• Read more about Mobomo’s Picks: Top 10 Drupal Websites

A chef can make a great meal with a few basic ingredients. But when offered a massive pantry full of options, the result can be a work of art.

The same principle applies when it comes to website CMS software. A basic template-style CMS can result in something that hits the spot. But Drupal’s staggering degree of flexibility and modular options has allowed the developers of some of the world’s most prominent websites to create gorgeous and highly functional sites that inspire, inform, and elevate.

Here are our top 10 picks for Drupal websites that we think have raised the bar:

• Tesla
• PGAL
• The University of Texas at Austin
• Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles
• Mint
• National Baseball Hall of Fame
• The Australian Government
• Rethinking Picasso’s Guernica
• The Emmy Awards
• NASA

Let’s examine these in more detail:

10. Tesla

A rare day passes by without Tesla making headlines. The brand and its founder, Elon Musk, are renowned for big, audacious ideas that have potential to change the world. The beautiful photography and design make every section look like a high-end editorial page in a magazine, while the simple, intuitive navigation and call-to-action features are clean and unobtrusive. It all combines to create a website that’s aspirational yet attainable.

9. PGAL

PGAL is an international design firm focusing on interiors, architecture, planning, and engineering. Their challenge is to show and tell, so that potential clients are dazzled by the site’s visuals while still being able to find enough solid information to want to take the next step. The site, which uses imagery as the gateway to project stories, is a delightful rabbit-hole that we could spend hours exploring. Make sure to check out their Projects page, as it is an excellent example of how to show off a portfolio in a clean but comprehensive way.

8. The University of Texas at Austin

University websites can often be an overstuffed nightmare to navigate, but the team behind UT Austin’s website got it right: Their menu navigation is clean, well-organized, and enticing. Add to it a home page that evokes the fresh excitement of starting the post-secondary journey, while peppering in well-organized data that invites the reader to learn more, and you have a website that gets students and their families off to the perfect start.

7. Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles

160,000 visitors go to CHLA.org every month, making it vital for the site to present clear, accurate, easily navigated information in a way that builds and maintains trust. It’s a tall order, but CHLA.org delivers. The design is clean but far from cold, while the most frequently searched information is put front and center instead of being hidden in the navigation bars, making it easy for frazzled parents to find out what they need to know. The sheer volume of information on the “Patients and Families” page could easily be overwhelming but is organized beautifully and intuitively.

6. Mint

Mint’s value statement: “We help you effortlessly manage your finances in one place.” They offer clean and simple financial management, using a clean and simple sentence to describe what they do. A cluttered or complicated website would completely undermine their brand. Fortunately, Mint.com is anything but cluttered or complicated. The simple and soothing colors and minimalist text are reassuring to visitors who want straightforward information, while the navigation and iconography make navigation a breeze.

5. National Baseball Hall of Fame

For any website to be successful, it has to give the end-users what they’re looking for, and the BHoF delivers. After extensive user research, the site was designed to showcase the incredible stories and artifacts in BHoF’s collection, bringing it all to life for the site’s visitors. Fortunately, it also does so in a way that’s easy to navigate, inviting visitors to spend plenty of time exploring.

4. The Australian Government

As with universities and colleges, government websites can often be an impenetrable labyrinth to navigate. Australia.gov.au does things differently, living up to their header, “Helping you find government information and services.” The site is incredibly well-organized, with virtually no clutter. And even though it has not one photo to speak of, it still manages to be attractive, through a judicious use of color and minimalistic icons.

3. Rethinking Picasso’s Guernica

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía created an ambitious project around one of Picasso's most famous works of art, and the results were groundbreaking: The project has been recognized with a Webby as the best 2018 Cultural Institutions Website. The storytelling and imagery on this site are captivating, while the user experience is smooth and unobtrusive.

