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A business’s website is more than just an online presence, it’s a critical driver of growth, customer engagement, and brand reputation. Yet, many organizations overlook a vital component of their digital strategy: accessibility. An accessible website ensures that all users, including those with visual, auditory, cognitive, or motor impairments, can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with online content. Often viewed merely as a legal requirement, accessibility should instead be embraced as a strategic advantage that enhances inclusivity, expands audience reach, and strengthens overall impact.

Creating successful tech products is about ensuring great ideas align with real user needs. By grounding decisions in data and user insights, businesses can build products that people actually want to use– leading to higher adoption, stronger customer loyalty, and better business outcomes. Research-driven design ensures product market fit, enhances user experience, and encourages adoption. It also saves time and budget in the long term and builds brand loyalty. Understanding your goals and the problem you are trying to solve will help you choose the right research methods at each stage of development.

DevOps is an approach to creating software which works to reduce the gap between coding and deploying, allowing the same team which created the code to deploy and monitor the application, generally through automating much of that deployment and monitoring process. In order to achieve the strong outcomes associated with teams practicing DevOps, the DORA Core model highlights building capabilities in the following categories: Climate of Learning, Fast Flow, and Fast Feedback.

Software teams typically include people with a wide variety of skills, including management, software architecture, visual design, UX design, data design, and business insights. A common “money-saving” approach is to have someone with management skills work closely with customers closest to the business goals in order to decide what should be done next, and then that management person will turn those ideas into tasks that the engineers and designers implement. However, the best teams understand that using designers and engineers only for implementation is a waste of their talents, and instead create a virtuous cycle of collaboration by bringing everyone to the table.

You know your product/business better than anyone else. Working directly with your design and development team helps them to design and build specific features and functionality around your exact needs. When your business needs change, having software built upon a flexible foundation can allow your product to quickly meet the challenge, whether that’s scaling, increased security, or an entirely new integration or product line. By starting with a custom approach to your business’ software, you have full control over the direction and impact of your vision.

Released in 2002, .NET Framework introduced the world to the C# language and came to be a stable, productive foundation for many Windows-based applications, including web sites through the ASP.NET framework. A new cross-platform version of .NET (originally called .NET Core, and now just .NET) was released in 2016, which saw the lion’s share of investment from Microsoft. .NET Framework had its last major release in 2019 (version 4.8), with 4.8.1 coming in 2022. Knowing the level of attention given to the newer cross-platform .NET, why would teams in 2025 choose to start new projects using .NET Framework instead of using the newest platforms and libraries?

Join Engage Software quality specialist Kristen Palm on Friday, April 4, 2025 at StartupSTL Summit where she will present on Quality Assurance Testing. Learn about different types of testing tools and software, best practices for implementing testing plans and more!

How can you know how long a new initiative to build a custom software product will take? What’s a reasonable amount to plan to pay to get started turning your vision into technically excellent software that can go live and start producing value? Once an estimate of the effort has been created, how close should you expect the true cost to be?

We’ve been patiently waiting for the next major release of DNN, and it is finally here (DNN 10.0.0 was published on April 9)! This update will be more disruptive than others in the past, as the maintainers have taken this opportunity to remove features that have been deprecated since DNN 8, going back to January 2016. In addition to clearing some accumulated clutter from years past, DNN 10 offers a number of improvements for both administrators and developers.

Investing in UX design is investing in your user base. Here are seven benefits of user experience design that can directly affect your project’s bottom-line and have your customers coming back for more.

DNN Platform (open-source) 10.0.0 is the latest stable version of the DNN CMS. It was officially released on April 9, 2025. Evoq is on 9.13, which was released on December 11, 2024 and is based on DNN platform 9.13.

Finding the right software firm to help you build and maintain your systems can be quite the challenge. Typically, it is who you know. "I know a guy who does development. Let me ask him if he can help/let me ask him who he'd recommend." But, what is the right method for evaluating whether your guy's recommendation is the right fit for your company?