A collection of thoughts, stories, updates and insights from the team

With the creation of new senior roles in Client Engagement, Business Operations, Sector Strategy, Client Experience and Delivery, accompanied by our recently announced advisory board, we’re now ready to make some further structural changes as part of a new route forward for the company’s leadership.

We are looking for a curious, technical and digitally focussed person to join the team as a Backend Development Lead. This role will ensure we deliver high-quality digital products and solutions for our clients, whilst also maintaining a strong technical strategy across the company.

We’re excited to announce that four leading figures from the cultural sector, Nick Starr CBE, Hilary Knight, Kati Price, and Nick Sherrard, will be joining our advisory board from July.

We are looking for a friendly, curious, and analytical person to join the team as a Technical Web Analyst. This role acts as a vital link between the organisations we work with, their users, and our delivery team.

We are looking for a collaborative, inclusive, curious, smart and friendly person to join Substrakt as our new Director of Delivery.

Arts and cultural organisations have powerful stories to tell about the work they do and the communities they impact. And the website is a prime spot for a lot of this content. Using best-in-class examples, this short article will guide you through an approach to developing impact stories that starts with the content purpose.

Now that we’ve got a bigger team filled with even more people specialising in a range of digital-related things, we’re in a position to offer our support not only to our clients, but to the sector as a whole.

It’s something we’ve been working on for a while now. The B Corp certification is based on the idea that businesses should pursue purpose as well as profit (using business as a force for good™).

We are looking for a friendly, curious, enthusiastic Frontend Developer to join our team. Find out more about the role and how to apply.

Ash Mann speaks to Nicholas Triantafyllou from the National Theatre for the Digital Works Podcast

In their venture to discover if Substrakt is right for them, the candidates we’ve interviewed over the last couple of years have asked us some great questions. Questions around culture, team, development and policies - less about what they can do for us, and more about what we can do for them.

We are looking for a proactive, diligent and organised digital project manager to join our team.

We are looking for a friendly, curious, and analytical individual to join the team as a Digital Insights Analyst. This role acts as a vital link between the organisations we work with, their users, and our delivery team.

Two themes that ran through both Kulturkraft and BEYOND were the future and sustainability. Here's a summary of the key takeaways from both conferences.

Ash Mann speaks to Kati Price from the Victoria & Albert Museum for the Digital Works Podcast

In this article, I’ll explain the most common issues that make website content inaccessible and share some examples of good content accessibility. At the end, there’s a checklist to keep you on track.

We are looking for a friendly, curious, and analytical individual to join the team as a Business Analyst. This role acts as a vital link between the organisations we work with, their users, and our delivery team.

We are looking for a friendly, diligent and knowledgeable developer to join our team. You will be working to support our portfolio of work (websites and products).

We are looking for an experienced, supportive and technically-literate person to join us as our new Delivery Team Lead.

A short and simple list of best practice rules you can follow to make sure your video mastheads are performing as well as they can

How well do you know your content? And how is it performing? If you were given a blank slate to start all over again, would you know what to build upon and what to leave behind? A content audit can help you answer these kinds of questions. And the findings can be really powerful.

We are looking for a friendly, experienced, and conscientious Support & Solutions Manager to join our Client Services team working across our existing client base with a particular focus on our North American clients.

For over a decade the AND team has been pushing the boundaries of digital work. In this conversation with Ruth and Catherine a few key themes emerged around innovation, finance, the challenges of competing with commercial channels and how difficult it can be to change audience behaviour.

In this conversation with David we covered a range of interesting topics, including digital progress, the realities of returning to the pre-pandemic status quo, and the huge opportunities offered by digital from both a production and audience reach point of view.

A few key themes emerged in this insightful conversation with Cimeon, focused around risk appetite and innovation management, the meaning of creativity in a digital context, the benefits of a modular approach to developing creative work, and the shrinking importance of geography to successful audience reach.

The cultural sector’s relationship with digital has been radically reshaped over the past two years. So we’ve started thinking about what a new ‘hybrid’ model for organisations might look like by initiating a creative Research and Development project.