2.  The Emmy Awards

The Emmy Awards are splashy and glamorous on the outside, while requiring meticulous planning and organization behind the scenes. Their website is no different. With a plethora of content, rich color choices, and high-quality images, the site is as immersive an experience as the awards show is. But thoughtful, intuitive navigation, exciting features, and well-curated content demonstrate expertise.

1. NASA

NASA.gov is a massive resource on space, astronomy, and the universe, offering detailed information on present and past missions, gorgeous photography, educational resources, and information about the organization in general, to name but a few features. Organizing such a wealth of information in a coherent and clear way shows what is possible with Drupal.

Full disclosure: We’re the team behind NASA.gov, so it’s understandable that we might have a soft spot for this site. However, we’re far from alone in loving the finished product. Our friends at Vardot.com call it “a shining example of Drupal CMS used to present stunning information, and elevate the user’s experience,” and NASA.gov has made the top of more than one “Best Drupal Websites” list.

Want to see the possibilities that Drupal can hold for your organization’s website?
Contact us today!

• Read more about Drupal 9: What’s New, What to Expect

Drupal 9 is scheduled for release on June 3, 2020. And as with any highly anticipated release, questions abound: “What will change from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9?” “What do I need to do to prepare before upgrading?” And top-of-mind is the big question: “What will Drupal 9 be like to work with?”

Read on as we share what you’ll need to know … and what might surprise you.

Anybody who’s upgraded from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 recalls the giant chasm between the two systems. Almost 200 new features were launched including an entirely new page editor, a new theme engine, a new text editor, and new field types, to name but a few.

This gap doesn’t exist between Drupal 8 and Drupal 9. In fact, on the surface, there IS no difference: Drupal 9 has the same code, functions, and feature set as Drupal 8.9.

So why release it then? As it turns out, there are differences — they’re just not front-and-center on the interface.

Time to Clean House

Throughout its development cycle, Drupal 8 has wound up with a lot of code debt: functions that were created programmatically and used for some time but have been rendered redundant by more efficient functions.

These bits of code clutter up Drupal 8 like your old CDs and DVDs clutter up your bookshelf: There’s nothing wrong with them, but you probably don’t need them anymore now that you have something more efficient.

The result of all this extra code is that programmatically, there might be 10 different ways to do one single thing.

What Drupal has done is marked all of those code items in the backend code base as being “deprecated”. When Drupal 9 comes out, the plan is to remove all the deprecated code on this list, leaving only the latest version of whatever that code’s API is. They’ll also be updating third-party dependencies, such as Symfony and Twig. From Drupal’s site:

Will Drupal 9 Be Better?

Yes, but not without some minor risks.

Jettisoning all this deprecated code will result in a much faster, cleaner, and better-operating version of Drupal. However, if you have legacy programs whose modules use some of that deprecated code, you could find yourself with some broken processes.

How to Prepare for Drupal 9

In general, upgrading to Drupal 9 is not an onerous process – it can literally be done via a single command. What will take more time is monitoring and auditing code bases to ensure that none of your functionality is dependent upon deprecated code.

Fortunately, Drupal is well prepared for this, and has indicated that the Drupal 8 branch of the Upgrade Status module can be used  to identify and report on any deprecated code:

In addition, we anticipate that when downloading or updating modules, Drupal will likely advise whether there are compatibility issues due to bad functions. However, that notification system isn’t currently in place (if it indeed happens at all), so your best bet is to work with your development partner, who can audit your code to identify any trouble spots.

Marie Kondo-ing Your Infrastructure

Drupal 9 will be a much faster and more streamlined platform, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If the rest of your operational architecture is similarly full of code debt and redundant processes, updating Drupal 9 will be akin to sending a Lamborghini down a pothole-rutted road: That powerful engine is wasted if the route is slowing it down.

So, going to Drupal 9 is an excellent opportunity to look at your legacy systems, audit them as well, and make sure your entire infrastructure is clean, fast, and free of roadblocks.

The Bottom Line

In general, upgrading to Drupal 9 should not be a complex or lengthy process. By cleaning out the clutter and performing some common dependencies, Drupal is practicing good development hygiene and providing its customers with a more streamlined system that will be faster … but still familiar.

