To strengthen and make our positive impact more visible to our clients, partners, and (future) employees, we recently embarked on an exciting journey. The ultimate goal of this journey is a ‘B Corp certification’: an internationally recognized certification awarded to companies that meet rigorous standards for social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability. At us., we know that positive change usually starts small A B Corp certification proves that as a company, you’re not just focused on profit but are also committed to making the world a better place. It demonstrates how your mission and strategy contribute to your surroundings, the environment, your customers, and your employees. As a B Corp, you become part of a global community of like-minded companies working together to drive positive change

It’s in the DNA of all us.-colleagues to stay constantly alert to trends, opportunities, and innovations. We’re curious and eager to dive into everything. We explore new technologies and digital possibilities to the fullest, aiming to delight our clients with valuable improvements. CLOMP: structural innovation in our workflowHelping our clients proactively – that’s what we love most. But let’s be honest: when things get very busy (which happens quite often), hands-on work with innovations can sometimes be overlooked. To everyone’s regret, because forward-thinking, coming up with new ideas and solutions, and sharing knowledge are integral to digital partnership. That’s why we have structurally embedded it into our way of working. And not just a little. We’ve reserved half of our developers’ hours for this new workflow, which focuses primarily on proactively serving our existing clients alongside handling support requests. This process is often called ‘Client Opportunity Management Process.’ We call it ‘us. CLOMP.’

European Accessibility Act 2025A huge problem for many elderly, illiterate people, and those for whom the online world is challenging due to a disability or condition…? Thankfully, there is the European Accessibility Act (EAA) 2025, a European law that helps ensure everyone in the EU can participate in economic and social life without barriers. Compliance with the EAA will be mandatory from 2025 for commercial companies, manufacturers, and digital service providers. For public institutions and government services, the EAA expands on the obligations they have already been meeting under the Web Accessibility Directive (WAD). The EAA is based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) of the World Wide Web Consortium – quite a mouthful.

Making the world a bit fairer with smart digital technology: that’s what we love at us. That’s why we’re so happy with clients like IDH, who have been challenging us as a digital partner for years to come up with the very best digital tools. Tools that IDH uses to encourage retailers worldwide to make international supply chains more sustainable. closing the gapA key focus for IDH is closing the ’living wage gap’: the difference between the actual wages of workers in developing countries and the minimum wage needed for a decent standard of living. To understand the extent of that living wage gap, identify changes, and ultimately close the gap (so that even Carlos gets a living wage), you need to start by measuring. Smart measuring. So in 2021, our developers built the IDH Salary Matrix tool. In close collaboration with our partner IDH, of course. You can read more about it here..

“We are very happy – yesterday we received our first new donor of € 1,000 annually! Already a success 😉 .” A day after the release of their new website, Kirstin Poot, head of Marketing Communication and Fundraising at the Zuid-Hollands Landschap, sends an enthusiastic email to the us. team. The ZHL website is the first of a series of ’landscape websites’ that us. is designing and building this year, based on the NGO suite.

Take SIDN. We have been working with them since 2013 on improving their online services, management of the NL domain, strengthening SIDN’s positioning and making an impact in the field of cybersecurity and online identity. In the SIDN customer story, online communication specialist Nicole Wedler explains the added value for her organization of our long-term cooperation. In addition to the partnership with SIDN, there are more and more non profit and charitable organizations with which we have a perfect match.

The partnership started with the renewal of the ‘slightly outdated’ SIDN website, followed by the redevelopment of the portal for registrars (domain name providers). In 2015, we worked together on the websites for SIDN Fund and SIDN Labs. SIDN also got a new identity that year, which called for a complete redesign of sidn.nl. Large and smaller projects followed, a few every year. online securityNicole: “For me, the best project we created together was the campaign website for more awareness of your personal online security: ‘hackman.nl’. For this, ethical hacker Rickey Gevers took up the challenge to hack actress and presenter Lieke van Lexmond and gave tips for safer online behavior. The website had beautiful visual moving elements and cool online quizzes with which you could test your own online behavior.”

why Wordpress?The answer is mainly pragmatic. Wordpress is one of the most widely used CMS solutions in the world. As a digital agency you will sooner or later have to deal with a Wordpress installation, whether you like it or not. Many customers are used to working in Wordpress. In order to be able to serve all our customers as well as possible, we decided in 2012 - with some healthy reluctance - to expand our toolbelt with Wordpress. But then Wordpress à la us..

