Why Government Website UX Matters?

Why Government Website UX Matters?


Why Government Website UX Matters? Summary: Multiple case studies (provided below) demonstrate that better User Experience leads to better digital transaction completion rates. Great UX help constituents complete what they need fast and at their convenience. User...
Five Simple Steps to Improve Government Website User Experience

Five Simple Steps to Improve Government Website User Experience


Five Simple Steps to Improve Government Website User Experience Summary: Creating an excellent government website user experience is not unattainable, but it requires consistency and organizational commitment. Regularly review website analytics Learn how people use...
7 Government Websites with the Best UX Design

7 Government Websites with the Best UX Design


If you already read our comprehensive article on Government Website Best Practices: User Experience, you know that we reviewed and rated more than 300 government websites for page speed performance, accessibility, technology, and user experience (UX). Subscribe to our...
Government Websites Best Practices: User Experience

Government Websites Best Practices: User Experience


Government Websites Best Practices: User Experience Design Summary: Top-performing websites combine simple and engaging custom visual design, easy navigation, plain language writing, smooth interactions, website-optimized branding, and high-quality graphics. Summary...
What to Consider When Planning a Government Website Redesign

What to Consider When Planning a Government Website Redesign


Incorporating relevant tasks and deliverables when planning a website redesign or implementation project will significantly impact the overall project approach and outcomes. While identifying most of the features, requirements, and deliverables is a straight-forward...
Government Websites Best Practices: Performance

Government Websites Best Practices: Performance


Numerous studies in the private sector have demonstrated that website speed performance is a critical factor to improved conversions due to a more convenient user experience. Although government websites usually don’t feature e-commerce functionalities, the website...
How to Sort Sitecore Solr Filters in Alphabetical Order

How to Sort Sitecore Solr Filters in Alphabetical Order


Sitecore Solr provides an abundance of advanced search features, but even without implementing anything as advanced as stemming, or search term suggestions, Solr’s default algorithm provides excellent relevancy in the search results. We’ve implemented Sitecore Solr in...
Intranet Business Opportunities and How to Identify Them

Intranet Business Opportunities and How to Identify Them


Organizations and businesses in recent years have sought ways to increase the productivity of their workforces, and eliminate barriers to communication. One way of doing so has been implementation of intranets. These private computer networks have the look and feel of...
Digital Product Design Tools We Love

Digital Product Design Tools We Love


About three years ago, the SymSoft Design team started to design our products and client solutions in an increasingly systematic fashion, looking at the whole map of the interface, rather than individual pages or components. We didn’t know back then that this would...

Sitecore 9.X Intranet Login using Azure Active Directory


Summary I am using Sitecore for a Multisite that is already hosting two publicly available sites. We wanted to create a new intranet site using the same instance of Sitecore. Since this is an internal site one of the requirements was to secure all content using Azure...

Solr POST request not working in Sitecore 9.1


We recently had to upgrade one of our client’s Sitecore website from version 8.2 to 9.1. During the upgrade we noticed that a POST request that was being used for one of the search components stopped working. The following error was being written to the Sitecore logs:...

Advanced Search Experience with Sitecore and Solr


Google-like search experience is so ubiquitous nowadays, that as end users we hardly ever notice it. It allows us to misspell words, expand our exploration beyond the initial scope, or simply provide answers to specific questions. Yet, those familiar with the Tesler’s...

Tips to Make Sitecore load faster on development machines


I have found during my experience with Sitecore that it can take a long time to load when the system first initializes (Happens after publishing code or changing a configuration). This becomes frustrating for developers who are creating the website as for testing they...

Five Factors that Make Products Usable


The terms usability and user experience (UX) appeared in the early 90’s and since then you can hear more and more people talking about them or referring to them as a “must have” in the design of a software solution. And they cannot be more right. It is a common...

Sitecore 9 Analytics Aggregation Stops Abruptly


We recently performed an upgrade from Sitecore 8.2 to 9.0.1 and at first, all was working smoothly. We installed everything in a modified XP3 configuration. After a small incident where SQL Server was down for some time, we noticed that analytics aggregation stopped...

Configuring testing in Sitecore Workflow


Sitecore A/B and Multivariate testing can help content authors improve their web content by performing a statistical analysis based on the data captured by Sitecore Analytics. Results obtained from Content testing can help better organize web content as well as...

Implement Multilingual with item level Language fallback


This article describes how to enable Item level language fallback for your item or template in Sitecore XP 8.1 or later versions. Item level language fallback feature enables an ’empty’ item version in a given language to completely fall back to another...

Sitecore 9 Upgrade and Preview Publishing Target Site


We recently performed a successful upgrade and migration from Sitecore 8 to 9. It went quite well, but wasn’t without challenges. Some examples of those challenges were the migration of custom dynamic placeholders (which now come out-of-the-box with Sitecore 9),...

Quick Upgrade from Sitecore 8 to 9


Okay, so I’ll just start off with the disclaimer: None of what is mentioned in this blog post is officially supported by Sitecore. Sitecore has official upgrade documentation that you should follow if you’re looking to go the supported path. With that over, I should...

“Reach” Statistic Issue in Sitecore 8


After a recent deployment of Sitecore 8.2 for one of our customers, we noticed that the “Reach” statistic when you open the “Personalized Experience” dialog in the Experience Editor was showing some numbers that were rather odd. According to Sitecore documentation,...