Want to know more? Contact us today!

• Read more about Native Mobile? Cross-Platform? Here’s How To Choose

 When developing an app, there are a multitude of important decisions to make between “Let’s do this!” and “It’s launch day!”

One of these decisions is the application development approach. Is a native mobile app the right way to go? Or would a cross-platform app be a better fit for your needs and your organization? There is no one-approach-fits-all, so it’s important for organizations to avoid false starts and costly redevelopment time by having a solid understanding of their available options.

Let’s analyze these options.

Native App

A native app is one that has been designed specifically for one mobile platform (i.e. Android, iOS), with engineers leveraging the programming language used by the platform’s own operating system (Java or Kotlin for Android and Swift/Objective-C) for iOS. If you wish to have native apps made for multiple platforms, the developers need to make separate codebases.

Advantages to native app development are plentiful. Because the app’s UX is tailored to that specific platform, the app will deliver strong and smooth performance and can take advantage of the device’s full set of functionalities. This tends to result in much higher ratings and better visibility (read: more revenue) in app stores.

Additionally, if the platform OS is eventually updated (which often means bugs will appear), resolving the specific code for that platform is much more efficient and therefore less costly than needing to fix a centralized code base that will affect all the platforms.

So, while native apps do tend to require more time and resources up front, they can offer considerable savings long-term in maintenance and updating.

The Takeaway: Native apps are an investment, but a worthwhile one if you’re looking long-term with your app. The functionality tends to be much better and maintenance is significantly less complex.

Cross-Platform App

Cross-platform apps are designed more as a one-size-fits-all solution …with modifications. A single codebase is written and can then be shared among the different platforms, either using web technologies or tools such as PhoneGap, Titanium, or React Native.

Cross-platform is a popular option among organizations with a tighter timeframe and lower budget, as it only requires one codeset to be written. This makes cross-platform a reasonable option for simple applications like games or single-purpose apps. Some organizations will specify the devices they want the code to work on, while others will make the app available to all users, whether they’re using an iPhone 3 or a Galaxy M30s.

The downsides of the cross-platform approach, however, can be summarized by the old adage, “Jack of all trades, master of none.” Because cross-platform has to be everything to every platform, its performance tends to be suboptimal. In addition, it can’t take advantage of each type of device’s proprietary features, thus limiting the potential.

Indeed, the Airbnb app initially used a cross-platform approach with React Native. But in June of 2018, they announced they were sunsetting their use of this tool and would be focusing on native app development, citing issues like developer experience, quality, and technical issues. Even the world’s most popular social media app, Facebook, made the switch from cross-platform to native in 2012, with Mark Zuckerberg announcing that “the biggest mistake we’ve made as a company is betting on HTML5 over native.”

The Takeaway: If both time and budget are short, cross-platform app development is a great way to get to market quickly … as long as you don’t mind sacrificing some performance.

A Third Option: No App

While apps are an excellent way to increase customer engagement and improve the user experience, they’re not a cure-all. If the app is providing a service that a user would only need once or twice a year for a limited number of functions, it may be better to focus instead on your mobile website experience. On the other hand, if you anticipate year-round use and wish to provide a rich, multifunctional experience, your users will be happy to have that app take up real estate on their devices.

If you have the time and the budget, native app development can provide you with a highly functional app that is not only tailor-made for the user’s experience and device but can also save you maintenance headaches down the road.

Meanwhile, cross-platform apps provide a viable option for smaller budgets and businesses that want to get a simple app out into the marketplace quickly.

Still not certain? The experts at Mobomo are happy to discuss options and recommend the best approach for you and your organization’s unique needs, so contact us today.

• Read more about Mobomo Named Clutch Top 1000 Companies Global 2019

For the second time in a row, Mobomo has been awarded the Clutch Top 1000 Companies in the world! This award highlights only 1% of the companies on the platform and is the most exclusive award offered by Clutch. Companies are ranked based on the quality and recency of verified client reviews, as well as the companies’ market presence and industry leadership.

