• Read more about What To Keep in Mind When Looking for a CMS Provider

Whether you're a business looking to build a world-class website or a government entity looking for a custom CMS solution that ticks all-the-boxes, finding the right CMS provider is the single most important step in your website journey. But how do you find the right partner? For government projects, website needs and budgets may need to be carefully defined in a solicitation guide for contractors. Businesses, on the other hand, often forge website proposals to send to multiple agencies.

So, what should you include in these proposals and solicitation guides? After all, choosing the right partner can make-or-break your entire website, and you need a holistic, best-fit partner to execute your website project with fervor, ambition, and purpose. Here's the scary part: over  30% of IT projects fail to meet initial guidelines, over 45% fail to meet the budget, and a terrifying 14% outright fail. A carefully crafted website proposal and solicitation prevents website failures and gives your CMS creator a concrete guideline for your website execution.

A Checklist for Your CMS Creator

Before you start writing your website guidelines, you need to know exactly what to include. Writing any type of proposal or solicitation guideline is a monotonous, labor-intensive process. It involves plenty of workshopping, stakeholder touchpoints, and language crafting. So, despite your guideline being a make-or-break component of your website design, many public and private bodies rush through their guideline and hope to discuss downstream details with their provider in-person. That's a bad idea. Your guideline sets the tone for your entire project. You want a thorough, well-defined project scope, and you want to include as many details as possible without overwhelming potential providers.

Let's look at a checklist of every core component your CMS project guideline should have.

What is Your Budget?

Let's start with the big one: budget. While capital isn't necessarily synonymous with beautifully-designed and hyper-functional CMS websites, your budget may restrict your features. You should be upfront and honest with your budget requirements. Every website has one goal: delivering wonderfully purposeful experiences. Your budget will help determine how those experiences get delivered.

An expert CMS designer will be able to help you work within your budget. You may need to shed some "wants" and focus on less-disruptive designs if you have a low budget, but that doesn't mean you can't create an impactful website. If you're honest and upfront about your overall budget, you'll find the most appropriate CMS provider for the job.

What Are Your Aesthetic and Functional Requirements

There are two primary types of website needs: functional and aesthetic. Your functional needs involve features and your overall CMS architecture. These needs contribute to the bulk of your website. You may need custom modules, API integrations, and modular components that deliver meaningful experiences to your customers. Sit down with your stakeholders and discuss what your website needs to do in a functional capacity. Again, your CMS provider will help you immensely with this step. They have the technical experience to navigate the increasingly-complex website component ecosystem, and they'll help you drill down and articulate the types of features you want.

Aesthetic requirements are very personal. Often, your aesthetic needs are based less on your target audience and more on your brand. Who are you? What colors, designs, and patterns represent you? And how can you leverage your brand in a very physical and aesthetic way? 86% of people say that "authenticity" is a key consideration when choosing who to do business with, and using a simple brand color can boost recognition by 80%.

Who is Your Consumer?

Touch base with your stakeholders and consider your end-user. Who is going to be using your websites? And how are they going to be using it? As an example, a public agency looking to create a public-facing news website may want to appeal to a broad, less-defined audience, while businesses often lean into buyers' personas and target audiences. Generally, the more defined you get, the better. Websites that leverage personas are 5 times easier to use for those targeted users.

While we heavily recommend discovering your end-user upfront, this is an area that an expert CMS creator can help you with. At Mobomo, we leverage over 16,000 modules to architect one-of-a-kind Drupal-based CMS solutions. So, we have a wealth of experience in building niche, user-driven solutions for a variety of public and private bodies. We can lean on that experience to move you towards an ideal user. But it's best to come at least semi-prepared.

Who is Your Internal User and What Are Their Needs?

Along with customers, you need to consider your internal users. For internal CMS websites, this is your entire audience. Otherwise, consider who will be using your website internally. Unfortunately, many people ignore internal requirements. Customer-facing websites often get drenched in feature-rich, hyper-visual design with tons of bells-and-whistles while internal users are left to pick apart the scraps. Clunky, outdated modules and generic UIs plague internal pages. But they shouldn't. Creating an internal website that's easy-to-use, engaging, and mobile-accessible can drive productivity and reduce workplace frictions.

During your proposal or pitch, discuss your internal user needs. Any industry-leading website designer will be able to deliver spectacular solutions that cater to internal users or amazing customer-facing websites with easy-to-use back-end architecture for internal developers.

Understanding Needs vs. Wants

Separate your needs from your wants. Not only does this help prioritize your features, but it gives you financial flexibility. For example, a CMS provider may see your proposal and be capable of delivering 95% of your proposal for the budget specified. Having a clear and comprehensive need vs. want structure helps them identify which areas they can exclude. Additionally, categorizing needs prevent you from being approached by providers and creators that may try to haggle with you and exclude must-have features.

Ideally, you want every single feature specified in your proposal, but that may not be possible within your budget. Give CMS providers flexibility and wiggle-room to approach you with a best-fit solution.

