There are plenty of similarities between WordPress and Drupal. That can make it particularly hard to choose between the two if you’re tasked with finding a new content management system (CMS) for your business. But when you’re about to invest in a new CMS, it’s an important decision that needs careful consideration.
After all, your CMS will be the platform upon which your website is built, and the influence that will have on your business growth and success today shouldn’t be underestimated. With that in mind, it’s crucial to find a platform that aligns with your specific requirements and enables you to achieve your strategic objectives.
To help you gain a clear understanding of the differences between WordPress and Drupal, and decide which one is better suited to your business, we’ve provided this helpful side-by-side assessment.
This article is part of a new series where we’ve explored direct, objective comparisons between some of the leading options for CMSs. In the third article of this series, we’re looking at Drupal and WordPress. You can find links to the other articles in this series at the bottom of the page.
Approachability and Ease-of-Use
A CMS is a big investment, and so you’ll want to begin getting good use and value from your platform of choice as quickly as possible. Like any type of software, though, some platforms are more approachable for the average user, while others will require you to have some previous experience to get going.
How Approachable is Drupal?
Drupal is aimed at users with some prior coding skills or content management experience. If you have technical skills at your disposal, Drupal can provide great functionality once you’ve put some time and effort into setting everything up.
For non-technical users, however, working with the platform and getting comfortable using it can be a long-term process. It’s an advanced CMS that doesn’t offer much in the way of straightforward usability “out-of-the-box” unfortunately. If your team is made up of non-technical users and beginners, this might not be the best platform for you.
Even if you work with a web development agency to help you get everything set up and tailored to your preferences, the complexity of the code will make their project timelines and costs higher than the average CMS.
How Approachable is WordPress?
WordPress is very approachable for anyone, even beginners without any previous experience using a CMS.
Simplicity is one of WordPress’s greatest strengths, and many would argue that elevates it above all its peers.
This usability allows you to get up-to-speed immediately with a very fast time-to-market for your site. That means you’ll begin to achieve a positive return on investment (ROI) much quicker than most other platforms. Almost everything you need to build and manage your website will be readily available when you first begin using WordPress, making it more approachable for the average user than Drupal.
As it’s such an intuitive platform, pretty much anyone in your team will be able to use WordPress. That will make it easier to handle the daily management and running of your site as a shared responsibility.
Functionality and Customisation
As touched on above, you should be looking for a platform that you and your colleagues will be comfortable using on a daily basis. If you don’t like the way a CMS functions, you should remove it from your shortlist of options.
While Drupal and WordPress are similar at first glance, with the same fundamental functionality of a CMS, there are some unique features and capabilities that differentiate them. There’s also a wide range of ways to customise them to your own liking.
Working with Drupal
While the complexity mentioned in the previous section does require considerable time, effort, and money to get past, once you’ve got there you’ll likely find Drupal is a good CMS to use for building and editing your website.
Drupal’s user interface (UI) is fairly easy to get used to. You can publish, edit, manage, and organise content with flexibility, adjusting your page structure and site navigation. You can also lean on a large library of website themes and modules, which are additions similar to WordPress’s plugins, to tailor your CMS to your own unique specifications.
Working with WordPress
As a CMS, WordPress’s simple, intuitive functionality allows you to seamlessly launch and manage your site. It’s very convenient editing content on a page-by-page basis with WordPress with its block-based design. This allows you to create quality content from day one, with the freedom and flexibility to make adjustments to the platform as and when you require.
WordPress also allows you to customise it as well with a vast selection of plugins and themes. The difference between WordPress and other CMSs, though, is that there’s not much you’ll need to change about it out-of-the-box before you can begin using it comfortably.
Because it has a lower cost and faster time-to-market, it will free up more time for you (or your agency) to focus on higher value work, like differentiating your site from competitors or developing personalised content for your customers.
Platform Security
When writing down the criteria that you’ll use to select your CMS, security should be one of the first things on that list. Threats to cyber security and data protection are increasing by the day, for businesses of all sizes across all sectors, so it’s crucial to ensure you select a secure, trustworthy platform.
