Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is May 16, 2024! GAAD was created to help bring attention and awareness to digital inclusivity. No matter your role on a project team, digital accessibility should always be a priority from start to finish. Why is accessibility so important?

• Over 1 billion people worldwide have a disability, and that number is growing every day
• 15% of people with disabilities say they never go online, compared to 5% of people without disabilities, according to Pew Research Center
• According to a survey by Click-Away Pound, 71% of disabled users are forced to leave a website if they find it difficult to use

Digital accessibility directly impacts people’s ability to access information, buy products, apply for jobs, engage in discussion, and everything else that people do online that is becoming critical for modern life. Accessible spaces even benefit people without disabilities, as it allows anyone to take in content though their preferred method (reading the captions on a video instead of listening in a noisy environment, for example), and often breeds innovation as engineers work to find the best way to be sure everyone can access information equally.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has developed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) in an effort to standardize digital accessibility. However, many websites unfortunately fail to meet these standards, leading to a lesser-quality user experience. WebAIM’s yearly report has highlighted some surprising statistics about WCAG across the top 1,000,000 home pages:

• The most common accessibility failure across home pages is low contrast text
• 98.1% of home pages have at least one WCAG 2.0 failure
• On average, there are 56.8 accessibility errors per page (this increased 13.6% from 2023!) 
• 16.8% of home pages had more than one <h1> tag

As you can see, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to create a more accessible web for everyone. If you’re interested in learning more about digital accessibility and how to improve accessibility on your own projects, there are plenty of resources and online courses available. Resources range from free, to paid courses, to professional certifications. Below are some courses and resources that we recommend.

Free Courses and Resources

If you’re looking to introduce yourself to digital accessibility, these free resources are a great place to start:  

• A11ycasts with Rob Dodson - A series of video tutorials on YouTube that highlights topics including semantics, focus, the correct way to use a button, and a11y testing
• The Beginner’s Guide to Web Accessibility - An article by Dequeue University that summarizes why digital accessibility should be a priority, and how to determine if your website is accessible
• Common Mistakes with Using Colour in Accessibility - Digital designer Andrée Lange provides insights into how to take color contrast into consideration when designing for the web
• Deque Accessibility Resources - Dequeue offers a variety of free accessibility resources, including webinars, blog posts, and their accessibility testing browser extension, axe DevTools
• HTML Semantics and Accessibility Cheat Sheet - WebAIM provides a list of the most common HTML tags that have an impact on digital accessibility
• MDN Accessibility Tutorials - MDN is an open-source project documenting web technologies, which also includes an informative section on web accessibility documentation and best practices
• Section 508 ICT Testing Baseline - Outlines minimal accessibility testing requirements for federal agencies subject to Section 508
• WCAG 2.2 Quick Reference - WCAG are a series of web accessibility guidelines released and maintained by the W3C, with 2.2 being the current version of the guidelines. This page provides a reference to standards that websites should meet in order to meet current accessibility standards
• Web.dev Learn Accessibility Course - A series of informative articles ranging from beginning a11y topics, to more advanced topics including animation and motion

Deep Dives with Paid Tutorials

If you’re a developer who has experience in accessibility and want to dig more into the topic, these comprehensive tutorials will help you improve your a11y knowledge:

• Accessible Web Academy - Accessible Web Academy includes more focused a11y courses for designers, developers, content creators, and marketers looking to target specific topics 
• Inclusive Components - There is a free online summary of Heydon Pickering’s Inclusive Components, but you can also purchase an eBook on the topic. Heydon’s blog provides examples of a pattern library that bakes accessibility into each component
• Practical Accessibility by Sara Soueidan - Sara Souedien is a prolific front-end developer who specializes in accessibility. Her course, Practical Accessibility, is a comprehensive guide for all developers, from those looking to familiarize themselves with accessibility, to experienced developers looking to expand their a11y knowledge.

