planning phase with your design agency.  

This is important in ensuring that every decision you make towards your UX and UI will produce a more effective website capable of meeting your business goals and your audience’s needs. 

Working alongside your agency, you’ll use this research to define the full scope of your website and all its requirements. This will include the creation of user personas and user journeys. These will help you determine the most simple and efficient flow for your visitors to take through your website to each call-to-action, and this is how your UX is created. 

This research will guide both your UX design and UI design processes.

Related reading: Understanding the Important Role of Research and Planning When Designing a New Website.

Visual Exploration

Your agency partner should then produce a set of mood boards that you’ll use to create the aesthetic style of your site in line with your brand. These mood boards help you visualise the way your website will look and feel when built. 

This is a precursor to your UI design, and it’s done before the UX phase to ensure the overall style is correct before any more design work is completed.

This is another collaborative process, where your agency should advise you with their expertise and experience from delivering successful website projects in the past.

Related reading: What is Visual Exploration in the Process of Web Design?

The UX Process 

Information Architecture 

The information architecture of your website is devised by building a sitemap, which is a map of all the necessary pages across your entire website. You’ll likely have an existing one from your current site, but this will probably need updating based on all the new research and strategic planning you’ve done. 

From the sitemap, you’ll have a list of all the pages and content required to populate your site. Your agency will then build out a content base framework, noting any content that you need support in developing.  

The users’ navigation through the site needs to be tailored to the objectives you’ve set and the research findings from earlier. It also needs to be built in a way that allows for flexibility and scalability later, as your requirements evolve and your business grows. 

High-Fidelity Wireframes 

Wireframes are used to design the user experience of your website. This is essentially like creating a blueprint of your website’s pages prior to beginning the actual design work, detailing the site’s flow and the users’ journey through it.

These wireframes are used to determine how the user can reach their desired outcome, or reach your desired call-to-action, in as few clicks or steps as possible. Remember, the purpose of UX design is to optimise that journey. 

Here at SoBold, we use high-fidelity wireframes that provide a clear, detailed representation of the users’ flow to all calls-to-action. This is directed and influenced by the things we learned in the research and planning phase. 

These wireframes are typically built on a standard desktop size, but they can be done on a mobile device screen size if you want your site to be designed mobile-first. 

Wireframes are used to create the UX so you don’t get distracted by the visual design when evaluating the user journeys. This allows you to focus completely on the flow and the experience the user will have when visiting your site, without worrying about the aesthetic elements. It proves to be a much more effective approach towards creating an experience that will satisfy your visitors and help you achieve your objectives.

Again, this will be a collaborative process in which you’ll work closely with your agency, providing feedback on the wireframes to ensure they align with your requirements.

Once the mood boards and the wireframes are approved, all that’s left to do is apply the design to the wireframes to bring your website’s design to life. This makes the UI design process very quick and easy from here.

A Quick Word on Accessibility  

Accessibility is a crucial aspect of any user experience. 

Accessibility refers to how easy and accessible technology is for all users, regardless of their physical ability, location, personal background, or any other factors. While accessibility is primarily a concern for the UI design team, it’s also important in optimising your UX as well. After all, a website that isn’t accessible simply cannot be considered to have a good UX.

If accessibility isn’t included as a core component of your web design process, you should raise this as a concern with your agency.

Here at SoBold, accessibility is a key part of all our design processes, as we believe that all technology must be fully inclusive and equally available to everyone.

Related reading: You can learn all about what it takes to deliver good usability through your website in our related article here.

Finding the Optimum Balance 

As touched on earlier, your target audience will be visiting your site with a goal in mind, and the UX is what enables them to achieve that easily.

Of course, you also have business objectives to achieve through your website, which must also be supported by UX design. That creates the need for balance between a UX that serves your visitors and supports your business strategy simultaneously. Your design should also play the important role of directing visitors to the calls-to-action that you want them to engage with. 

