Our top ten articles on websites and digital customer experience from 2023
Well, that’s a wrap for 2023! Once again, the year has gone incredibly quickly. It’s been a very busy twelve months for us, mainly knee deep in delivering projects for our clients, some of which are continuing into 2024. However, we have come up for air now and then to be able to deliver the odd article on this blog – in fact we’ve been able to publish 24 of them (including this one). We hope you’ve found them useful.
In this post we’re going to look back at ten of the articles about digital customer experience and websites that you may have missed this year (and a few more on top of that).
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Four website development trends for 2023
Back at the start of 2023 our CTO Bryan Archer cast his eye on what we could expect to see in the year in website development space. In the post Bryan covers four key trends – the continuing march of low code no code solutions, the need to prioritise security, the greater emphasis on sustainability and the potential disruption to coding practices from generative AI. Did he get it right? Read this insightful piece to rate his predictions! Also watch in January for Bryan’s predictions for 2024.
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Seven essentials of a law firm website
At 3Chillies we’re particularly proud of our record of supporting law firms with their websites and other digital projects. Back in January we looked at the essential components of a law firm website, some of which are particularly key for the legal sector to validate firm experience and knowledge, as well as facilitate connections. These “essentials” include the partner and staff directory, legal insights, all the statutory notices, a good search and details of practice areas.
We then followed up the post with a second article covering five key challenges of managing a law firm website. Law firms are generally risk averse, lawyers are very time-pressured and marketing automation tends to be not mature, all of which can make managing a legal sector website occasionally challenging, but also actually very rewarding.
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Umbraco round-up: seven recent noteworthy updates
Umbraco is one of our favourite CMS platforms and it has had a very busy year, with multiple product updates to extend its capabilities and release new features. Collectively these have also increased support for headless publishing and composable architecture. We covered several of the key updates and enhancements in this post from March, but we also continued to report on the latest news from Umbraco HQ through the year, with five takeaways from the 2023 Umbraco Codegarden conference in June and Umbraco evolution: seven recent updates to the platform in December.
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What are the essential ingredients of a content strategy?
The phrase “content is king” still holds true – a website is only ever as good as it’s content. But not everybody takes a systematic and strategic approach to defining what their content is trying to achieve, and then works out the foundations that are needed to deliver it. In this post we look at some of the main ingredients of a content strategy including website purpose, customer journeys and brand and publishing guidelines; all the things that help you to deliver strong content.
A companion post listing 10 essential elements of content governance for your website also looks in more detail at the processes, standards and approaches that need to be in place to help maintain the quality of your web content.
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Seven tips for managing digital projects
The success of digital projects often hinges on how they are managed. Here at 3Chillies we take project management seriously and in this post we covered seven key tips for managing digital projects, some of them learnt through experience! We mention the importance of taking a joined-up approach across your designers and developers, why it is best to provide early warnings if things are going wrong, why Acceptance Criteria rock and more.
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Inside the build of a law firm website: 3Chillies and Lewis Silkin session at the Passle CMO Live event
We were thrilled to attend the inaugural Passle CMS Live event earlier in the year, which was very well organised, and had some great presentations. We were pleased to have the opportunity to present a session with Lewis Silkin about what to consider when building a law firm website, based on insights gained from our project-in-progress. This post presents six takeaways from the session with learnings from both the Lewis Silkin team and our CTO Bryan Archer.
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Getting the partner and staff directory right on your law firm or professional services firm website
Legal and professional services firms provide advice to clients that is based on the expertise and experience of their people. This is why it is so important to get the partner and staff directory on your website right, so it properly showcases the knowledge that you can deliver. In this post we cover seven tips for getting your directory right – from focusing on the photography to managing your taxonomy and tagging – ensuring that your partner and staff profiles are engaging, informative and can easily be found.
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How generative AI will influence websites and digital customer experience
Generative AI is undoubtedly the technology theme of 2023, garnering a huge amount of media attention and discussion within businesses. And it’s clearly going to have an influence on the world of digital customer experience, with the ability to create content and new capabilities for customers to interact using natural language. In this post we looked at six ways that generative AI will potentially influence website management and features, from advanced personalisation to improving SEO to the arrival of an army of more sophisticated chatbots.
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New Sitecore announcements: the journey to the cloud and generative AI
Another prediction we make about generative AI is that it will start to appear within features across different CMS and DXP platforms. In this post from October, we explored recent announcements from Sitecore, including how generative AI is being baked into the platform and also the launch of Accelerate – a programme designed to encourage digital teams to switch to Sitecore’s SaaS-based offerings.
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Managing images and assets on your website
Images and documents are an important part of any website, but they are not always subject to the stringent content management that is applied to pages. For example, the media library is invariably a mess! In this summer post we looked at seven good practices to better manage the images and assets on your website, including defining image and asset standards and guidelines, establishing ownership for any reports and files, and yes – cleaning up and actively managing the media library!
Happy new year!
We’ll be back next year for more articles on websites, digital customer experience and content management systems. Until then, we hope you have a peaceful Christmas and holiday season, as well as very happy and healthy new year. See you in 2024!