Basic SAML SSO with Sitecore 8


Sitecore 9 comes with nifty new configurations for federated authentication using a variety of identity providers, including SAML providers. If you’re stuck on Sitecore 8 for a little while, though, SAML authentication is still a custom implementation. With the right...
Good Design Does Not Sell Itself

Good Design Does Not Sell Itself


We’ve all seen rants from wounded designers complaining about the fate of their concepts at the hands of unappreciative clients—“They wouldn’t know good design if it hit them in the face” or “Another bad client ruining my design”. The feedback is in, and someone is...

Validating Aesthetics in a Web Design Project


Many current design research methods can help teams and organizations to successfully validate interaction, the usability of an user interface and the findability of content. While some research methods are quite exact and quantifiable, others can be less refined....

Tools for Testing Accessibility Compliance on the Web


Designing and developing governmental websites means keeping one eye on accessibility at all times. We’d argue that this should be the case on any type of project, because accessibility compliance is not just another regulation we ought to meet, but a true need for...

Sitecore 8 Component Properties Dialog Scrolls Page to Top


We use Rendering Parameters a whole lot in our implementations, because we like to follow the idea of separation of content and presentation. Basically, content is content, and visual options for displaying that content shouldn’t be kept with the content (i.e. fields...

Rich Text and Empty “a” Tags in Sitecore 8


After content migration for a recent project, we noticed that certain components were throwing errors on the page once content was migrated. Note that we were using GatherContent, a really nice tool to prepare content for migration while implementation of the Sitecore...

Sitecore + Lucene Search Result Ranking


As many of you know, Sitecore’s Content Search API does a great job of hiding the complexities of Lucene, thus providing a quick way for implementers to provide search functionality to their end users when building Sitecore websites. Wrapping search in this way also...

Submit Additional Context Data with Sitecore WFFM


This blog post is a little bit high-level, but provides some ideas for capturing context data when filling out Web Forms for Marketers (WFFM) forms. When I say context data, I mean certain things related to the user’s current context on the website (like the User ID,...

Sitecore Search API Boost by Date Range


With Sitecore’s Search API, boosting by date range may seem like a simple a straightforward thing to do. Well, it is if you choose the right (or, rather, suggested) way to do it. Let’s start with the way in which it will not work: dateBoostPredicate =...

Field Editor Customization in Sitecore 8


I’m sure that many of you have worked with Experience Editor and have used Sitecore’s built-in functionality to spawn a “Field Editor” modal window in order to allow users to edit more complex fields (such as Multilist or Treelist fields). This is a simple and...

GlassMapper and Sitecore Remote Events


As I was working on a project recently, I realized that when using GlassMapper in events that are triggered remotely (in my case, the publish:end:remote event), I was getting a fairly odd error that looked like this: Failed to map to property ‘<Property...

Web design brainstorming through a Google Design Sprint


“Keeping the “technical hat” on for too long makes you forget how other folks (especially non-technical) people see things. The design sprint helped me to step back and look at building functionality from a business (non-technical) point of view.” – Bhavik Patel,...

Sitecore Databases in Amazon RDS


UPDATE: As of July 2016, Amazon RDS fully supports backup and restoration of MS SQL Server backup files. See https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-rds-for-sql-server-support-for-native-backuprestore-to-amazon-s3/ for more information about that. Considering this,...

Turning Off Analytics in Sitecore 8.1


How do you turn off analytics in Sitecore 8.1? I’ve been asked this question many times now, so I’ll write a quick post about it. In previous versions of Sitecore 8 (prior to 8.1), this setting was in Sitecore.Analytics.config and was called “Analytics.Enabled”. In...

Leveraging the Sitecore Links Database


Sitecore’s Links database is actually a very useful tool when you are dealing with a lot of data and have to come up with creative ways to get information from Sitecore quickly. In one of our recent encounters, we had to present a list of items that were related to...

Sitecore Custom Index Computed Field


In our previous Sitecore application, we sometimes need to have a custom computed index field based on the business requirements.  For example, we might need an extra field for faceting purpose of certain data template. In order to have a custom index field, you need...

Sitecore 8 Dev and SPEAK Pre-compilation


If you’re an avid Sitecore developer, you’ll quickly realize that the initial load times for Sitecore 8 are a bit longer than in previous versions of Sitecore. This is primarily due to a new addition to Sitecore’s “initialize” pipeline, namely “PrecompileSpeakViews”....

Sitecore 8 Upgrade Image Size Issue


In versions of Sitecore prior to 7.5, many of us have used parameters in Sitecore’s controls (i.e. sc:image) to alter the size of an image. All works well if you use this strategy for image resizing. However, in some cases, we request the URL to a media item...

Sitecore MVC Controller Rendering


This blog post will describe the steps on how to create controller rendering in Sitecore MVC.  One of the benefits of using controller rendering is to set aside the complex logic in the MVC controller. First, you need to create a definition item in the Sitecore tree....

Index Rebuild Stops Abruptly in Sitecore


While performing a large Sitecore upgrade, we ran across an issue during the step that required us to rebuild the search indexes. It seemed that after a few minutes of working as it should, the index rebuilding process would stop abruptly. Initially, we didn’t even...

SymCal Event Calendar Module for Sitecore 8


For those of you who have been using our SymCal Event Calendar Module for Sitecore 6 and 7, we have recently uploaded a new version of the module that supports Sitecore 8. We also understand that Sitecore’s support for both ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC developers means...

Sitecore 7 Media Upload Permissions Issue


If you’re using Sitecore 7.2 (or 7.5), you’ll notice that the traditional interface for browsing through media items has been improved. What was once the traditional SHEER version of the media browse/upload user interface has now become a more attractive SPEAK version...