Advanced Knowledge with Certifications

• If you want to take the next step and become a certified professional in accessibility, IAAP offers professional certifications in digital accessibility:
  • IAAP offers five certification options, CPACC, WAS, CPWA, ADS, and CPABE
  • Deque University offers a curriculum to help prepare for IAAP certification exams
• The Department of Homeland Security also offers a “Trusted Tester” certification for Section 508 compliance
• W3C offers a free Digital Accessibility Foundations course, with an optional verified certificate ($99) upon course completion

As the world’s population and number of disabled users continues to grow, it’s clear that implementing digital accessibility in your products is more important than ever. By implementing the information from these lists, you can help users of all abilities access the content that you share, ensuring a better internet for everyone.

Authentication! What a hassle!

Self-Hosting

Integrations

Customization

Conclusion

In the fast moving and constantly changing landscape of web development, codeless solutions like Webflow and Squarespace have emerged as an alternative to more traditional development. These platforms allow users to design and build websites through intuitive visual interfaces, and are viable solutions for many use cases out there. 

For the past several months, I've been working as a frontend development support specialist alongside one of our talented designers, Blair Culbreth, who is managing a large, established Webflow project. Here are my candid thoughts and impressions from this experience, along with some critical considerations for those looking to integrate Webflow into their own workflow. Spoiler alert: while Webflow has some impressive strengths, it also comes with limitations that can be both unexpected and frustrating at times.

What Webflow Does Really Well

Small Team Efficiency

Webflow truly shines for smaller teams or products, especially those with limited resources. For a team that’s just a single designer or a small development crew, Webflow can help lower the technical debt involved with getting a website to production. By mitigating some of the more complex aspects of development such as responsive design, cross-browser compatibility, and hosting, teams are able to focus on other aspects of the site. This makes it a strong option for startups, freelancers, or small businesses looking to create professional-grade websites efficiently and effectively without the necessity of a developer.

Animation Tooling

When I say professional-grade websites, I’m talking about more than just functional designs. Webflow has some fantastic animation tooling making it incredibly simple to build rich, full-page animations and interactions without ever touching a line of code. Users can create scroll-bound animations or interactive moments of joy all from the comfort of a relatively simple and straightforward GUI. Through the use of animation keyframes, you can elevate a static site into something that feels modern and expensive. Heck, I could even see using the animation tooling itself as a prototyping tool for design handoff in a more traditional web development process. This ability to easily add sophisticated animations allows smaller teams to produce polished, dynamic websites that rival those created by much larger teams with dedicated development resources.

Documentation & Education

Beyond its design capabilities, Webflow also stands out for its educational impact. The platform offers incredible documentation that covers core frontend principles, effectively bridging the divide between design and development. Through simple, digestible, and intuitive videos and written documentation, Webflow equips designers with knowledge that shores up many concepts and intricacies of web development.

Working with Webflow provides designers with numerous takeaways they can apply to future projects, including those outside the realm of Webflow. The platform educates users on HTML structure, CSS styling properties, and responsive design. This deeper understanding of web development makes designers more versatile and effective in their roles and inherently benefits communication between designers and developers, as their thinking will be more aligned with one another.

Navigating Webflow’s Limitations

Class Styles

Webflow's class-based styling system is a standout feature, especially to those familiar with CSS. It allows you to bundle properties into classes and apply them efficiently across different elements, minimizing code duplication. When used effectively, this approach facilitates the creation of reusable styles and design systems; however, mastering it requires attention to detail, similar to working with CSS directly, which can be made challenging within the Webflow UI.

Due to the separation of pages and content in Webflow, tracking down existing CSS classes and applying styles consistently throughout a project can be challenging. Keeping track of which class names apply what styles can be a struggle. While Webflow offers a Style Manager to help organize and manage classes, it can be difficult to use for quickly identifying how styles are being applied across the platform.

Moreover, the inability to open multiple pages in designer mode at once presents a significant frustration. Without the ability to compare elements across different pages simultaneously, users may face challenges in ensuring consistency and troubleshooting design issues efficiently. This limitation may lead to a slower, more cumbersome workflow, particularly in larger projects where maintaining a coherent design system is critical.