Mobomo Can Help You Build Your Dream CMS Website

At Mobomo, we fearlessly pursue rich experiences that go above-and-beyond expectations. Our agile-driven development process and hyper-customizable websites are intricately designed, purposefully experienced, and entirely brand-driven. Are you looking for a world-class government website or business solution?
Contact us. We're ready to help you create websites built on fundamentally disruptive and security-driven architecture.

• Read more about Understanding the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

If there's one buzzword that's dominated the last five years, it's "agile." It's one of those all-too-vague terms that's overused, undervalued, and certainly misused by a large chunk of the dev teams trying to jam it into their software development lifecycle or web development flow. It's not that the tech community doesn't understand the core message behind agile or even that agile is difficult to achieve (given the budget and training).

The problem with agile is that it's incredibly variable and difficult to scale. Iterative development isn't new. And, despite the "word on the street," developers weren't stuck in a Waterfall-loop for the past fifty years. Many agile components have been floating around the dev space since the '80s. The Agile Manifesto — which popularized the term and (in some cases) many of the practices — may have been the Big Bang of iterative development, but it wasn't the spark. These loosely-defined components (e.g., iterative, short cycles, collaborative, etc.) that sit at the heart of Agile have been manifesting in the air for decades.

So, when we look at the larger agile space, almost every organization has its own "version" of agile. In some ways, that's great. The power of agile is its innate flexibility. Unfortunately, this variability makes it difficult to scale agile, since many are trying to scale a one-of-a-kind framework. There's no roadmap... or is there?

Recently, Mobomo was certified in the Scaled Agile Framework (i.e., SAFe). This flexible, scalable, and enterprise-centric agile framework helps organizations build robust, end-to-end agile practices that go beyond product and delivery methods. SAFe penetrates core business models and rethinks how organizations can approach agile in a structured, meaningful, and impactful way.

What is SAFe?

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is an agile-based framework that gives organizations the strategies and guidance they need to execute lean-agile practices at scale. When we look at the average enterprise — which is jam-packed with ongoing projects — finding ways to deliver continuous value that meets business goals and visions is tricky enough. Trying to deliver that value at scale in an environment that's constantly changing is downright challenging. SAFe goes well-beyond building agile teams; it helps define how enterprises can deliver, scale, and manage these projects — as well as how they can breed innovative and iterative practices into their culture.

The SAFe Framework (as of version 5.0) defines 7 "buckets" that enterprises can create to breed agile into their organizations. We'll split these into three more buckets (which will make sense at the end).

Bucket #1: Teams & Delivery

1. Team & Technical Agility

2. Agile Product Delivery

3. Enterprise Solution Delivery

Bucket #2: Product Choice & Culture

4. Lean Portfolio Management

5. Organizational Agility

6. Continuous Learning Culture

Bucket #3: Leadership

7. Lean-Agile Leadership

SAFe Best Practices

Let's quickly cover a few SAFe best-practices.

Mobomo & SAFe

At Mobomo, we're big advocates of agile. We've used agile practices to create projects for NASA, USGS, the US Navy, and thousands of private companies across the globe. As we grew, we saw a need for agility at scale. Recently, we became fully SAFe certified. This is important for us, as a company, but it's also important for our customers. You expect value-driven, customer-centric solutions that adapt and evolve over time. We're going to continue to deliver that value to you.

Want to learn more about Mobomo's services? Interested in our agile practices? Contact us. Let's talk about it.

• Read more about The Pros and Cons of An Agile Engagement Model

Seventy-one percent of organizations use Agile to drive their app development process. By now, most of you have already heard agile-fanatics screaming from the rooftops and corporate execs using the word "agile" as if it's the most modish term on the planet. But what is agile, really? It can be difficult to wade your way through the dense forest of hype artists and the trendy alphabet soup of "agile-like" acronyms to discover the real, tangible meaning of agile.

So, let's cut through the red tape, ignore the trendy buzzwords, and uncover the truths of agile. No. It isn't a catch-all development solution, and it certainly isn't perfect for every development project. In fact, agile has some serious downfalls that seem to be excluded from those 25-page long "Agile Manifestos" that developers and companies are putting out at the speed of light.

To be clear, we're agile "fanatics." We're SAFe certified, and our entire motto (i.e., PUSH) is driven by agile-thinking, and we've used agile methodologies to execute massive-scale projects like NASA.gov 2.0 and The United Service Organizations' app. However, we're going to take a step back. Let's put away the biased hats, ignore the hype, and dig into the nitty-gritty of today's most popular engagement model. Here's everything you need to know about the agile engagement model.
 

What is an Agile Engagement Model?

Engagement models are frameworks that define the relationship between an outsourced development team and your company. In other words, engagement models are "how" your app is getting executed, and your project is being delivered by your development team. There are a wide variety of engagement models, and each of them has specific pros and cons.

Agile engagement involves rapid-fire iterations, immense flexibility, and plenty of collaboration. The overarching goal of agile is (as the name suggests) marketplace agility. So, when the environment outside of your development team changes, agile gives them the tools to quickly react to those changes. Typically, agile development teams have daily meetings, use tools like Kanban boards to execute bite-sized chunks of development, and have the flexibility to rapidly change requirements and needs based on internal and external factors.