Finding this balance is a challenge, and one that could have a negative impact if you get it wrong. This is where the guidance and expertise of a specialist agency partner becomes so important. All design is collaborative and iterative, and UX design is all about compromising to find the right balance. 

The Business Benefits of Great UX 

Finding a design agency you can trust, and investing the time to work with them to craft a truly outstanding user experience, will prove well worth it in the long-run. 

UX design is complex, but the right agency can guide you by demystifying the process and helping you make the right decisions at every step. Finding that aforementioned balance between your strategic objectives and your target audience’s best interests can have a transformational impact on the performance of your website.  

Providing your visitors with a great UX can deliver a wealth of other benefits as well, not only to the performance of your website but to your wider business too. For instance, a study by 

Forrester Research found that a well-designed UX has the power to raise conversion rates for your website by an incredible 400%. 

Some of these additional benefits include: 

• Boost SEO and brand awareness
• Improve audience engagement 
• Reduce bounce rates
• Increase conversions 
• Drive more sales through your website 
• Accelerate business growth
• Improve customer retention and loyalty
• Gain competitive advantages. 

Your UX isn’t Complete Without User Interface Design 

The key thing to remember is that good UX design is really just helping your website visitors travel from their entry point to wherever they need to get to as easily and efficiently as possible.

In the UX phase of your project, you need to consider who the user is, what they’re aiming to do, and then determine how to enable them to do that with an intuitive design.

Once your UX design begins to come together, and you’re satisfied with everything, the next step will be for your agency partner to begin to design your user interface.

While UX and UI are separate, they’re also intrinsically linked. They need to work together seamlessly and complement each other in order for your website to be successful. 

In our next article, we’ll walk you through the topic of UI and help you ensure your user experience is brought to life with an effective visual design.

If you’d like to take a step back and learn more about the overall process of web design, read our related article here.

Many businesses in the healthcare sector require some form of bespoke web development in order to remain competitive today. But entering into a bespoke development project can be a daunting challenge, with plenty of risks attached to it. 

This article will answer your pressing questions about bespoke web development, and provide you with a step-by-step guide to set yourself up for success when approaching your own project.

In recent years, modern healthcare has been driven forward by great advances in technology. Organisations in the healthcare sector have leveraged cutting-edge digital technology to transform the way healthcare services are delivered for the better. 

But with that positive change comes a shift in expectations to improve technology across the board. 

Whether you’re a practitioner or a healthcare solution provider, you now must deliver your services to your end-users through the latest digital channels if you want to keep up with the rest of the industry. 

If you’re unable to meet modern expectations for an effortless consumer-grade user experience (UX), your clients and partners will be left unsatisfied and may look elsewhere for a more convenient alternative. This can also apply to your internal systems and processes, as your employees also want intuitive digital tools in order to do their work efficiently and effectively.

To achieve this, you need a sophisticated website that serves your users in a way that’s specifically tailored to their needs and preferences, while also supporting your strategic business objectives. Given the complexity of the healthcare sector, that will likely require you to develop a website with bespoke features and functionality. 

Of course, any website you develop also needs to be secure and compliant, and flexible enough to adapt as your business grows or healthcare technology trends continue to evolve. 

Going Beyond the Basics with Bespoke Development 

While a more straightforward, simple website may be sufficient for small and medium-sized businesses, such a limited approach will prevent companies in the healthcare sector from retaining clients and staying competitive. 

If you’re struggling to deliver exactly what your clients or other users are looking for, particularly in an industry as technical as healthcare, you may need to build a bespoke website. This could include anything from: 

• A bespoke client-facing website that represents your brand and provides direct access to your products or services 
• An internal web portal, either for training employees or for networking and sharing of information
• A bespoke intelligence platform with powerful data and analytics capabilities 
• A new content management system (CMS) that can provide greater flexibility and scalability for a portfolio of multiple sites 
• A unique tool to transform inefficient manual processes into a simple digital platform
• A bespoke website that integrates directly with a wide range of other back-end tools and technology, such as your CRM system.