Another struggle with managing styles within the UI comes in the form of applying styles to combo classes. Combo classes are when you combine multiple classes together to create a variation or modified state of an element. Inadvertently applying styles to a combo class when intending to apply a style for the base class was a common issue I found myself running into, highlighting some challenges users should be aware of, especially when getting more familiar with Webflow.

These challenges underscore the value of implementing a strong and consistent CSS class naming system, such as BEM (Block Element Modifier). Adhering to a standardized naming convention will help mitigate some of the challenges posed by Webflow's class-based styling system, but it does come with the added overhead of needing to learn a new class naming convention.

Preset Web Elements

Webflow provides users with a diverse selection of default web elements, ranging from simple divs to intricate lightbox elements, which serve as the foundational building blocks for websites. These preset elements occasionally impose rigid structural constraints. For instance, when attempting to create a tabs menu with a filter, users may encounter a problem with adding additional elements to the tab menu block. This restriction forces users to either conform their design to Webflow’s constraints or devise creative workarounds to achieve their desired functionality.

Navigating such limitations can be challenging, particularly when striving to realize a specific design vision. It may involve exploring alternative solutions or compromising on the original plan. Yet, as users gain familiarity with the platform, those limitations can be anticipated, allowing them to develop strategies to circumvent the constraints.

Custom Scripts

One of the most powerful aspects of Webflow is also one of the most challenging features to balance. It requires careful management to avoid issues like performance degradation and increased technical debt.  It’s incredibly easy to have a website get bogged down with bloat, especially when a larger team might be working on a project.

Webflow lacks a built-in feature to view all custom scripts at a glance, making it difficult to track and manage them. Maintaining a documented list of all custom scripts used in your project and detailing their purposes and locations can help mitigate this issue, but that’s a fair amount of overhead to maintain. Additionally, custom scripts do not function in Webflow’s editor mode, requiring a site deploy for testing and troubleshooting, which can be time-consuming. 

The ability to add custom scripts opens up a world of options, including third-party plugins and libraries that can expand Webflow's native features. Tools like Jetboost or Finsweet can help fill in the gaps, and are oftentimes worth the investment as they provide relatively easy-to-use integrations that will make for a better user experience.

That’s all to say that applying custom scripts to a Webflow project is not necessarily bad, but should be approached with considerations on how to mitigate technical debt. Here are a few suggestions to help with integrating custom scripts into your Webflow project:

• Maximize Native Features: Use Webflow’s built-in features as much as possible. If a design can be achieved with Webflow’s interactions and animations, avoid adding custom JavaScript.
• External Development: Develop and test scripts in an external environment to reduce time spent deploying and debugging within Webflow.
• Reusable Components: Save frequently used custom code as reusable components to simplify maintenance and ensure consistency across the site.
• Regular Audits: Periodically review and clean up scripts to ensure that only necessary ones are loaded, improving site performance and maintainability.

Mitigating Difficulty Through Teamwork

I started this article by mentioning that I recently served as a frontend development support specialist alongside our designer, Blair, on this project. Blair took on the primary responsibility of building many of the pages, and I want to share more about our collaborative experience. Webflow is as close as you can get to building a traditionally coded website without necessarily needing to touch code, but that doesn’t mean there’s no value in having someone more familiar with the technical side of website building available. From accessibility considerations to complex layout structures, a lot of time can be saved by having a developer serve as a pseudo consultant on the project.

On numerous occasions, Blair reached out to me to help set up more complex custom implementations that required JavaScript or weren’t coming together as expected. By being able to jump in and solve those issues quickly for Blair, she was able to focus on building out the other pages. Similarly, I was able to audit and review her work to ensure it was inclusive for all types of users.

There are various development tricks we can implement to enhance user experiences for visually impaired users. For example, hiding text specific to a screen reader to provide greater context is a technique that a designer might not generally think about or even be aware of, but a good frontend developer would know to include. By being involved in the building process, I was able to highlight and advise on such instances, ensuring our project was accessible and user-friendly for everyone.

Conclusion

Webflow presents a robust solution for web development, particularly for smaller teams or projects with limited resources. Its intuitive visual interface and powerful animation tools enable the creation of professional-grade websites without the need for extensive coding knowledge. Webflow’s educational resources also empower designers to deepen their understanding of web development, bridging the gap between design and development and fostering better collaboration.