In today's fast-paced, digitally-drenched software development lifecycle, agile brings a ton of value to the table — especially on long-term projects that have to cross that oh-so-scary "pit of scaling." According to PMI, 70% of organizations use agile development today, so it's certainly a popular and results-bearing approach to software development.
 

When Does Agile Make Sense?

Since agile requires strong cultural structures, unparalleled collaboration, and iterative-driven strategies, it's best for outsourced projects that leverage in-house teams. In internally-driven development cycles with in-house teams, agile is often used to execute from start-to-finish. However, when you're leveraging outsourced developers, start-to-finish projects may work better with more traditional engagement models like firm-fixed — since they prevent cost-traps and unnecessary cost scaling.

Agile really starts to shine when either:

In the first scenario, your outsourced team will send boots-on-the-ground to your location (or Zoom-on-platform in today's ecosystem). These are people who integrate themselves into your business, so you can push cultural and collaborative requirements onto them. In the second scenario, it doesn't matter as much if you have in-house or external outsourced teams — since you don't have to worry about cost-traps or over-the-scope project requirements. To be clear, agile is very powerful in these two situations. In fact, we would argue that agile can completely change your delivery cycle and help you create more fantastic customer experiences. But there are also plenty of situations where agile isn't strong.
 

Understanding the Pitfalls of Agile

We love Agile. Being SAFe certified, we leverage agile to execute massive government projects and huge client apps. But, despite the hype, there are very real situations where agile simply doesn't make sense. In particular, agile engagement models — meaning you are using outsourced development to execute and grow a project  — are tricky to leverage on from-the-ground-up projects. For starters, agile's iterative and flexible processes don't lend themselves well to budgetary projections. You don't get a firm, upfront quote like you would with firm-fixed. Since project requirements change throughout the lifecycle, agile can breed unpredictability and budgetary concerns into off-the-ground launches (i.e., costs change with the growth of the project and as new demands hit your outsourced team.)

Also, there's a tangible scope issue. Agile development doesn't have a set-in-stone scope. So, it's easy to overthink and over-scope projects with agile. You may start feeding new requirements to your outsourced team on a regular basis. And while these requirements may be things you desperately want, they also incur additional costs. Over time, your budget may grow out-of-control. This can also cause relationship frictions between you and your outsourced partner. The raw flexibility and scalability of agile are exactly what makes it so dangerous for some projects. Requirements can spiral out-of-control.
 

Which Engagement Model Works for Your Business?

There's no such thing as a perfect engagement model. But there is a perfect engagement model for your unique project. Obviously, agile is the most hyped, utilized, and championed engagement model in today's fast-paced development ecosystem. And for good reason. It's amazing. But it isn't ideal for every project. Unfortunately, the disadvantages of agile often get drowned out by the agile fanatics. Not every project fits with agile, especially full builds that leverage outsourced talent.

Will agile work for you? It depends! If you're looking to support an ongoing app or bring over an internal team of outsourced experts, agile could help you execute faster, smarter, and with more purpose. But if you want an off-the-ground app via outsourced talent, agile may put you in a dangerous cost-cyclone that's detrimental to your finances, forecasting, and relationship with your outsourced solution. Are you looking to create an amazing project?

Contact us. We have the skills, experience, and frameworks you need to execute projects across a variety of engagement models. From firm-fixed to agile and beyond, we're here to hand-pick the best solution for your business.

• Read more about Mobomo Receives ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management System Certification

Mobomo is pleased to announce that we have successfully earned the ISO 9001:2015 certification. ISO 9001:2015 is an international standard that specifies requirements for a quality management system. It provides a model for all companies to use to build and operate an effective and efficient quality management system.

Mobomo’s certificate was issued by Intertek (certificate #0110786), a Total Quality Assurance provider that has helped companies ensure the quality and safety of their products, processes, and systems for 130 years. The certification is applicable to user experience, design, mobile, web and cloud development services provided to businesses, government and non-profit organizations.

To become certified, Mobomo underwent two audits conducted by a professional with Intertek. During the first audit, the Intertek team member evaluated our scope of management system, understanding of the standard’s requirements, confirmed the status of our internal audits and reviews, and that our implementation of management system verifies that we were ready for audit number two. For Audit II, our team reviewed our management system with the evaluator to confirm that it met all the requirements of the ISO 9001:2015 standards and that we have effectively implemented the system.

Mobomo is extremely proud of the work that has gone into the development of our quality management system. Through this system, we are anticipating improved overall performance, and improved quality and satisfaction with our customers. We are extremely dedicated to the routine maintenance and adjustments that will be necessary to continue to evolve and adapt.

“Our ISO certification is vital to ensuring our ongoing commitment to customer satisfaction and quality by producing superior products and services to our customers.” – Brian Lacey, CEO.

More about the ISO 9001:2015 certification:

ISO 9001:2015 is based on the continual process of planning, assessing, and revising in order to maintain effective quality management as an organization and with the services offered to clients. In its entirety, it provides a process-oriented approach to documenting and reviewing the organization’s structure, responsibilities, and procedures.

