May 26, 2021
Are you looking for a way to navigate the content storm and increase content agility? Do you want to be able to launch campaign landing pages or microsites in days compared to months? Or easily involve external agencies to implement them for you if you are short on resources at the moment? Then, you need to know about the new quick site creation features in Adobe Experience Manager Sites. We have summarized our experience with these features and the three main benefits we see for marketeers and developers.
But first, what is quick site creation?
Quick site creation comes with Adobe Experience Manager and will help you set up a campaign landing page or microsite with ease and speed. Although developing your own site template still requires AEM development expertise, initializing a project and importing a site template can be done by non technical users. It relies on the use of AEM core components, editable templates and some frontend development, but no backend changes.
Users can easily import this developed site template in their own AEM as a Cloud Service environment and use the previously developed page templates with no or only minor adjustments. Think of it as setting up and using PowerPoint templates, once the template is setup it’s quick and easy to adjust if needed.
Now let’s dive further into the main benefits we see using AEM Quick site creation.
Bring your idea to the market – faster than ever before
Implementing a brand-new appealing design for a campaign landing page or microsite with an existing CMS takes quite a bit of time since some backend as well as frontend work needs to be done to develop or adjust custom components. Using a pre-developed quick site creation template allows marketeers to setup a site within a fraction of the time normally spent on custom development. The site template will provide predefined page templates, style policies, experience fragments and the frontend code so that you can start creating pages and setting up the content within minutes of installing the site template. To get started quickly, Adobe offers a basic site template and Valtech developed two templates, one tailored towards event pages and one for sites geared towards eCommerce.
Respond quickly to new market demands
One of the main benefits of quick site creation is how easily adaptable the site templates are. If using ready-made templates does not work for you, you can adjust an existing site template to your needs with just a little frontend development or template editing.
Since quick site creation relies on core components and editable templates, a content author can use the template editor to adjust the layout of the pages, add or remove components from the page template's initial content, modify style policies and quickly make changes to the policies of components. This means for example adding new colours to the container components so that a new background colour can be used for a new campaign site. Should this not be enough, you still have the possibility to develop customized components and extend as necessary.
Save money in the process
Since the main benefits of quick site creation are its quick setup time and its adjustability, it makes sense that using this feature will also allow marketeers to setup new campaign landing pages or microsites at a lower price point than expected with a traditional AEM Sites implementation. It is possible to stand up sites with no back end development with quick site creation. Furthermore, only a small implementation team is needed consisting of a designer, a content author and a frontend developer. Depending on whether you use an existing Site Template and modify it or develop a new one, the new Site could be implemented within a few days or a few weeks.
While quick site creation will not always replace traditional implementations of AEM Sites, the quick site creation feature fills a gap in the Enterprise Level CMS market. We see its main benefits as the quick setup time, easy adjustability and low cost to implementation, combined with the user-friendly interface of Adobe Experience Manager. Our team was glad to be provisioned with the beta release of that powerful feature and had the opportunity to explore its potential.
Do you want to know more about the new feature? Get in touch with us and we are happy to share our experiences and knowledge with you.