Webflow is not without its limitations. The class-based styling system, while efficient, can be challenging to manage, and the need for site deployment to test custom scripts adds to both the complexity and time investment required to build a project. Despite these challenges, many of the difficulties can be mitigated through careful planning and teamwork. Leveraging native features, developing and testing scripts externally, and creating reusable components are all strategies that can help maintain site performance and manage technical debt.

Collaborative efforts between designers and developers can further enhance the process, as seen in my experience working alongside Blair. This teamwork allows for efficient problem-solving and ensures that accessibility and user experience are prioritized throughout the project. By combining the strengths of Webflow with thoughtful collaboration and strategic planning, teams can create dynamic, user-friendly websites that meet modern standards.

Users expect a website to load fast. An average web page loads in about 2.5 seconds. The longer the user has to wait, the higher the user bounce rate. There are a lot of factors that go into site speed, but images account for about 75% of the page weight on an application or website. Google’s Core Web Vitals uses several metrics to rank sites. Visual site speed or largest contentful paint affects ROI as slower sites have fewer repeat users and fewer sales.

Without properly sized images, both site speed and image quality are affected. Accordingly, we use several methods to deliver properly sized images. Our primary solution is imgix because it is easy to implement and saves managers and clients time and effort. 

Imgix Key Features

Imgix provides a lot of features — some we consistently use on projects, and others we use in very specific situations. 

Responsive Images

Setting up responsive images can be complex. As the variety of devices and their screen resolutions continue to expand, managing all the different image requirements is increasingly challenging.

Consider this scenario: a website’s images look crisp and clear on a high-resolution monitor. When that same page is viewed on a mobile device, the images are so large the page takes forever to load. A solution could be to upload a smaller image for mobile, right? It's not quite that simple. We need eight or more different sizes of the same image to account for different screen sizes and retina screens. Keeping track of all the image sizes and saving each size gets complex and would be nearly impossible to do manually on a site that has hundreds or thousands of images. 

One of our clients, National Park Foundation (NPF), wanted to clarify its message to better target major donors. Their gorgeous, large scenic images are essential to their website strategy.  NPF needed the images throughout their site to be crisp and clear at all screen sizes. Using imgix, NPF content managers can load high-resolution images to the CMS and not worry about the site's speed or performance. They rely on imgix to deliver the correctly resized image for any user's screen.

Imgix does this with their Device Pixel Ratio and Client Hints which automatically sets the pixel density for the image based on the user's device. Those API parameters can be easily set in the URLs for the image’s `srcset`. This allows developers to set an image width for an image `srcset` and then imgix delivers the right pixel ratio image to the user. We use `srcset` with imgix on other client sites like Bezos Earth Fund and Human Rights Campaign as well.

Resize and Cropping

Imgix allows you to crop images in addition to setting an image’s focal point. So, only one image needs to be uploaded and it can be used at multiple sizes and croppings throughout the site. Let's say we upload a large landscape image, but on some pages we only need to use a portion of the image cropped as a square. Imgix will crop the image and deliver the smaller versions on the pages we need while persisting the larger versions on other pages.

At Viget we use resizing and cropping on our own website, including our articles, to crop the staff photo to a smaller size at the top of the articles. This makes it possible for us to upload the staff photo once and the article image gets created automatically. 

Color Palette 

Another feature that we've used on client sites is the Color Palette API which allows you as many colors as you want from an image. For example, the Shedd Aquarium website that we built uses this feature by pulling a vibrant color from the image and setting it as the background color for the page hero. Aside from taking the manual work out of closely aligning photography with a page’s design, there’s an additional benefit: if you are on a slow connection, you will see a dynamic colored banner at the top before the image loads.

Image Upscaling

Another valuable feature is the ability to upscale images. Even if you upload an image that is low resolution, it can still be used at a higher resolution. This is especially useful for e-commerce sites or applications where users are uploading their images.  The upscale feature uses Generative AI to take a pixelated image and create a higher-resolution image. The final image will not be perfect, but it looks more professional. See the upscale demo on imgix.