ISO 9001:2015 covers the following seven principles in detail:

The benefits of ISO 9001:2015 for our clients:

By certifying as an ISO 9001:2015 organization, Mobomo has been trained and confirmed compliant to having a structured and efficient Quality Management System in place. We can guarantee to our clients that we:

• Meet all regulatory requirements that are related to our services
• Continuously monitor and suggest process improvements as necessary
• Adapt to the challenges of changing markets and changing customer needs
• Capable of implementing well-thought out and structured approaches to risk-based thinking; therefore, managing any unexpected situations
• Can support global organizations

For more information on Mobomo and our services, please click here.

• Read more about What Goes into a Firm-Fix Engagement Model?

Today's software ecosystem is drenched in competition, scope creep, and costs. The average IT project failure rate is over 10%, and one in six IT projects go 200% over-budget. To be clear, this isn't only a modern problem. Companies have been dealing with project failure for decades. In 2004, The Standish Group Report showed that 72% of projects went over-budget. So, we're all still worming around the same core issues that we've been dealing with for years.

Despite advances in technology and the hefty tech stack we all have packed under our armpits, the simple truth is: launching projects is still problematic for the majority of businesses. So, how do you minimize these failure rates and eliminate pesky cost overages? For many, the answer to this question (and often the source of the issue) is their engagement model. Your engagement model is the plan that identified project execution and launch details between your business and whoever is launching your project.

One of the most popular engagement models is the firm-fixed model. This classic engagement model virtually eliminates scope creep, budgeting issues, and timing frictions, but (like most things in life) it also has some serious downsides. Here's what you need to know about firm-fixed, and why it may help you launch smarter and more efficient projects in the future.
 

What is a Firm-Fixed Engagement Model?

A firm-fixed engagement model is a fixed-price contract that requires outsourced development agencies to create a project in a fixed timeline based on a set-in-stone, upfront cost. So, the development team will sit down with the company, discuss the project, and set the upfront scope, scale, time, and price of the piece before development begins. Once the contract has been signed, the company will know exactly how much they need to pay, and when the project will be delivered to them. Any additional costs accrued during the development phase due to unknown or unaccounted for features will be on the outsourced development team — not your company.

There's a safety net that comes with firm-fixed contracts. Developers can't add additional hidden fees, go "over-scope" and charge you the difference, or adjust project requirements halfway through the development process. However, there are also some downfalls to firm-fixed. You can't change the scope of the project mid-way through the development process without incurring additional charges, and firm-fixed doesn't work well with mid-horizon (+3 years) or loosely-defined projects.

Remember, firm-fixed sets the project in "stone." So, if the market changes during the development phase, it's difficult to readjust the project requirements. For some companies, this sounds "anti-agile" or "anti-lean." However, firm-fixed doesn't mean the dev process has to have anti-agile tendencies. This depends solely on your outsourced developers. That being said, firm-fixed does not suit in-house or hired team development — since it's difficult to operate on fixed costs in this type of environment.
 

How Are Costs, Time, and Scope Accounted For in a Firm-Fixed Engagement Model?

The firm-fixed engagement model is a classic. It helps align outsourced devs and businesses to the same goals, and it keeps the entire project on-budget and on-time. So, how does this work in the context of scope, flexibility, and time?

Which Project Work Best With the Firm-Fixed Model?

Traditionally, the firm-fixed engagement model has been primarily leveraged by outsourced teams. That still rings true. In-house teams have little to gain from firm-fixed, since it locks you into a less-agile framework for project development. With in-house teams (both salaried and sourced), it makes sense to use agile models that emphasize iterations, continuous adjustments, and consistent re-works. Everyone is on-site, deeply integrated with your company, and juggling multiple high-impact projects.

Outsourced teams exist in a different space. Firm-fixed helps you align everyone to a clear-cut goal with hyper-predictable cost structures and timelines. You may not want your outsourced team to have the potential to scope creep your project, add costs onto the dev cycle, or miss that ever-so-important deadline. Firm-fixed bakes project requirements directly into the contract.

So, when we look at projects, firm-fixed works great with zero-to-launch projects that have an identified scope. These are things like websites, portals, small software programs, and extensions or updates on apps. Firm-fixed lets you cut through the grease, identify requirements, and get results all within a predictable budget. However, zero-to-launch projects that have a mid-horizon timetable (think +1 year) may not work well with firm-fixed, since you lose agility and the ability to rapidly adjust project requirements to changes in the marketplace or consumer behaviors.

To help clarify the value of the firm-fixed engagement model, let's look at some recent statistics from PMI's Pulse of the Profession — which surveyed +3,000 project managers, 200 senior execs, and 510 PMO directors:

In other words, almost half of projects go over budget, over the timetable, and over scope. That's a big problem! Firm-fixed provides you with an easy-to-use model that circumvents these types of common project issues. Sure. You lose some agility on the front-end, but for zero-to-launch projects that can be completed in under 1 year, firm-fixed is a more affordable, approachable, and predictable model than Agile.

