Mar 21, 2025 | Artificial Intelligence
A problem which we are commonly faced with at Axyom regards which LLM to use for various downstream tasks. While there are a range of evaluations, it’s not always clear which ones to look at and which will be relevant for your task. In this blog post, I will cover a...
Mar 14, 2025 | User Experience Design, Digital Experience
Azure Notification Hub is a scalable push notification service that allows sending messages to multiple platforms, including Web Push (VAPID), Apple Push Notification Service (APNs), and Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM). Recently, we integrated web browser based push...
Mar 14, 2025 | Digital Experience
Azure Active Directory B2C (Business-to-Consumer) is a custom identity management solution provided by Microsoft Azure as part of Microsoft Entra. It is designed to handle authentication for millions of users with auto-scaling capabilities and built-in security...
May 16, 2024 | Digital Experience, Accessibility, User Experience Design, Web Design
Understanding Color Contrast on Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2024 Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is an annual event celebrated on the third Thursday of May, dedicated to raising awareness about digital accessibility. It’s a day to reflect on the...
May 10, 2024 | Digital Experience, Employee Experience
PRESS RELEASE: California Signs Partnerships to Utilize GenAI (Click here for Official GovOps Press Release) Date: May 9, 2024 WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: Leading companies will utilize cutting-edge technology for five specific challenges, working with state teams on how...
Apr 22, 2021 | User Experience Design, Digital Experience, Web Design
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...
Apr 8, 2021 | User Experience Design, Digital Experience, Web Design
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...
Mar 16, 2021 | User Experience Design, Digital Experience
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...
Mar 3, 2021 | User Experience Design, Digital Experience, Web Design
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...
Feb 18, 2021 | Sitecore, Digital Experience, Employee Experience
This article is the second part of our Department of Water Resources’ Intranet case study that Bianca Sievers, Kevin See, and Bhavik Patel presented at Sitecore Symposium 2020. In case you missed it, read the previous part about Intranet business opportunities and how...
Feb 11, 2021 | Sitecore, Digital Experience, Web Design
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...
Feb 5, 2021 | User Experience Design, Web Design
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...
Jan 29, 2021 | Sitecore
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...
Jan 27, 2021 | Sitecore, Digital Experience, Employee Experience
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...
Feb 12, 2020 | User Experience Design
Design systems have emerged as a popular tool for organizations in recent years because of their ability to support business goals and communicate brand values by providing a unified and consistent design language to work with. With this integrated set of tools and...
Feb 5, 2020 | User Experience Design
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...
Jan 17, 2020 | Sitecore
When we were migrating from Sitecore 8.2 to 9.1.1 we found the following exception in our AppInsights Logs. Also, non-admin users were reporting that they would receive a fatal error that looks like the following: We weren’t sure what was happening but in the...
Jan 8, 2020 | Sitecore
Jan 2, 2020 | Sitecore
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...
Dec 30, 2019 | Sitecore
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:...
Apr 1, 2019 | Sitecore, Digital Experience, User Experience Design
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...
Jan 22, 2019 | Sitecore
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...
Sep 17, 2018 | User Experience Design, Digital Experience
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...
Sep 10, 2018 | Sitecore
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...
Aug 24, 2018 | Sitecore
Recently during one of our projects there was a need to perform a search on a content item based on a “Keywords” field. This field was of type single line text and it had contained a list of keywords separated by commas. The keywords could be a single word or a...
Aug 21, 2018 | Sitecore
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...
Aug 17, 2018 | Sitecore
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...
Aug 15, 2018 | Sitecore
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),...
Jul 31, 2018 | Sitecore
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...
Jun 24, 2018 | Sitecore
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,...
Jun 5, 2018 | Web Design
It’s no secret that a large percentage of digital transformations fall short of expectations or outright fail. Many blog posts have been written about why companies struggle with digital transformation. Website redesign projects are a form of digital...
Mar 10, 2018 | Sitecore
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...
Mar 5, 2018 | User Experience Design
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...
Feb 22, 2018 | User Experience Design, Digital Experience, Web Design
As we previously established, including customers really is a key component of user-centered design that leads to better performing websites. However, randomly testing interfaces with no prior planning is likely to result in disappointing outcomes. Hence, why it’s...
Feb 12, 2018 | Web Design, User Experience Design
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....
Feb 2, 2018 | Web Design, Digital Experience, User Experience Design
It’s no secret that the high performing website redesigns come with a lot of moving parts. More so in the enterprise-level projects with a range of content interdependencies and numerous subject matter experts. Multiply this with diverse audiences that modern...
Jan 31, 2018 | Accessibility
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...
Nov 29, 2017 | Sitecore
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...
Sep 20, 2017 | Sitecore
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...
Jun 20, 2017 | Sitecore
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...
May 3, 2017 | Sitecore
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,...
Feb 9, 2017 | Sitecore
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 =...
Dec 28, 2016 | Sitecore
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...
Dec 27, 2016 | Sitecore
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...
Dec 1, 2016 | Web Design
“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,...
Sep 1, 2016 | Sitecore
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,...
Apr 8, 2016 | Sitecore
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...
Mar 25, 2016 | Sitecore
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...
Feb 19, 2016 | Sitecore
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...
Nov 23, 2015 | Sitecore
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”....