PDF Preview Images

There is also a PDF page to image option in imgix. The API enables the generation of a page-specific image preview from the PDF, which can serve as both a thumbnail and a full-size preview. When we built AHIP.org, they had a resources section for their members containing quite a few PDFs. To help with clarity and findability, we used imgix to show previews of the PDF documents to non-members. This feature allows AHIP to upload resource PDFs without having to also upload any thumbnail images. 

Face Detection

Another nice feature is a face detection parameter that you can pass to the API. This allows you to upload a photo and no matter the cropping or size it will keep the face as the focal point of the image. We used this feature on NEA for their team member page. It's great for user profile images that are used in different contexts throughout the site. 

Video Streaming

Videos have become a key design element on websites. However, determining which service to use for embedding those videos is an ongoing topic of discussion. Video platforms enable you to integrate the video onto the page, yet they introduce scripts that may impede page loading speed. Imgix offers a video embed service that allows content managers to keep all the images and videos in one place. The videos are automatically encoded to Adaptive Bitrate Streaming to get the best compression and video quality. So, videos load fast and look great on mobile and desktop. 

Performance 

A lot of CMSs have image transformations built in. An image transformation encompasses everything for that image including responsive sizes, cropping, resizing, and face detection from the original. This is great for small sets of images, but transformations quickly get out of hand the more images there are on a site. For example, the homepage of the National Park Foundation has a minimum of 96 image transformations. 

Processing all of those image transformations uses a lot of server resources. Imgix saves the images and delivers them through their CDN. The imgix image CDN has an average of 0.15 milliseconds return on requests which enables images to load as quickly as possible. The CDN also caches the images on CDN edge nodes making them immediately available for future requests. 

Flexibility

Imgix is flexible enough to work with almost any site structure; including WordPress, Craft CMS, Shopify, React, Ruby on Rails, Python, and more (see the full list). So, whether a site is a WordPress site or a Rails application, imgix fits right into the ecosystem. And, even better: you don’t have to rebuild your web app or website to gain the benefits of image performance, which can save you a lot of time and money.

Setting up imgix on an existing website is easy. Imgix can connect to existing asset storage sources like AWS, Azure, or a web folder on the same domain. Once the image source is set up, a developer can start passing parameters to the API. 

Cost

Imgix is free for 1,000 images which makes it easy to integrate and grow with your site. Pricing goes to $750/yr for 5,000 images and $3,000/yr for 25,000 images. In their pricing structure, “images” are categorized as origin images, so the count only includes original images and not transformed ones. So, you could have hundreds of images and thousands of image transformations all being delivered through a CDN for free.

Conclusion

Ensuring fast site speed isn't just important. It is vital. It's the cornerstone of a successful online presence, directly influencing search engine rankings, user satisfaction, and ultimately, your return on investment. Properly sized and optimized images are key to ensuring your site loads quickly and displays correctly for users across various devices.

We have found that imgix enables our team to efficiently create projects with diverse image options, saving managers and developers valuable time. Our clients benefit from reduced server space and an increased site speed. Imgix’s API is comprehensive, so you can use one tool for all features and options around site images — from cropping and resizing to face detection and automated color palettes, to video and beyond. Having used imgix for the past five years to support the wide-ranging needs of our clients, we feel confident recommending it and using it again and again. 

Users expect a website to load fast, and imgix is a reliable way to make sure that happens. 

When onboarding a new partner to redesign your website, take over maintenance, or rescue a project going sideways, you'll need to carefully transition access to a variety of critical systems and tools. And if you're navigating a contentious relationship or onboarding into a new organization without documentation, you might not know where to start.

Does that sound scary? It doesn't have to be. 

Here's a comprehensive checklist to ensure that you retain full control of your website and avoid any potential hiccups during a transition.