Your Model; Your Way

Creating, launching, and maintaining amazing IT projects isn't easy. We can help. At Mobomo, we specialize in best-fit project execution. Whether you want a rapid-fire project on a firm-fixed contract or a long-term behemoth that's agile and purpose-driven, we can deliver incredible projects that impress boards, amaze customers, and win revenue. Contact us to learn more.

• Read more about Mobomo, LLC Won Three Awards from the 2020 Vega Digital Awards: Season 2

The Vega Digital Awards has released their 2020 Season 2 winners and Mobomo has proudly won three different awards:

• Centauri Award for NOAA Fisheries under the Science Website category
• Arcturus for NOAA Fisheries under the Government Website category
• Arcturus for the PRAC Pandemic Oversight work under the Government Website category

The Vega Digital Awards recognizes and honors digital content creators worldwide for their exemplary talents and creative minds. These awards are open to all, no matter the affiliations or experience of the creators. To evaluate the entries, a panel of experienced judges evaluates and critiques each entry, providing a rating on a scale of 100.

Mobomo is honored and proud to receive these three awards. We know how hard the two teams have worked from researching, designing and developing both the fisheries.noaa.gov and pandemicoversight.gov sites. Our hats go off to them and thank each and every team member for their dedication to the project and to the clients’ overall happiness with the work we’re conducting.

More about these projects:  

NOAA Fisheries:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries, also known as the NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), is a federal agency responsible for the stewardship of the nation’s ocean resources and their habitat. Their services include: conservation and management of U.S. waters to promote prevention of overfishing, declining species, and degraded habitats. NOAA Fisheries manages five coastal regions broken down by department, fisheries management, science centers, and labs. Each office ran their own independent site creating inconsistency and overlap in content and design as each isolated digital property.

Mobomo partnered with NOAA Fisheries to assist in restructuring and redesigning their digital presence. Merging all their core web properties into one Drupal site allowed users to go to one destination to find and discover information they need. Mobomo focused on improving content efficiency, design consistency, and unifying NOAA Fisheries voice. Mobomo followed a user-centered approach that consisted of discovery, research, design, and validation phases to deliver a comprehensive, documented and validated user-centered design and information architecture that unified the 16 previously disparate web properties into one site.

Within one year, we launched the framework for their next generation site.

The NOAA Fisheries site is more than a conveyor of marine life information and research. It offers a large variety of information; from summaries of upcoming rules, permits, funding opportunities, to various types of helpful resources. Each section had its own challenges for the Mobomo team to learn and develop automated solutions around. The goal was to automate and simplify the content for users to locate, as well as for editors to post and manage.

The PRAC:

In 2020 the Coronavirus reached the United States calling for the development and passing of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act (CARES Act). To help inform the public of the spending provided by the CARES Act, the PRAC (Pandemic Response Accountability Committee) and Mobomo teams launched PandemicOversight.gov. The overarching goal of this site is to promote transparency for the government’s spending in response to COVID-19 by displaying the details of who received the $2.6 trillion relief and how they will be spending it. The site also provides helpful resources for reporting fraud and funding abuse.

Mobomo’s objective was to redesign, develop and deploy a new website for the PRAC built using a Drupal content management system (CMS) and deployed into the Microsoft Azure cloud. The website needed to support displaying interactive graphics for showcasing Coronavirus relief funding, as well as various government reports surrounding pandemic response and instances of fraud, abuse and mismanagement of relief funding. Due to resource circumstances, the new website had only a 5-week timeframe for redesign, develop and deployment of the new website.

Within the tight turnaround, Mobomo successfully launched the new site. The layout was designed using Mobomo’s human-centered design process. This resulted in a modern and clean look that is easy for viewers to use and understand the data and funding information provided.

• Read more about A Look at Drupal’s New Layout Builder

Recently, Drupal has been on an update rampage. The introduction of the oh-so-beautiful Drupal 9 core has spurred a chain reaction of upgrades across the Drupal platform. Just this week, we're getting a new default theme (which is hyper-minimalist and easy-on-the-eyes), a 20% reduction in install times, and automated lazy load for images. But let's talk about the juiciest UI/UX update that came with Drupal 9 — the standardization of Drupal's Layout Builder.

If you've built a pre-Drupal-9 website over the past few years, you probably dabbled with Panels/Panelizer, WYSIWYG templates, or even custom coding to set up your UX/UI. And that works. We did it for years. But you can throw that worn-out Panelizer module in the trash. The times, they are a-changing. Drupal's new Layout Builder module combines the core functionality of Panelizer with an out-of-the-box WYSIWYG engine.

First hinted at in 2017, Drupal Layout Builder officially left the onerous Drupal testing pipeline last year as part of Drupal's 8.7 updates. Despite circulating for a year now, the chaos of 2020 has overshadowed this potent and flexible tool. So, let's talk about it. Here's what you need to know about Drupal's Layout Builder.

What is Layout Builder?

Layout Builder is a WYSIWYG page editing engine that lets you manipulate back-end features via an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface. It's difficult to overstate just how valuable Layout Builder is when it comes to time-savings. You can create templates in minutes, immediately preview and create content changes, and tweak page-by-page UI/UX features to create more cohesive and on-the-fly websites and landing pages.

