Ever been in a situation where you need to get a campaign site up and running quickly? Change messaging urgently? Or run a speedy A/B test?

Of course you have. And the process? Get hold of the developer, brief the agency, etc etc...which all takes time and effort which could be better spent elsewhere. By then the opportunity may have gone, or the problem has escalated to DEFCON 1. There must be a better way to manage your Website Content. Let's take a look in a bit more detail.

Overall, marketing needs three things from their Web CMS

1.   The ability to publish content quickly, and flexibly, and ideally by the people who understand the content and the audience the best

2.   To remain on-brand, support multiples devices, remain search visible, minimise waste and overhead in development tasks

3.   To manage everything concisely and simply in one platform,

But traditional CMS systems require developers to make many simple changes (where you need a new layout, for example, or a new component, or a new feature to an existing component).

At Coherence, we use a platform which builds in flexibility to configure components so they behave differently in different contexts. This means a publisher can use a component for a wide variety of uses, and not worry that they need a developer, or that the visual design will break.

This helps in a number of ways. Here are a few:

Speed.

Using a design system approach, we’ll help you get a site live quickly. The launch effort can be spread across a wide set of non-technical personnel – content editors, publishers, site assemblers, rather than bottleneck with a development team.

Scale.

Using multiple technologies, we can help you manage many websites (and indeed brands) from a single code base.

Performance.

Once in place, your editors have more power to publish, evolve, and experiment with content. Campaigns get to market quicker and customers are happier.

Overall, the platform gives businesses the speed and agility to make and change content with a minimal development overhead.

And this means massive savings to your marketing budget, and if you’re an enterprise business, potentially millions.

What’s the platform called?

We use Site Studio, which is part of Acquia’s Digital XP and is our preferred technology stack. It’s low-code, which means that publishing is handled entirely through drag-and-drop form-based interaction. As a publisher, you can see previews of your new page build in real time and with an accurate depiction of how the page will behave when you publish.

This makes publishing quick and effective. Site Studio doesn’t let you over-ride the stylings implemented in the design system, so your publishers can never ‘break the page’. This helps them focus on message, content and outcome.

How do you implement Site Studio?

It’s implemented typically along with the Drupal platform, although it can be fitted retrospectively to existing Drupal 8+ platforms.

Site Studio builds still use Drupal developers to install and configure the platform, and you will still need digital designers initially who can understand your brand and build your design system. But once the platform is deployed, your content editors really are free to manage the publishing process from there.

And publishers can change messaging, re-order pages, build campaign pages, do features, takeovers, A/B tests without having to bother the development team.

Show me how it works

Here’s a brilliant video case study for a global healthcare giant we’re currently working with, showing the platform in action and how easy it is to use:

And here are a few sites we completed recently:

What next?

Site Studio represents a very powerful tool for marketers and content publishers. It’s backed by Drupal, one of open-source’s biggest enterprise backers who have put it at the heart of their digital customer experience offering.

So take a look at this short video and understand how you can implement hundreds of websites in under a year, bring content control to your brands and boost marketing performance.

Then speak with your content, marketing and developer teams, and get their thoughts. We’d love to hear from you.