Content Management

During the past seven days I've been upgrading our websites from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10. There are four of them which includes socPub, CMS Report, INFOTECH Pub, and After Work Pub. While one is never quite done with the work, we're quickly moving from the upgrade back to the maintenance phase of these website. As the dust settles down it will soon be time to start focusing on the content and presence of these websites.

How you build and design your website, you should always have UX (user experience) at the forefront of your processes.

Without a good focus on UX, you may end up with a website that keeps visitors from engaging with your small business. Yet, a site that establishes long-term relationships with customers is key to growth and profitability.

Though most experts say UX is fundamental to online business success, maintaining a high-quality user experience at all times is no easy feat. One way to ensure the user experience is meeting user expectations is by analyzing your big data results.

Here are some ways business owners use it to improve UX. 

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.

 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.

BuddyPress 10.0.0 "La Pino'z" is the first major release of 2022 for the WordPress plugin. BuddyPress is a plugin to build online communities and includes features such as user profiles, groups, activity streams, notifications and can be integrated with the WordPress plugin bbPress to enhance community forums.

Highlights of new features and significant changes in BuddyPress include:

It’s becoming increasingly clear that online retailers are losing out on billions of dollars in revenue because their websites don’t meet the needs of disabled shoppers. Unsurprisingly, more than two-thirds of disabled online customers click away from sites they find difficult to use, despite the total spending power of this market in the UK hitting £17.1bn [$23.3 billion USD].

This isn’t something that will just automatically improve as technology advances. In fact, the problem has become worse in recent years, as businesses shift to digital it exacerbates the difficulties that many people have.

The third feature release of Drupal 9 recently became available. New features and improvements in Drupal 9.3.0 include:

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.