It’s one of the reasons why I work at us.: here we find it important to master the latest technology, improve standard solutions and continuously innovate. So there is always room to develop, research and experiment. Google’s open platform is perfect for this. GCP has great solutions that you can use as a developer, but for me the challenge is to analyze those standard solutions, recalibrate them and use them to develop custom applications that perfectly match what a customer needs. As a Google Cloud Architect, you understand exactly how Google built the platform, why certain things work the way they do, how the platform moves in certain situations around your application.

You probably heard about them: SDGs - Sustainable Development Goals. Seventeen goals with 169 targets, agreed by the UN countries, to make the world a better place by 2030. A global compass for challenges such as poverty, education and the climate crisis. us. is eager to make a (small and humble) contribution. Many of our clients contribute to achieving the SDGs. For example, charitable organizations such as Plan International Nederland, Amnesty International, Wilde Ganzen and SOS Children’s Villages are committed to several causes. Think of Gender Equality, Good health and well-being, Quality education, Clean water and sanitation, Economic growth and decent work, Reducing inequality, and Peace and justice. A client such as IDH contributes by helping other organizations to achieve the sustainable development goals.

At last… a new website! It has cost us a lot of blood, sweat and tears, because that’s how things are at usmedia – everybody has an opinion about everything. In the end we opted for a step-by-step approach, so that everyone could make their contribution to the final result at some point. And to what follows, of course, because a website is never “finished”… We are curious to hear your reactions!

Amsterdam UX organized a workshop with the topic “User checks and agile usability testing” at us.. Anouskha Scholten was leading the workshop. “user checks is an agile way of usability testing with the focus on creating value” With User checks the design accelerates to a higher level within a short period and relatively low cost and little resources. User checks maximize the key element of usability testing: getting to empathy.

If you work on projects with a team like we do, you probably have encountered a merge-conflict or two in your time… And most likely the default merge tool which Mercurial has picked isn’t really helping you.

Some of our clients wanted to provide localized content based on the municipality of the visitor. Having played with Open Data for an “Apps for Amsterdam” contest in the past we decided to visit the website of the Cadastral Survey in the Netherlands.

Today we migrated from Bugzilla as our client facing issue tracking system to YouTrack from JetBrains. The reason for this migration was, that while Bugzilla was and is an excellent issue tracking system. It is also too much focused on the engineer as its user.

I am happy to show you the first renders of the building concept we are working on for the creative campus we try to build in Suriname. The goal is to create an environment that combines learning, work and cultural activities. The campus will house the training facilities, different companies in the creative sector, a restaurant and dormitories.

I’m a highly visual oriented person and I always need to make little diagrams, mind-maps, sketches of my thinking. Unfortunately I am very bad at making drawings (imagine the frustration).

As you know we are actively involved in Spang Makandra and its ambitious successor Spang Campus. Spang Campus aims to be and inspirational place for young and creative ambitious people. Together with Waag Society from Amsterdam we are trying to move a Fab Lab to Suriname

Since 2007, us. has been front-running several initiatives in Suriname. That year we established Spang Makandra in Paramaribo. Spang Makandra was born out of CyberMango plus the best candidates coming out of our own 9 month training.

Establishing a creative sector in Suriname is ambitious and requires both good ideas and perseverance. The leapfrog is feasible. Let me show you why I believe in it so passionately.

The Vision, or maybe it is better to call it the ambition, I had when starting Spang Makandra was to develop an environment where great stuff can happen. Of course starting Spang Makandra in Suriname was, what you can call, a leap of faith. I am very pleased it turned out very well.