1. Codebase access. Ensure you have ownership or administrative access to the existing codebase or code repository. Popular platforms like Bitbucket and GitHub are often used for this purpose.
2. Content Management System access. Ensure you have the highest level of access (super admin) for your Content Management System (CMS). 
3. Hosting information and access. Gather all hosting information and ensure you have access to the account that owns the workspace. This is crucial to prevent unauthorized updates or changes to your site. For hosted platforms, you’ll need Owner access, not just Administrator access. 
4. Additional services information and access. This might include your domain registrar (e.g., GoDaddy), DNS settings, email services, your content delivery network (CDN), if applicable. This could also include any third-party services that are integrated with your website. Common examples might include: Algolia, Hubspot, Stripe, etc. 
5. Analytics and Data. Make sure you have access to all analytics tools used to monitor your website traffic and user behavior. This might include both old Google Universal Analytics data and current GA4 data, Google Tag Manager, or any other analytics services used on your website (e.g., Mixpanel, Hotjar, Adobe Analytics, etc.). 
6. Backups. Secure a full backup of your site, including the file system. Plugins like UpdraftPlus for WordPress can be very helpful for this process. Also, ensure you have backups of shared files, such as those in Google Drive, Box, or Dropbox.
7. Design Assets. Retain copies of raw design assets (e.g., Figma files). We always transfer ownership of Figma files to our client teams to ensure they have the ability to extend the design system in the future.
8. Licenses. Make sure you own any required licenses, such as font/photo licenses, CMS licenses, API keys, or premium plugins. We insist that our client teams purchase any required licenses/subscriptions using their corporate information so we’re never blocking access to those critical resources.

Transitioning website partners can be a smooth process with foresight and preparation. While ideally there would never be gaps in access to these critical resources and services, by following this checklist, you can ensure that you’re not missing anything when offboarding old partners or getting your bearings with a new team or organization. 

Do you need help figuring out how this checklist might apply to your situation? Be in touch, and we’d be happy to discuss your current status and suggest next steps for your website transition. 

This week we will bid farewell to our fifteenth cohort of summer interns. Ciel Park (UI Developer Intern), Faye Stover (Product Designer Intern), and Paul McKissock (Application Developer Intern) joined our team ten weeks ago and have been hard at work learning and growing, teaching and sharing, and iterating ever since – and so have we. 

At Viget we are committed to fostering curiosity and drive both for budding engineers and designers but also for our team of full-timers who are eager to learn themselves and flex their mentorship muscles. As we’ve shared over the years, the internship is one of our favorite traditions and while a lot has changed in fifteen years, that commitment remains the same. 

Here’s a quick look at three core aspects of the Viget internship that remain flexible. 

Cohort size and available roles.

We are not married to a specific number of interns. We recruit for and match interns with available mentors who serve as our interns’ dedicated advisors.

Working location. 

This summer our interns primarily worked from our Falls Church, Virginia headquarters. We required interns to work in the office for the first three weeks of the program and the last. During weeks four through nine they were able to work remotely two to three days a week. In the past the internship has been fully in-person and fully remote. 

Cross-discipline internship project. 

Interns can expect cross-discipline collaboration during their time at Viget but how exactly that takes shape remains flexible. In years past interns spent 8 weeks coming up with, designing and building a working product. This year, with our smaller cohort of interns, we opted for a smaller approach to the group project. The project was pre-defined, scoped by our advisors, and happened over just two short weeks.   

Earlier this summer we hosted an internship alumni panel and invited Hayley McMillon (2022 Summer Cohort), Andrea Brucculeri (2019), Gabriel Kay (2019), and Vigenesh Gopalan (2018) to discuss lessons learned at Viget, life after Viget, underrated skills worth developing, tips for remote collaboration and more. The event was open to all and both current staff and other alums sat in on the moderated panel discussion. It was awesome, and everyone – long-timers and interns alike – left feeling inspired. This is my favorite aspect of the internship, our alumni network, and how our interns graduate to be active contributors.

I’m looking forward to staying in touch with Ciel, Faye, and Paul and I cannot wait to see all the wonderful things they accomplish. 

Does this sound like an experience you want to be a part of? We’ll host our 16th cohort of college students and recent grads next summer. Bookmark our internship page to keep an eye on future opportunities. 