With passion and expertise in creating cutting-edge, functional, and successful experiences, Mobomo has become one of the top mobile app development companies in the Washington, D.C. area.

In a recent project reviewed on Clutch, Mobomo received 5 stars for developing a custom web portal and Android and iOS apps.

It has been an honor to receive this recognition as 2019 comes to an end. Mobomo is grateful for the support we have from our amazing clients, who have taken the time to provide detailed reviews on Clutch. We are excited to see what 2020 will bring for our team and clients!

About Clutch
Clutch (clutch.co) is a business to business research firm located in Washington, D.C. They are best known for connecting agencies and software solution companies in order to enhance business goals across businesses. Their ratings and reviews platform publishes the most extensive and referenced client reviews in the B2B services market.

• Read more about NOAA Fisheries Wins W3 Award

Mobomo is excited to announce that NOAA Fisheries (www.fisheries.noaa.gov) was selected as the Silver winner of the 2019 W³ Awards in the government website category. The W³ Awards celebrates the digital excellence of outstanding websites, web marketing, video, mobile sites/apps & social content created by some of the best interactive agencies, designers, and creators worldwide. Website entries were judged on creativity, usability, navigation, functionality, visual design, and ease of use.

Partners since 2016, Mobomo collaborated with NOAA Fisheries to design and build a new content management platform using UI/UX tools such as card sorts, surveys, and journey mapping. 

The new website allows various stakeholders, including fishermen, fishing councils, scientists, and students, to easily find information and resources related to the marine ecosystems and coastal communities. Since the implementation of the new mobile-first website, over 85% of customers would recommend the site and 90% would plan to return.

Mobomo is honored to be part of the restructure and redesign of NOAA Fisheries’ digital presence.

• Read more about For 7 Years in a Row, Mobomo Listed on Inc. 5000!

We are pleased to be recognized for the 7th consecutive year as one of Inc 5000’s Fastest Growing Firms. “Our talented, growing and evolving team, driven by delivering elegant solutions to our customers complex problems, is directly attributed to receiving this honor,” said Mobomo CEO, Brian Lacey. “This award highlights the resiliency, leadership, and significant capabilities of our team, showcasing their hard work and dedication to our clients.”.

Mobomo is a premier mobile-first web and mobile application development company that has extensive experience working with federal agencies and commercial enterprises. Inc magazine revealed that we were recognized for one of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies.  The list represents a unique look at the most successful companies within the American economy’s most dynamic segment--its independent small businesses.

• Read more about “Jewels of Asia” Awards Gala Recognizes Two Leaders at Mobomo

CFO ReStart, founded by Mobomo’s CFO Wendy Kessell, has been honored as the Asian American Chamber of Commerce (AACC)’s 2019 New Business of the Year, and Mobomo’s President, Ken Fang won AACC’s Member of the Year. The awards were bestowed at the “Jewels of Asia” Awards Gala held in Tysons Corner, Virginia on May 3, 2019. Dedicated to improving the economic development for Asian & Pacific American (APA) owned businesses in the Metropolitan Washington, D.C. area, the AACC hosts a gala each year in order to recognize businesses, community organizations, and APA business leaders who have made outstanding contributions to both the business community and economy.

The New Business of the Year awardee is recognized for demonstrating proactive and innovation leadership with their business or industry; demonstrating measurable success, growth, or promise as a business; and practicing good corporate citizenship and making exceptional contributions by promoting community betterment as an employer. CFO ReStart's CEO, Wendy Kessell, said "We are so honored to be recognized by the Asian American Chamber of Commerce. We feel fortunate to be able to help many Asian American run businesses with their 8(a) and government accounting needs. It is our great pleasure to work hand in hand with CEOs in many industries - government and commercial - to jumpstart their profits and position their companies at maximum shareholder value."