With a bespoke development project, the possibilities – and opportunities for innovation and growth – are virtually endless. You can discuss your current business challenges among your team, and then create something purpose-built to solve those specific challenges.

Of course, coming up with an idea for an exciting new site is the easy part. For many businesses, it’s an additional challenge to know where to go next. To make that easier for you, we’ve provided a simple, proven process here to help you plan and launch a bespoke web development project that will set you up for success.

A Process for Approaching Your Bespoke Development Project 

Start with the “why” and think about what you’re trying to achieve 

As touched on above, it’s important to have a specific reason for building a bespoke site. Whether it’s to achieve a strategic business goal, like customer growth, or overcome a prominent challenge, like inefficient processes, you need a clear purpose. 

Determine exactly what you’re trying to achieve with your website and why it’s being developed. A big part of this will also relate to delivering on a specific need or solving a specific problem for your users as well. 

Thinking of how it will help your users in a valuable way will make it easier to understand what sort of features and functionality you’ll require. 

List all your requirements and use them to create a project brief 

Once you’ve completed that first step, you’ll already see a list taking shape, with requirements for design, usability, capabilities, and so on. 

Note down all those things your website needs to do and use that to create a project brief. This is a simple written document containing all the ideas you think are relevant to your site, including both functional and non-functional requirements.

The purpose of this is to make your request as clear as possible for the design and development agencies you speak to. 

The more specific and detailed your brief is, the better, and that includes things like your initial ideas for cost and timelines. This will help ensure your agency will deliver what you’re asking for on time, within your budget, and matching your specifications. Without a clear, specific brief, you could wind up disappointed and maybe even over-spending.

For a comprehensive guide to creating a brief that will set you up for a successful web design and development project, read our useful article here. 

Evaluate the options for a technology platform to build on

Most websites on the Internet are built using a content management system (CMS). This is almost certainly the type of platform you’ll want to use to create, edit, and publish all the content on your website and manage things behind the scenes. 

Every business is unique, and every bespoke development project is different, so you need to use the work you’ve done in the previous two steps to help you select the right CMS. 

By this point, when you’re evaluating platforms, you should already know your objectives, your requirements, your users’ needs, your budget, your existing technology stack, and so on.

Take all these factors and use them to determine which CMS is the best suited to deliver exactly what you want. 

Something that’s important to note is that integrating a new website with other systems can be complex, particularly if you’re building your site on a new platform rather than an existing one. 

When planning a bespoke development project, you’ll need to consider how easily your new platform will integrate with your other systems. 

We recently produced a helpful series of articles comparing some of the leading CMSs for enterprise website development. You can read those here: 

• WordPress vs Sitecore
• WordPress vs Drupal 
• WordPress vs Umbraco 

Find the right agency partner to design and develop your site with you

As mentioned earlier, you’ll likely need to find a design and development agency to partner with in order to create a bespoke website. 

Building, managing, and supporting a high-performance website in the current technology landscape is extremely difficult, especially in a strictly-regulated industry like healthcare. 

Not only should you look for a partner with a proven track record of delivering bespoke websites, you should also try to find one with healthcare sector-specific experience as well. 

Which agency you choose will have a significant impact on whether your development project is successful, but also on whether or not your new website is successful in the long-term as well. It’s a decision that mustn’t be taken lightly. 

Some of the qualities and capabilities that are important to look for when assessing your options for an agency partner include: 

• Experience working with businesses in the healthcare sector
• A strong portfolio of successful bespoke development projects 
• The expertise to guide you and help you make the best decisions for your project
• Certifications and accreditations 
• Compliance with healthcare sector regulations
• Security and data protection built into the core of your project 
• Secure hosting supported by back-up, disaster recovery, and risk mitigation plans
• Ongoing support services to maintain, update, and optimise your site
• Additional advisory services to help you gain as much value from your technology as possible.

What Does a Bespoke Website Require to be Successful? 