At its core, Layout Builder is a block-based layout builder. You can create layouts for either a single page or all content of a specific type. In addition, you can jump in and create rapid-fire landing pages based on your existing design theme. There are three "layers" that Layout Builder operates on to help you build out holistic websites.

1. Layout templates: You can create a layout template for all content of a specific type. For example, you can make a layout template for your blog posts or a layout template for every product page. This template will be shared across all pages, so you don't have to go in and rebuild for each content type.
2. Customized layout templates: You can also go in and make granular changes to a specific layout template. So, if you want a certain product page to be different than the layout template, you can make granular changes to just that page.
3. Landing pages: Finally, you can create one-off pages that aren't tied to structured content — like landing pages.

Important: Founder of Drupal — Dries Buytaert — dropped a blog post with some use cases for each of these layers.

To be clear, Layout Builder isn't a WYSIWYG template. It uses your existing template. Instead, it allows non-developers (and lazy-feeling developers) to quickly make per-page changes to the website without diving into code. But these aren't just simple changes. You can create a layout template for every page type (e.g., creating a specific layout for all the shoes you sell), and you can also dive into each of these layout pages to make custom changes. So, it really lets you get granular with your editing without forcing you to completely retool and redesign pages for each type of content. This gives Layout Builder a massive advantage over WordPress's Gutenberg — which requires you to go in and re-lay elements for every page individually.

Here's the kicker: you get a live-preview of all changes without bouncing between the layout and the front-end. Every block and field you place and every change you make to taxonomies or content is visible the second you make the change. The entire process takes place on the front-end, and changes are instantly visible. Remember, Layout Builder is part of Drupal's Core, so you don't need to implement new entity types of dig into third-party elements. It's an out-of-the-box experience.

Advantages of Layout Builder

Last year, we got a gorgeous, picture-perfect demo of how Layout Builder would work. It's beautiful, fast, and packs a punch that other leading layout builders are indeed missing. So, to help unpack the value of Layout Builder, let's look at some of the advantages of Layout Builder:

Customization

Beyond Layout Builder's incredibly powerful and customizable block-based design engine, it offers customization in usage. Let's say you want to create an amazing landing page. You can start with a blank page that's untied to structured content, drop in some hero images, a few pieces of text, some content, and a video. Suddenly, you have a custom landing page (complete with modules, blocks, and taxonomy) that exists in a separate ecosystem from your website.

Simultaneously, you can create a template for every blog post, then dive into a specific blog post and make on-time changes to just that page while still being tied to your structured content. Remember, you can make these changes nearly instantly, without touching code. And you'll see a live preview of every change immediately without switching between interfaces.

Accessibility

Drupal is committed to accessibility. The second principle of Drupal's Values & Principles page reads, "build software everyone can use," and this rings true. Layout Builder meets Drupal's accessibility gate standards (i.e., conforms to WCAG 2.0 and ATAG 2.0, text color has sufficient contrast, JavaScript is keyboard-usable, etc.)

Ease-of-use

Like many WYSIWYG editors, Drupal Layout Builder is all about "blocks." But these aren't your run-of-the-mill blocks. There are inline blocks, field blocks, global blocks, and system blocks. Each of these has its own use case, and you can combine these block types to create stellar pages in minutes. For example, global blocks are used to create templates, and inline blocks are used to create page-specific changes that don't impact the layout. The combination of these block types makes Layout Builder a hassle-free experience.

Additionally, there are plenty of ease-of-use features built into the core. Layout Builder works with the keyboard, has plenty of usability features that tie to Drupal's value statements, and allows nit-picky setups for customized workflows.

Creating a Drupal Website is Easier Than Ever

With Layout Builder, users can generate valuable content and pages without needing to patch together various WYSIWYG tools or Panel/Panelizer. At Mobomo, we're incredibly excited for our clients to dive into Drupal Layout Builder and make actionable and memorable changes to their templates based on their in-the-moment needs and experiences.

But Layout Builder isn't a replacement for a well-designed and well-developed website. We can help you build your next world-class website. Once we're done, Layout Builder gives you the freedom to make substantial changes without the headaches, back-and-forth, or unnecessary touchpoints. Are you ready to create a customer-centric, experience-driven digital space? Contact us.

• Read more about NOAA WIN

MOBOMO, LLC WINS $13M CONTRACT FOR NOAA WEB MODERNIZATION

Mobomo, LLC is honored to have been awarded a new web modernization contract with National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Within this new contract, Mobomo will support NOAA Fisheries, NOAA, and the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) in improving the efficiency of web content management and enhancing the user experience for NOAA customers. We are excited to continue our award-winning partnership with the Agency and to continue to develop a first-class experience for NOAA’s online audience.

