b13 Blog

Users want to find information fast. If the page navigation is insufficient, they quickly resort to the search functionality. Nowadays, users expect that an on-site search is easy to use, provides flexible options, and delivers specific and useful results. But bringing your on-site search to the next level is not straightforward, because there are many factors that contribute to the overall solution, such as your search engine, content, metadata and your information architecture.

In an ever-evolving technological landscape, keeping your brand and technology up-to-date and competitive can feel like a full-time job. Whether you’re working on a website relaunch, a brand refresh, or a system-wide version update, it’s going to be time-consuming and expensive, not to mention repetitive. When your focus turns instead to future-proofing your website, you ensure your design and technology are ready for anything, now and for the long-term.

The human mind is naturally driven by aesthetics. Interface design, therefore, contributes substantially to building a positive user experience. But when it comes to durability and quality, it's what's on the inside that counts. Although conceptual models are abstract, they let you take a step back and envision how people are going to interact with your product. This distance gives you perspective. Seeing the entire landscape means you can more easily align interactions, relations, transitions, and the functionality of your project. Building an elegant solution underpins a well-made interface.

Site navigation is one of the most important elements of any website, and can greatly impact user experience. Poor navigation can result in shorter site visits and higher bounce rate. The good news: unlike some other UX elements, navigation can be improved relatively quickly. You can address a lot of preliminary issues by following well-accepted usability heuristics. Then go deeper with a thorough analysis of your business goals and user needs to create a site nav that is truly intuitive.

Enterprises now have many software delivery channel options to choose from. With software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud-based implementation models on the rise, you might be trying to figure out the best software delivery channel to support your enterprise’s digital strategy. If you don’t have an internal IT department, SaaS can be tempting, but when you also have stringent data compliance needs, an on-premises (or on-prem for short) solution is your best bet.

TYPO3’s separation of content and code is one of its major strengths. TYPO3 saves content in containers called content elements, which you can stack in content areas on a page record to create pages. The different parts of this highly configurable setup include “page types” (defined by the “doktype” field value in the pages database table record), a “backend layout” configuration, and possibly a third, separate “frontend layout” configuration value. We combine these components in various ways to enable different scenarios and desired outcomes.

In previous installments of our TYPO3 v11 series, we covered some of the great UX improvements that are making editors' lives easier. In this final post of the series, we’ve got something special for all the developers and site administrators: new TCA types. Using these dedicated types will reduce and simplify the TCA configuration required for special fields. They also allow auto-configuration and auto-creation of database fields.

When working with transnational corporate websites in different cultural contexts, it is very important to know the different aspects and demands of your international audience. To make a website optimally available and enjoyable for a wide range of users, you need to look beyond the technical requirements of a CMS only supporting text display and language direction. For your visual design to have a global reach, you need to consider things like aesthetics, symbolism, typography and form construction.

TYPO3’s “Form” system extension is a flexible framework that can handle many configurations, templates, and use cases. While TYPO3 makes it easy to create forms on the fly, your business may have more complex needs that require backend adjustments. Rather than seeking tech help for every minor change, your company might benefit from a custom extension or flexible finisher that makes forms more self-serviceable for marketers. At b13, we love to help our clients get more flexibility out of TYPO3 Forms with custom solutions for specific business needs.

It’s fair to say that there’s a lot of jargon in every industry, but the web seems to have plenty. The misunderstanding about the user interface (UI) versus the user experience (UX) highlights the confusion we often come across in our work. Sometimes customers ask us to build user interfaces, but they haven’t considered the impact on user experience. This quick article explains these terms and why this difference matters.