Content Management

CMS Contensis Approved for G-Cloud 13

Content Management System (CMS), Contensis, whose customers include public sector organizations like police forces, councils, museums and universities, will be part of the UK Government’s G-cloud 13 initiative.

Contensis is a sophisticated API-first CMS, which supports any design that can be built in HTML. It has been part of G-Cloud since version two and has been included in every iteration of the framework for the last ten years.

G-Cloud 13 replaces G-Cloud 12 and will provide software services, together with associated support services, to UK central Government and public sector bodies.

New Research Suggests Media and Publishing Businesses Have The Best Performing Websites

Media and publishing companies have the best performing websites according to new analysis of all FTSE 100 and 250 homepages by an expert team at Contensis

Travel, hospitality and leisure and retail and grocery; industries which existentially rely on their online presence, failed to make it into the top half of the table. 

Why CTAs Matter Greatly to Your Conversion Rates

A call to action (CTA) on your website is more than a carefully chosen phrase. It’s also a mechanism for encouraging your visitors to convert. Here’s a closer look at why and how the kinds of CTAs you choose could impact your business outcomes. 

The Right Words Can Make Offers Seem More Appealing

Writing a compelling CTA means putting yourself in the position of your target visitors and understanding what words would most likely cause a favorable response and which ones might make them disinterested or even annoyed. 

New Study: Five years after EU antitrust fine, over half of UK Google Shopping ads still come from Google

Five years after the EU commission fined Google 2.4 billion euros ($2.65 billion) and ordered it to open up its Google Shopping service in Europe to external competition, a new study suggests around 53% of ads on the platform in the UK, still originate from Google itself - up from around 49% in 2019. The research from Searchmetrics indicates that after Brexit, Google is no longer trying to increase competition on its shopping platform in the UK.

Connected Content: Rethinking The Role Of Websites

It’s easy to see why social media has become the ‘front of house’ for small businesses in recent years – almost literally in the case of many independent restaurants and cafés.

Free, fast and convenient, these channels offer a multitude of functions for businesses, enabling staff to share information and content and respond to enquiries on the go.

Similarly, customers naturally gravitate towards social media because they don’t need to type in a web address, create an account or fill in a form but simply use an app already on their phone. They don’t have to contend with laggy or difficult-to-navigate websites either.

Full site editing arrives with WordPress 5.9

 This week WordPress 5.9 was released. As was hinted in the BuddyPress 10.0 article, the most anticipated new feature in this new version of WordPress is full site editing. The Site Editor is a new feature to WordPress that allows block editor users to build their entire site with blocks. Unfortunately, full site editing is only available to content creators that are using a Block theme specifically designed to take advantage of the new feature.

End of Life for Drupal 8

This is old news but I thought still worth mentioning. Last month Drupal 8 reached its end-of-life. This means that all versions of Drupal 8 core and Drupal contributed project releases that are compatible with only Drupal 8 have been marked unsupported and are no longer supported by the Drupal security team.

Drupal 8.0.0 was first released on November 9, 2015. The last version was released on November 17, 2021. With the end of life approaching, I also updated my two websites from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9.

My Lack of Blogging in a Pandemic

Blogging has always been a way for me to express myself creatively as I hide away in my home office for "me time". Unfortunately, the COVID-19 Pandemic changed all that with my day job requiring maximum telework which in turn transformed my creative personal space into a remote office that work owned eight hours a day. For my mental and physical health, once those work hours are up I have made the conscious decision to walk away from the computer. I now find it more necessary to find something else to do that doesn't involve screen time. This shift in priorities unfortunately reduced my writing time.