If you’re like us, you’ve likely built ‘page builder’ fields in Craft CMS using Matrix. But sometimes you need more than a block. We use Super Table to create ‘page sections’ that include some extra settings (like background color, controls for width, etc.). We can then nest a Matrix field to control page blocks within the Page Section (Super Table). This has worked well for us in the past but there's a new, simpler way to achieve this starting in Craft 5.

Upgrading a site from Craft 4 to Craft 5 can seem intimidating. Even more so when your site relies on complex content models like the one I described above. You might think, okay I'll upgrade to Craft 5 and then look into migrating to the newer method in the future. Well, now is the time. Verbb has announced that Super Table has reached end-of-life.  While there is a Craft 5 compatible version available, it won't receive updates. That means now is the perfect time to migrate your Super Table fields to native Matrix fields.

Craft 5 makes the process easy by converting Matrix blocks to entry types automatically during the upgrade. This guide will walk you through the process. We'll cover preparation, the upgrades themselves, and steps to clean up afterward. As you’ll see below, the process is actually quite simple and nothing to stress over!

Preparing for the Upgrade

The first step in any upgrade is preparation. Start by backing up your site’s database. This ensures that you can restore your site to its previous state if anything goes wrong during the upgrade process. We use (and love) DDEV here at Viget, so this guide will be leveraging it. But you can easily adapt the commands if you are not. To create a database backup, run:

It's also essential to familiarize yourself with the Craft 5 Upgrade Guide. This guide provides detailed information on the changes, new features, and potential breaking changes in Craft 5, helping you understand what to expect. It serves as a fantastic set of instructions to get your site upgraded.

The Upgrade Process

Once you're prepared, you can begin the upgrade process. Per the Craft Upgrade Guide, we will update Craft and plugins at the same time. Open your editor and modify your composer.json with the new versions of your plugins. The two for sure we will need to modify are:

Updating Super Table Fields and Templates

With the Matrix blocks converted to entry types, you need to reconfigure any Super Table fields to be Matrix fields.

Update Super Table Fields:

• Browse to Settings > Fields and edit any Super Table fields
• Change the field type from Super Table to Matrix (there will be no content loss when switching from Super Table to Matrix)
• Select the entry type to use (Craft has already created one for you)
• Save the field
• That's it!

At this point, you have removed your dependency on Super Table and have a page builder entirely built with Matrix fields. What were previously Super Table blocks are now a custom Entry Type and what were Matrix blocks are now also Entry Types. This allows you to have nested Matrix within Matrix thanks to Craft’s Entrification plan.

Cleaning Up After the Upgrade

After updating your fields and templates, it's time to clean up. First, uninstall the Super Table plugin. Navigate to Settings > Plugins in the Control Panel to uninstall the plugin. Then remove it from your project by running:

Thoroughly test your site to ensure everything is functioning correctly. Pay close attention to the entry types where you used Super Table fields, confirming that authoring and your front-end work as expected.

Additionally, you can also take this opportunity to clean up your fields and entry types. Craft 5’s reusable fields and entry types give you ample opportunity to consolidate and Craft 5 provides new utilities to make this process as simple as possible.

• fields/auto-merge — Automatically discovers functionally identical fields and merges their uses together.
• fields/merge — Manually merge one field into another of the same type and update uses of the merged field.
• entry-types/merge — Merge one entry type into another and update uses of the merged entry type.

That’s it!

Upgrading from Craft 4 to Craft 5 and transitioning from Super Table is incredibly simple, thanks to Craft 5’s automatic conversion of Matrix blocks to entry types. Super Table will no longer be maintained moving forward, and it's better to switch to the native Craft solution for better long-term support. By following these steps, you can quickly tackle the change and take advantage of the new features and improvements in Craft 5. With careful planning, thorough testing, and a few commands, you’ll have your page builder working again in Craft 5 in no time. Happy upgrading!

Behavioral analytics are a great way to get a sense of what users are or are not doing on your website or app. While behavioral analytics may not provide insights into why users are behaving a certain way, this method does provide a quick and cost-effective way to see what your users are currently doing at scale. Knowing how your users are engaging with your website or product can help you make informed decisions that have a positive impact on engagement and conversions.