We are looking for a friendly, diligent and knowledgeable developer to join our team. You will be working across our portfolio of work, building new websites and products, and maintaining live sites.

We are looking for a new Product Owner to join our team. This person will be responsible for setting the product vision and overseeing the roadmaps for our growing suite of the products that we developed natively here at Substrakt.

Delightful digital experiences are often characterised by ease of use and simple, seamless design. And while these characteristics are undoubtedly important, what really makes a great digital product stand out is its ability to move beyond the digital and transactional realm, towards an experience that feels distinctly human. And that’s where microcopy comes in.

Since Google Analytics 4 (GA4) officially launched as the default Google Analytics solution in October 2020, it's really no surprise that Google has given us an end date to UA. In this blog post, I will cover what this means for your current Google Analytics accounts, what you need to do to prepare for the change, and what you can do to help your future self.

We are looking for an enthusiastic, organised and insightful Solutions Analyst to join our team. This person will be responsible for working closely with our clients and their users to ensure that we are understanding, defining and delivering the most successful, appropriate solutions for their needs.

When audiences arrive at a venue, there are fewer things more frustrating for both front of house staff and other customers than long and slow-moving queues. Viadukt's share tickets features takes this problem away.

On sales are a crucial moment for any ticket sales-based organisation, so having a sales flow that can cope with increased traffic, avoid downtime, and keep customers and stakeholders happy is really important. Read about how Viadukt does just that.

We are looking for an enthusiastic, thoughtful and highly organised person to join us as our new Head of Operations. Find out more about the role and how to apply.

We’re very excited to introduce you to Viadukt, which we’ve created to address and resolve the most common ticket buying issues and in so doing, to help cultural organisations maximise their ticket revenue.

We are looking for a friendly, curious, enthusiastic Frontend Developer to join our team. Find out more about the role and how to apply.

Organisations use digital publishing platforms such as Issuu to make their print-style content more widely available. But such platforms often come with accessibility issues. This post explains more about why and what you can be doing to make your 'print-style' content digitally accessible.

We’re definitely seeing some clear trends in the digital work that our clients are prioritising this year. So here we share our predictions for the top five areas that will be a focus over the next 12 months.

Everyone at Substrakt is offered an annual allowance of time and money to focus exclusively on their professional development. I recently spent some of my time going back to basics with JavaScript (JS) – mainly vanilla JS starting from ES6. I've written about what I did and why.

On Wednesday 17th November we held the fourth Tech in Culture EDI Alliance partner forum, marking the final session of 2021. We used this forum as an opportunity to reflect on some of the progress made, the challenges faced and where people plan to focus their EDI efforts in 2022. Here, we’ve captured some of the many things we discussed.

Earlier this year Substrakt signed the Show The Salary pledge, an initiative that aims to tackle the issues of pay gaps and inequity in the charity sector. We've written about what this means and why it's important to us.

The ‘about us’ section of your website is likely to have some of the highest page traffic. But it’s often the most neglected content on a website. This short article will guide you through some tips to help you meaningfully engage your audience with your brand story.

This is a blog about content production processes for your website. I’ll explain the fundamental steps and help you to think about tailoring them for your organisation. You’re probably doing (most of) this stuff already. But it’s likely to be a process that hasn’t been deliberately planned or formalised yet.

On Thursday 30th September we held our third Tech in Culture EDI Alliance partner forum. Part one focused on mental health, which is a crucial topic of social, political, medical and organisational conversation. Part two focused on the diversification of our suppliers and supply chains. This is a write-up capturing lots of the things we discussed.

Welcome to part two of my discussion about Google’s latest page title update. If you’ve missed out on part one (which covers what the page update is and how it differs from previous updates) go back and read that first, then join me back here to learn how you can find out exactly which of your page titles have been affected.

Learning that Google are rewriting your carefully crafted page titles may come to you as a bit of a shock, but in fact, this is nothing new. Google have been rewriting your page titles and meta descriptions as they see fit for many years now. So, what’s different this time?