Once you’ve found a CMS and an agency you’re comfortable with, the next step will be to design and develop your bespoke website. 

This will involve working to the requirements you noted in your project brief, but there are also some essential qualities and characteristics of a successful website in the current digital business landscape: 

Enterprise-Grade Hosting 

Ensure your agency can provide enterprise-grade, secure hosting, ideally with managed services, from a trustworthy provider. Not only is your hosting environment responsible for the security of your site and protection of your data, but it can also influence the speed and performance of your site. 

If you’re in a position to build a bespoke website, you’re likely going to be dealing with a high volume of data and a large audience of users, so it’s important that you have a hosting service that can manage that without any disruption to your services. 

User Experience 

Whatever services or products you provide to companies in the healthcare sector, a great UX is the foundation of any successful website. People working in almost all industries now expect the same convenient consumer-grade experience they receive from the technology they use in their personal lives. Your website needs to be as quick and easy-to-use for your visitors as apps like LinkedIn and Amazon. 

This also applies if the sites you’re looking to build are internal-facing for employees. Workforces now also demand a seamless experience with company systems, and providing this will create gains in efficiency as well as competitive advantages. 

A great UX usually leads to a strong ROI. 

Performance and Functionality 

Your website connects you directly to your clients. Flip that to your client’s perspective, your website is a direct reflection of the quality and professionalism of your services.

If your website is slow, or doesn’t give your users what they need in terms of performance or functionality, they won’t hesitate to look elsewhere. 

Security 

Businesses today run on data. The data of your clients, partners, and your own critical data will be at risk if any technology attached to your network is not secure. 

As mentioned earlier, you need to make sure your site is hosted in a secure environment with robust data protection measures in place. But security isn’t just about hosting. Security also comes down to a wide range of best practices, like regularly testing your site and updating your platform.

When your clients and partners are working with highly sensitive medical data, all your technology must also be highly secure and compliant with industry regulations. 

Again, these are all critical things that your agency partner should be experienced enough to handle for you. 

Personalisation

Personalised user experiences are becoming increasingly important for businesses to deliver to their clients and employees these days. One of the key advantages to a bespoke website is that you’re able to provide each of your users with personalised content and services, tailored to their needs, at each stage of their user journey. 

Scalability and Agility 

More often than not, a bespoke website is a key point of differentiation and an enabler of business growth. When you begin to achieve that growth, your requirements will evolve and your website will need to be agile enough to adapt easily without disrupting business continuity. 

When planning and building your new site, ensure it’s developed with long-term growth and seamless scalability in mind.

The Benefits and Advantages of Bespoke Development  

If you’re able to follow this process and incorporate some of these qualities into your new bespoke website, you’ll have something completely unique to your business. This should set you on the right path to accelerated business growth. But a bespoke website, once built and deployed, can begin to deliver a range of additional benefits and advantages too. These include: 

• Boosting engagement with customers, with an outstanding UX and personalised services
• Increasing customer retention and loyalty 
• Enabling real-time interactions with data and greater analytics capabilities 
• Higher adoption rates of internal systems and improved business performance 
• Reducing costs by streamlining inefficient processes and removing outdated technology
• Strengthening your corporate network with enterprise-grade security 
• Achieving competitive advantages in a highly competitive market.

The Healthcare Sector Runs on High-Performance Websites 

As technology continues to evolve and drive more disruption, it’s becoming increasingly important to keep up with the resulting trends. A bespoke web development project allows you to reach beyond the limitations of a basic website and give your users exactly what they need from your services.

It also enables you to create a high-performance website that’s entirely unique to your business, differentiating you from your competition. 

In the current healthcare sector, it’s easy to appreciate why this is quickly becoming a necessity, rather than a “nice-to-have” for many leading businesses. 

To continue learning, read our comprehensive guide to understanding and evaluating the enterprise options for bespoke web development here.

Discover how global healthcare group, Clanwilliam, used bespoke design and development to take their brand to a new level and transform the capabilities of their marketing. 

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.