Keys to Success

This new contract will continue Mobomo’s long-standing partnership with NOAA. Mobomo previously worked closely with NOAA Fisheries on a Drupal 8 Web Modernization project that resulted in a new cloud-based, mobile-first responsive design to create an up-to-date, trusted, mobile-friendly website (https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov) using Acquia’s Cloud Enterprise (ACE) Platform where visitors can easily find information on the science and management of our nation's living marine resources and their habitats. This modernization has won numerous awards and industry accolades. Two key factors led to this tremendous success and provide the foundation for continued improvement for NOAA in this new partnership:

Mobomo and NOAA Awards and Recognitions:

We are incredibly proud of the outstanding work that came from our work with NOAA. The efforts of all parties involved led to many awards and recognitions including:

• 2019 Webby
• 2020 Webby Honoree,
• 2019 W3 Award
• 2018 Muse Award
• 2018 Acquia Engage Award

We look forward to continuing this mission to improve NOAA’s digital engagement and service to its customers.

About NOAA:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries, also known as the NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), is a federal agency responsible for the stewardship of the nation’s ocean resources and their habitat. Their services include: conservation and management of U.S. waters to promote the prevention of overfishing, declining species, and degraded habitats. NOAA Fisheries manages five coastal regions broken down by department, fisheries management, science centers, and labs.

• Read more about How Do You Source Feedback from Your Users?

Here's a question: Are your customers really happy?

As a business, you spend time, money, and headaches trying to develop best-in-class products and services. You put on armor to go to battle with your competitors, and you sweat blood and tears to grow your brand. But how do you know that your most valuable asset (i.e., your website) is really meeting customer expectations?

The customer experience has overtaken price and product as the #1 brand differentiator. Unfortunately, customers aren't jumping through hoops to tell you about their experiences. It’s estimated that 1 out of every 26 unhappy customers actually complains. The rest, they just leave... forever.

If you want to roll out a best-in-class website that convinces and converts, you need to understand what your customers want. So how do you do it? How do you get customers to tell you their pros and their woes? Let's talk about hunting Ishmael's white whale. Here's how you discover what your customers really think about your website.

Why Should You Source Feedback From Your Users?

Why should you worry about soliciting feedback? After all, can't you just wait for customers to tell you? Or, can't you just use analytics and testing software to determine issues? Here's the problem: software can't tell you what customers are actually thinking. Sure! There are obvious problems like speed, broken links, and laggy interfaces. But beyond the tangible lies the very real intangibles, and they're the driving force behind customer satisfaction.

62% of companies are specifically investing in feedback generation solutions to help them meet the ever-changing needs of the modern customer. Over two-thirds of companies compete on customer experience alone. And the number of businesses investing in game-changing omnichannel experiences has jumped from 20% to 80% over the last five years.

For customers, the experience is everything. 86% of customers will pay more for a great experience. 49% have made an impulse purchase due to their great experiences. And a massive 57% of customers will refuse to do business with your company if you have a poorly designed website or mobile compatibility. And that's the interesting thing. Design is in the eyes of the beholder.

If you want to know what your customers want... what they really want deep down... you have to elicit feedback. It's the only way. You have to jump into the trenches and figure it out.

So how do you do it?

How Do You Gather User Feedback (And What Do You Do With It)?

At Mobomo, we always say that we build "customer-centric websites." But we aren't just throwing around marketing buzzwords. We dive deep and leverage tools like ForSee to gather and analyze customer feedback quarterly. After all, a website is a living, breathing organism that requires change, action, and movement to remain viable in today's constantly evolving market.

For us, eliciting feedback is done with tools. And we highly recommend that you do the same. Sure! You can try emails, postcards, surveys, and all of the other wonderful pop-up(ish) methods. But they only give you some details. You need to be able to analyze feedback at scale, combine it with CX benchmarks, and leverage best-in-class road maps to intelligently attack CX across the user journey.

In other words, we recommend that you either:

Trying to tackle CX with ad-hoc processes is a surefire way to get beat out by your competitors. And, remember, CX isn't just one metric; it's the metric that spells success in 2020 and beyond.

What Are the Benchmarks of an Effective Design?

Every company will use different design benchmarks. Remember, design is personal. And so is the purpose of your design. For example, the purpose of our project with NASA differs from the purpose of our projects with B2C point-of-sale brands. If you're a B2B or public agency, you may want to drive users to engage and learn. White papers, downloads, and mid-funnel resources may be the most significant part of your play. So, using design that lures and drives users to these assets is front-of-mind for your business.

On the flip side, a B2C brand may be looking for sales volume. In this case, driving users to products, descriptions, and shopping cart purchases may be your largest driver. These are two very different circumstances. And they both require different benchmarks for success.

You should always start by figuring out your value-based business objectives. From there, you can start breaking down the UX factors that will help you achieve those goals by A/B testing UX/UI changes and benchmarking UX specifics that exist in that value landscape.

We won't spend too much time discussing benchmarking because it simply varies too much. But, you do have to benchmark. It's not optional. If you want best-in-class UX, you need the right benchmarks to track and measure success.

How to Perform a User-Centric Rollout

When you first start sourcing feedback and developing benchmarks, you'll start making changes. Watch out. Changes are good. Poor implementation of changes is bad. The biggest UX mistake is trying to roll out massive changes across all users. If you have a high-traffic website making big UX changes, you have to carefully and methodically roll out changes in a way that doesn't impact the user.