Here at Viget, we use behavioral analytics data for a number of use cases:

1. Our client has a specific question about a certain aspect of their website or app (e.g., a specific user flow or content type) and wants to learn more about how and when users are engaging. 
2. We are redesigning a client’s website and want to get a sense of where the current experience is excelling or falling short.
3. We are conducting an annual analysis to help clients keep an eye on potential areas of growth or stagnation. 
4. We are reviewing behavioral changes on a site or app after launching a new experience or feature to assess performance.

But what kind of insights can you expect to find from behavioral analytics data? 

It ultimately depends on the website or app, the users, and the kinds of questions you are asking, but let’s go through a few different examples of what kind of information you can gain from behavioral analytics tools.

Who is using your website or product?

Understanding who is using your website can provide helpful context on your user base and potentially unlock growth with new user groups you may have been unaware of. To investigate this, we may look at geographic location, language, device type, and any other demographic information that may be available. Sometimes this kind of data provides what I like to call descriptive information—information that often doesn’t feel immediately actionable but can become more useful relative to other data points. This could come from comparing your data to last year, to industry standards, to other content on the website, or it might come from comparing it to an assumption that an individual or organization holds. 

Here are some examples of findings that shed light on who was using the website or product:

How do users get to your website or product?

Knowing how users navigate to your website or product can highlight what traffic sources are particularly effective in driving conversions, but it can also help to provide important context on user expectations or goals. To understand this, we look at both the source/medium that brought them to the website as well as the first page they viewed. 

For example, users might:

• Come from google and land on a blog article
• Go directly to your home page
• Come from an email referral to a donation page 
• Learn about you from ChatGPT and land on your About page

From there, we might look at engagement rate, conversion rates, or other metrics to get a sense of what these users are doing and whether anything stands out as particularly effective or ineffective. 

Here are some examples of acquisition insights that informed our understanding and approach:

What content or features do users engage with?

Here is where we start to get to the meat of what your users are actually doing on your website or product. Knowing what users are doing and what they’re not using can help to establish priorities and inform decisions. You might be surprised to learn that users are actually engaging with specific features or content quite a bit, but others are barely used. If the content or feature is surprisingly popular, then we likely don’t want to outright remove it and may instead consider iterating or leveraging that offering more. If users aren’t engaging with content or a feature, it may be worth considering the effort to maintain and iterate on that offering. 

Here are some examples of engagement insights that helped us identify opportunities related to content or features:

What is the user journey or path?

Another major area of investigation is the sequence of steps users take when viewing content or completing certain actions. This could be perusing content on the website, going through a signup funnel, or checking out to make a purchase. 

This helps us identify:

• the actual paths that lead to conversions (which is not always the path we assume it is) 
• areas where users drop off at key points in the funnel
• moments where users have to “turn around” in the journey, because the path laid before them doesn’t align with their needs 

This information can help you build towards a frictionless experience that encourages users to sign up, complete a purchase, or find the resources they need.

Here are some examples of user journey insights that helped us understand where there were existing points of friction for users:

What “turning around” in the user journey can look like:

What dropoff can look like at different stages:

The Ecosystem at Large

Some clients have a larger ecosystem of products or services, and it’s important to look at how users engage with and navigate across the ecosystem. This might include subdomains for a shop, a marketing site versus the product site, help documentation, etc. By looking at the larger ecosystem we can reveal important connections that are missing or connections that could be strengthened.

Here are some examples of insights that demonstrated a need for changes in those ecosystem connections:

Here at Viget, there are a wide variety of insights we may discover for any one project through behavioral analytics. These insights can help to identify new user groups, help to prioritize content or features maintenance and updates, or bring to attention moments in the user journey that are causing friction. These opportunities can help you bring in new users and retain your existing users, by providing an experience that aligns with their needs, whether that is finding resources, getting involved in a community, or making a purchase.  

If you’re interested in making your website or application more effective for your users by leveraging the power of behavioral analytics data, we’d love to hear from you.