How Secure is Drupal?
One of the major advantages of a CMS that’s aimed at those with web development skills is that the users of Drupal work hard to ensure the platform is highly secure. Drupal regularly receives security updates and additional reinforcements to protect the platform.
Of course, you still need to test thoroughly and continuously double-check there are no vulnerabilities in your system. This is usually the responsibility of your agency, and a good partner should always prioritise security at the core of any development project.
How Secure is WordPress?
WordPress is a secure platform, but some still carry the misconception that it isn’t suitable for large businesses. To find evidence of its enterprise-grade security, though, you only need to look at the number of organisations using WordPress as their CMS of choice today.
Still, there are some potential vulnerabilities that are important to be aware of. For instance, be careful when adding plugins to your WordPress platform. As WordPress runs on open-source software, some developers will inevitably release plugins that aren’t secure, so you should only use plugins from reputable sources.
When you do use plugins, you’ll also need to test them thoroughly and keep them updated, and ideally have them working alongside security-specific plugins such as WordFence. These are issues that a good agency partner should be well aware of and handle for you.
Security is also influenced by the hosting environment of your platform. You can reduce your security risks further with WordPress if you find a trustworthy, well-managed hosting partner to look after your system.
The Global Communities
An active community of developers is a valuable asset for a CMS to have. This is a selection of dedicated users who work hard to contribute to growing and improving the platform, either by releasing new updates and plugins or fixing bugs in the software’s code.
For businesses like yours, the community could make the difference between having a small issue resolved quickly or growing into a big problem. Communities also provide resources to learn more about the technology, to further develop the digital offering you provide to your customers.
Drupal’s Community
Drupal has a fairly niche, but very passionate developer community supporting it. The size of Drupal’s community is considerably smaller than more popular platforms like WordPress, mainly because of that higher degree of coding skill required to use the CMS easily.
However, that doesn’t detract from the level of support or added value you’ll receive if you do opt for Drupal. New themes, modules, and updates are often released to contribute to the quality of websites that can be built on the platform.
WordPress’s Community
Most of what’s been discussed as strengths of WordPress in this article can be put down to the hard work of the community adding to the software.
WordPress’s community is truly global, with millions of users regularly producing innovative new themes and plugins that your business can pick up and begin using with ease.
No matter what issues you run into with your WordPress site, there will always be help readily available from the community.
WordPress users are renowned for their events as well, with free meet-ups and conferences often held to help users learn more about the technology. WordCamp, for example, is a non-profit event that has been run by the WordPress community since 2006 across several continents. WordPress also hosts an annual event called WordPress accessibility day, designed to help increase awareness of the importance of accessibility in modern technology.
The Cost and TCO
Another important aspect of your evaluation will be the cost of your CMS, and its long-term total cost of ownership (TCO).
The platform you choose will need to deliver good value for money and a strong ROI. How easily you can achieve these will vary depending on the CMS and how well it aligns with your business’s requirements.
Drupal’s Up-Front Investment and Ongoing Costs
Drupal is an open-source platform, which means it’s free to use. In most cases, Drupal is a good option in terms of value when compared to other CMSs.
You’ll only need to worry about costs like agency fees for development, your platform hosting, and post-deployment testing and maintenance.
However, the aforementioned complexity of Drupal often causes agency work to be more costly and time-consuming than it would be when working with platforms like WordPress. From basic set up and development to customisation, it’s possible your TCO will continue to grow over the years the longer you’re working with Drupal.
WordPress’s Low Cost and TCO
WordPress, on the other hand, is a very cost-effective solution with a much lower TCO than with Drupal.
It’s another open-source platform with no license fees, and you’ll rarely need to add on new features or capabilities because it comes with so much “out-of-the-box” already.
WordPress development is more simple and affordable, as are its maintenance and support. As mentioned earlier, the fast time-to-market helps you get a high quality website launched quickly so you can begin seeing ROI almost immediately.