DNA changes can create superheroes or cause illness. You want the former. The proper rollout is how you avoid the latter. Practice safe hygiene during rollouts and always roll broad changes out slowly while testing at every step. Benchmarks are great. Feedback is great. But if your excellent new UX feature has the opposite impact that you intended, you need to be able to pull-the-plug before it impacts too many users. The stakes of the customer experience are too high.

Are You Ready to Build a Customer-Centric Brand?

Gathering feedback is the easy part. Figuring out how to leverage that feedback to make meaningful changes is challenging. We can help. At Mobomo, we design user-centric websites baked in proven UX. We elicit feedback, use powerful analytics to drive decisions, and carefully A/B test changes across populations before rolling out new solutions. We don't just build websites. We build experiences.

Contact us to learn more.

• Read more about Debunking 4 CMS Migration Myths

Here's a dirty secret: most businesses are unsatisfied with their website. Research shows that 34% of website owners are unsatisfied with the amount of business their website generates for them. Loudhouse data suggests that 62% of business owners believe a more effective website would increase their sales. And millions of business websites deal with slow load times, inconsistent customer experiences, and problematic UI/UX issues.

There's a reason that 36% of small businesses STILL don't have a website. Creating an amazing, design-driven, customer-centric website is challenging. So, what do you do when your website isn't making the cut? You look towards the source — your Content Management System (CMS). Every year, thousands of private and public entities migrate their website to a new CMS.

But, unfortunately, thousands more don't. Migration is scary. It's easier to stay with your current CMS and focus on redesigns or new templates. Here's the problem: new coats of paint don't fix broken engines. If you're thinking about migrating from WordPress or Joomla to Drupal, you've probably heard rumors and myths regarding migrations.

Let's clear those up. Here are 4 myths about migration that need to be squashed.

Myth #1: I'm Going to Lose All My Content/Data

This is, by far, the most common excuse against migrating. You're worried all of that precious content and data are going to fall off the ship if you switch ports. And, you're right to worry. It could... if you don't migrate correctly. But it's not inevitable. You can prevent data and content loss. In fact, if you lose data or content, we would consider that a failed migration. In other words, successful migrations keep data and content intact by definition.

Here are some handy-dandy steps you can take to ensure that your precious data doesn't go overboard during your migration:

Myth #2: I Have to Invest in a Redesign

You're migrating; you might as well invest in a redesign, right? Sure! You could. But it's tricky. When you do a redesign and a migration, you're no longer just matching URL-to-URL and content-to-content, you're simultaneously rebuilding your website. Don't get us wrong; there are advantages. It's a great time to redesign from an SEO perspective (you're already going to take a small hit during the migration; more on this in the next section), but it also requires significantly more planning, budget, and time.

If you want to do a redesign-migration, we heavily recommend that you touch base with your design company. You want to work through the kinks and create a best-in-class action plan to tackle any issues that may (or may not) pop up. The entire migration will be structured around the redesign, so it's important to carefully weigh your options.

Myth #3: Goodbye SEO!

From an SEO perspective, migration sounds like a nightmare. You've worked diligently to build up your SEO. What happens when you frolic to a new location? Let's get this out of the way: your SEO will take a temporary hit. But, it shouldn't last long. In fact, there's a good chance you're moving to another platform because it's better at handling SEO. For example, Drupal has built-in SEO capabilities (e.g., title-based URL nodes, customizable meta tags, etc.) WordPress does not. Obviously, you can get SEO plugins for WordPress that help you build SEO functionalities, but most of those plugins are also available for Drupal — so Drupal gives you a net gain.

Here's a secret: migration can help your page rank. After the first awkward week (Google has to recrawl your website, recognize that it's you, and give you back your ranking), migration can help you build a more powerful SEO framework.

Want to migrate without dumping your SEO overboard? Here are some tips:

Myth #4: You Just Have to "Lift-and-Shift"

There are plenty of myths surrounding the difficulty of migration. But there are also a few myths making migration out to be super easy. And, without a doubt, the most prevalent "easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy" migration myth is the ever-coveted "lift-and-shift." There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for migrating websites. Sometimes, it can be as easy as lifting content off of one website and putting it onto another website. But that's seldom the case.

Generally, you need to set up test servers, check to see if website elements function correctly on the new platform, test out and utilize new CMS features, and a variety of other tasks before you can simply drop content from one place to another. In other words, lift-and-shift may work when you're migrating a cloud environment, but it often doesn't work with CMS migration.

Remember, just because everything worked perfectly in one environment doesn't mean it will in another one. You may have to fix some website elements and carefully construct your new website ecosystem. At the same time, you'll probably be playing around with the new features available to you on Drupal — so the "lift-and-shift" is usually more of a "lift-and-test-and-shift."

Do You Need Help With Your Drupal Migration?

At Mobomo, we help private and public entities migrate to Drupal environments using proven migration strategies and best-in-class support. So, whether you're looking to establish your website in a more secure, SEO-friendly environment or you're looking to do a redesign-and-migrate, we can help you migrate pain-free. Are you ready to move to a brighter future?

Contact us. We've got your back.