• Read more about Mobomo, LLC Appraised at CMMI Level 3

May 10, 2019, Vienna, VA - Mobomo, LLC today announced that it has been appraised at level 3 of the CMMI Institute’s Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI)®. The appraisal was performed by Nina Malyutina and Acme Process Group.

CMMI is a capability improvement framework that provides organizations with the essential elements of effective processes that ultimately improve their performance. An appraisal at maturity level 3 indicates the organization is performing at a “defined” level. At this level, processes are well characterized and understood, and are described in standards, procedures, tools, and methods. The organization’s set for standard processes, which is the basis for maturity level 3, is established and improved over time.

Brian Lacey, Mobomo’s CEO stated, “Mobomo is proud to have received a Level 3 appraisal from the CMMI Institute. It demonstrates our project teams’ dedication towards excellence, quality and rigor. Our repeatable processes not only ensure project success, but win our customers awards, including multiple Webby awards, Muse Creative awards, Acquia Engage awards, and Innovate IT awards, to name a few. We look forward to continually improving our process as part of our dedication to CMMI in order to consistently deliver better value and quality to our customers”

CMMI Institute is the global leader in the advancement of best practices in people process and technology. CMMI Institute’s promise is to inspire cultures of continuous improvement that elevate performance and create sustainable competitive advantage.

CMMI Institute offers market-driven solutions that provide insights for baselining and optimizing key organizational capabilities, cybermaturity, and data assets to elevate business performance. For over 25 years, thousands of high-performing organizations in a variety of industries, including aerospace, finance, healthcare, information technology, software, hardware, defense, transportation, and telecommunications, have achieved sustainable business success through adopting the CMMI and proved they are capable business partners and suppliers.

We are recognized as a Top Website Design Company on DesignRush.

• Read more about NASA Wins People’s Voice Webby for Government & Civil Innovation

NASA.gov, the agency’s primary website, has been awarded the 2019 People’s Voice Award in the Government & Civil Innovation category!

NASA.gov, led by Brian Dunbar, NASA’s Internet Services Manager, continues to incorporate cutting-edge technology solutions to communicate the excitement of exploration to the global online public. NASA’s commitment to innovation has been the foundation for NASA.gov’s continued success and solidifies its position as one of the most visited website in the federal government.

NASA’s Office of Communications has managed NASA.gov, the agency’s primary home on the web since 1994, setting a high standard for government online communications. This is the 5^th time NASA.gov has won the Government & Civil Innovation Webby award in the last 6 years, winning each time it has been nominated!

The site receives an average of more than 300,000 visits a day, and surges with major announcements, such as the discovery of the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star, which brought in 6.7 million visits in a week.

Mobomo has been thrilled to be part of an award winning team at NASA – we are excited to see what’s in store for the future.

• Read more about NOAA Fisheries Wins Webby Award in the Science Category

NOAA Fisheries (www.fisheries.noaa.gov) has won the 2019 Webby Award in the Science category!

Started in the fall of 2016, the ambitious project focused on merging all disparate Fisheries web properties under a single architecture, is jointly-led by the Office of Communications’ Director Kate Naughten and Chief Information Officer Roy Varghese. With support from their teams, the new NOAA Fisheries website was designed and built from the ground up to better serve their mission as stewards of the nation’s ocean resources and their habitat.

With a new design and content management platform, NOAA Fisheries was created using UI/UX tools such as card sorts, surveys, and journey mapping. Utilizing the findings, NOAA Fisheries designed and built a website that caters to all of its disparate users, including fisherman, scientists, and students.

The analyses and designs paid off. Since the launch of the new website, the customer satisfaction score has increased by 10%, from 65% to 75%, with 96% of users stating that the information they were seeking was easily found. This combined with a mobile-first website has also helped increase site traffic by 29% year-over-year, including a 67% jump in traffic during Shark Week when compared to the previous iteration of the website.

Mobomo has been thrilled to be part of an award winning team at NOAA Fisheries and look forward to solving new challenges with new innovations.