Tone of voice (TOV) guidelines distil the essence of a brand, helping the writing folk to do their work well. But they are often problematic, so here I'll share some tips for dodging these challenges and help you put your brand voice into action.

Arts and cultural organisations have been using social media in a variety of interesting ways to engage with their audiences. Here, we share some successful examples from organisations in the sector to give you some inspriation and ideas to help increase engagement with your content.

Our second Tech in Culture EDI Alliance partner forum focused on internal communications and engagement around Equity Diversity and Inclusion (EDI). This write-up captures some of the many things we discussed.

This is a short guide to help you improve your writing online. These techniques can be used by anyone who writes content as part of their job – whether that’s blogs, event copy or educational resources.

The benefit of caching is that retrieving cached data is much quicker than requesting data from a server, which creates a faster and more enjoyable experience for website visitors. CloudFront has become our primary means of caching in the past few years. When configured correctly, it’s very reliable and drastically improves loading speeds as well as efficiency when serving assets to your website.

We’re very excited to announce that Substrakt have signed up to be an employer partner with Black Codher, a coding bootcamp specifically for black women in the UK who are interested in developing a tech career.

We’re very excited to announce that Substrakt have signed up to be an employer partner with Black Codher, a coding bootcamp specifically for black women in the UK who are interested in developing a tech career.

The first Tech In Culture EDI Alliance partner forum was held on Monday 17th May. Hosted by the Alliance’s Founder and our Managing Director, Ash, the Forum was focused on recruitment, and the different ways in which organisations can make their hiring processes more inclusive.

Irrespective of how a website is accessed or navigated, what device is used, internet connection, software, language, location, or ability, a website should work for everyone. This article explores what we mean when we talk about accessibility and inclusion. We cover why accessibility and inclusive design is important, who it affects and how to ensure your website is accessible.

Proactively reducing the carbon footprint of our websites through sustinable web design is something that all organisations should be thinking and caring about. This article shares tips on how you can be doing this and why it's so important.

Over the past year we have made a number of changes to the way that we do recruitment at Substrakt. In this post I’m going to detail some of the changes we made, both so that anyone else who may be considering what they can do to change their recruitment processes can see what has, and hasn’t, worked for us – and the effort involved.

A look at how to get started with pipelines in GitLab.

The global pandemic placed increased pressure on organisations to maximise revenue by encouraging donations or bringing onboard new donors. We’ve been working on a way to streamline the user experience of adding additional items when buying tickets, through a solution we like to call SmartLinks.

This article delves into the real technical side of SEO. We cover everything from backlinks and redirects to content restructuring and structured data. This may sound “too technical for you”, but if you follow this guide you’ll be a technical SEO expert in no time.

Ongoing SEO is arguably the most important type of SEO you can undertake. With Google’s search algorithms changing daily, the rise of voice search, and various data protection legislations impacting the way we upload content, we're required to keep updating the way we do SEO. So here are some ongoing tasks you can be doing to help keep you on the right track.

Everyone that owns a website probably knows how important Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is. Optimising your website to gain more free high-value traffic is a no-brainer, but SEO activities usually fall behind other important website updates. So here are five 5-minute SEO tasks you can complete that I hope will show that even the smallest of changes can have a huge positive impact.

This article demonstrates how you can use array_column in PHP to simplify your loops and in turn your code. Using array_column reduces the number of lines of code you have to write and the complexity of your code, which can only be a good thing.

Individual productions at The Bridge may run for around 12 weeks, meaning potentially up to 100 performances of each. The team at The Bridge wanted to make it easy for people to narrow down this long list of performance dates/times to find specific performances that had availability matching the user's criteria.

Everyone likes diagrams, and everyone likes lists. Lists are easy. The process of designing websites, however, is not a neat production-line-style flow diagram - it doesn’t follow a linear set of steps (contrary to what some people might tell you). So here's more what the typical 'design process' often look like.