Understanding the Role of an Agency
The role of an agency has been mentioned several times throughout this article. That’s because most businesses with a great website will have worked with an agency partner with platform-specific skills to help them bring their vision to life.
An agency can support you with hosting, design, development, maintenance, security, and updates, each of which can be highly complex and challenging to handle alone.
Therefore, it becomes even more important to consider how easy your CMS is to work with, not just for you and your team but for your development agency as well.
With a platform like Drupal, that has a reputation for being difficult and time-consuming to work with, agency projects are likely to be quite a big investment, and an ongoing one at that. WordPress is a platform that’s far easier to work with, meaning that the cost of releasing a quality, secure website will be much more affordable.
A CMS becomes far easier to use when you find an agency with the experience and expertise to help you gain as much value from the technology as possible. Whichever platform you choose, you’ll find it easier to achieve positive ROI if you have a specialist partner supporting you.
Deciding Between Drupal and WordPress
Both WordPress and Drupal are perfectly good options for most businesses looking for a new CMS. While there are strengths and weaknesses to consider, the most important thing is to keep your business’s specific needs in mind.
Make sure you’re clear on your strategic objectives, unique requirements, users, budget, and other factors to inform your decision. Once you’ve done that, use the comparisons in this article to see how each CMS lines up against what you’re looking for. It should then become evident which platform is more suitable for you.
If you need more help in your evaluation of the various CMS options:
- Read our comparison between Sitecore and WordPress here.
- Read our comparison between Umbraco and WordPress here.
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- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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.
- Design
- Development
- Quality Assurance Testing
- Migration and Launch.
- Strategy
- Website Data
- Target Audience
- Industry Landscape
- Competitors.
- 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.
UX Design
10 May, 2022
Infinite Scroll vs Pagination. Which is better for you?
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:
Cons:
Pagination
Pros:
Cons:
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UI Design
18 April, 2023
Exploring the End-to-End Process of Web Design
Summary
In this article, we’ll outline the end-to-end steps of what takes place in a thorough user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) web design process and discuss what modern web design requires to be successful.
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You may have read our in-depth guide to creating a brief for a web design and development project. A brief can be used to capture all your ideas and requirements before discussing your project with any web design and development agencies.
Once you’ve completed your brief, and evaluated your options for agency partners, you’ll be ready to launch into your website project.
An end-to-end website project is typically organised into phases, which will usually be structured as follows:
We’ve provided a detailed breakdown of these phases in a recent series of articles. This series is intended to give you a clear understanding of the full end-to-end process involved when working with an agency to design and develop a website. This will help you remove any apprehension heading into this kind of project and set you up for success.
The Current State of Web Design
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
Steve Jobs, Co-Founder and former CEO of Apple.
While web design does focus on the visual aspects of the site, there’s a lot more to it than just the aesthetic elements like colour schemes and typography.
Web design is a complex blend of branding, user experience (UX) design, user interface (UI) design, graphic design, content creation, layout and structure, accessibility, and much more.
The design of your website needs to be visually attractive but, more importantly, it also needs to be simple and easy-to-use. Your website needs to find the perfect balance between supporting your strategic objectives and serving your clients with a seamless experience. Of course, that’s much easier said than done, which is why it’s so important to find an experienced partner you can trust to guide you through the process.
Outlining the Web Design Process
Phase 1 – Research and Planning
The phase that underpins EVERYTHING!
A good agency will have absorbed everything in your project brief. They should also have worked hard to understand your perspective and your requirements from your website, before you’ve even agreed to work together.
Once you’re preparing to launch the project, the research and planning phase will then go beyond that initial information gathering exercise.

The objective of this phase is to define the full scope of the website, including its design, its features and functionality, its content, and everything else involved.
Your site will be discussed in extensive detail, and then research will be conducted into some key areas that will inform your design and development, such as:
Whether you’re making small updates to an existing design or completely rebranding your business, it’s equally important to use this research to inform every decision you make. That’s because every element of your site’s design must be made to support your business goals and serve your target audience with a great user experience (UX).
This research and planning phase is essential in enabling you and your agency partner to do that.
Phase 2 – Visual Exploration
This exploratory phase involves defining the most appropriate and effective visual direction to take with your site.
The main tool used to help determine the right visual identity for your website is a set of mood boards. These are a visual compilation of different options for colour, typography, structure, images, and other visual components that are used to tell your brand’s story through your website’s design.

A good agency partner will usually present around three mood boards to help shape the direction, then collaborate with you to narrow it down to one final version.
Visual exploration, like most processes within web design and development, will be collaborative and iterative. You’ll be presented with ideas by your agency partner, then given the chance to provide feedback across several rounds of revisions.
Phase 3 – User Experience (UX) Design
The UX design process is the phase in which you work with your agency’s UX specialist to create a blueprint of the website functionality.

This involves creating wireframes (either low-fidelity or high fidelity) that help you visualise the design and outline your website visitors’ flow through the pages into your main calls-to-action. This is the way the website’s design works strategically to drive outcomes that align with your business goals.
This phase takes place before working on the site’s visual design to ensure the two separate aspects complement each other.
Phase 4 – User Interface (UI) Design
From there, your user interface (UI) will be designed. The styles, fonts, and look and feel of the site from the mood boards will be applied to the wireframes.

Your agency will likely present you with a design for your homepage before moving on to the rest of the site. This will typically be done on a desktop screen size, but it can be done on mobile if you want to take a mobile-first approach. Once this is complete, it will then be designed across the relevant breakpoints.
After completing this process, your agency partner will be ready to enter into developing your website.
Making Complex Processes Simple
As technology continues to become more advanced, more and more of our daily lives now take place in a digital-first context. This means:
In order to succeed, your website’s design requires careful planning, research, and a strategic approach if it hopes to meet the demands of the modern client.
Working with a specialist design and development agency is a proven approach to ensuring you gain a website that meets your requirements and delivers on the expectations of your target audience.
Completing a process like the one outlined in this article will enable you to design a website that can become your clients’ go-to online source when they have a need.
As mentioned earlier, we’ve provided a step-by-step guide to each of these phases to make the process even easier for you.
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Development
9 June, 2023
Craft vs WordPress: Which Platform is the Best Option for Your Business?
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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Announcement
4 January, 2023
SoBold’s 2022 Round-Up
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!
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Digital Business
8 March, 2023
5 Women To Shape the Design and Tech Worlds
March 8th is still an important date to remind us of the brilliance of being a woman in our society. Even though it can be a struggle every day, we know that women are capable of anything and we are very proud to celebrate the achievements of these creative and intelligent women.
Hedy Lamarr
Who can live without Wi-Fi nowadays? In 1942, Hedy invented the technology that later helped the creation of wireless signals.
Rear Admiral Grace Hopper
If you’re not in the programming world, you may not have heard of COBOL. This programming language created in 1952 is still used on business applications to this day. Grace was one of the first ever compilers and her work led to the creation of COBOL.
Margaret Calvert
Even in the age of Sat Nav, you’ve probably relied on a road sign at some point, right? Either driving or walking down the street, the reliable signs are a source of comfort when technology fails. Margaret was part of the team that redesigned the whole UK road sign system. It all started in the late 1950s and her work still guides us even to this day.
Carolyn Davidson
‘Just do it’ – the famous tagline from a brand you might have heard of, called Nike. The tick logo was first developed by Carolyn when she was just starting design and the idea behind it to represent speed and motion. Even though the Nike tick is now one of the top 10 most recognised logos worldwide, Carolyn has only made $35 from her design.
Susan Kare
We all know Apple. We all know that they’ve conquered the world of technology by consistently presenting unique designs with both their hardware and software. What you probably didn’t know was that Susan was the designer responsible for developing all the typefaces, icons and other elements that serve as the core for what we now know as the Apple brand.