Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness ~ John Ruskin
As organizations become increasingly multi-faceted, the websites they own have spiralled and sprawled, both in terms of number and diversity of content. It is very normal today for organizations to own a main website, some sister sites and a few microsites like those for marketing campaigns, newly launched products etc. Mergers and acquisitions can also bring in new sites that may need to be integrated or modified for uniformity.
While it may be easy to add on to your list of sites, managing them is one big uphill task. Also, while each site will have its own unique content, there will be some content like those related to branding, messaging and even announcements and press releases that need to be displayed across sites. Besides, how do you ensure the content on each of your site is organized and easily accessible to the right set of people?
Sitefinity’s multi-site management feature is a blessing to those faced with the challenge of maintaining multiple sites. Sitefinity is a leading proprietary content management solution based on Microsoft’s .NET framework. It brings in many benefits like reusing assets, selective sharing of content, removing redundancy and improving consistency across websites.
Pitfalls of managing multiple sites without Sitefinity
- Allocating resources to manage content on each site is expensive with higher development and web hosting costs
- Effort and content redundancy
- Lack of uniformity between sister sites leading to confusion in how people perceive your brand
- Scattered and incomplete customer data resulting in inaccurate data analytics
What Sitefinity can do for you
- Creating new sites: Creating new sites is quick and easy. Duplicate an existing site to copy over pages, templates and widgets used in the original site. It is simply a matter of cloning and modifying them, if needed. It has multi-language support where you can set language for each site at the time of creation. The tool provides previews for mobile devices and generates built-in responsive layouts. HTML5 video players give an enhanced user experience without any browser extensions or plug-ins.
- Sharing content between sites: Sitefinity provides a single interface to manage all your sites. Easily switch between sites to share content with a single click. Reusing content, forms and templates ensures consistency between main site and satellite sites. Each site has its own configuration so that specific pages can be enabled or disabled as per choice.
- Access Control: Control access to different groups on need basis. Permissions can be set for site, module and data source. Access is given at three levels –
- The Action level for Editors, Authors, Designers and Administrators
- The Resource level for members of an Active Directory Group that manages a subset of the content
- The User level which gives each user specific permissions which can be widened or narrowed based on job demands.
- Smart display of content: Display relevant content to users quickly and efficiently by setting relationships between content. Whenever a user browses a topic, other related content is also displayed to them. This promises a better user experience as the user is shown content that he or she is most likely to be interested in.
- Multi-tenant architecture: Multi-tenant environment means all websites are part of the same installation. This gives better utilization of hardware resources leading to cost savings from minimal infrastructure and a single web hosting. Upgrades are easy as there is only one code base to maintain. A single code base also makes it possible to quickly deploy new features across all sites with minimum development effort. Resolving network and server issues is easier as there is only a single interaction point to examine.
- Single site to multi site migration: If you have a single site set up in Sitefinity, it is possible to convert it to a multi-site instance through the staging and syncing module. You can transfer all your existing site data, pages, templates, users and roles to the new instance. All permissions are also carried forward to the new instance. Also, if you already possess multiple sites, you can migrate it to one Sitefinity instance and manage them with a single login.
- Better SEO: This is the icing on the cake for all you multi-site owners. The URLs generated in Sitefinity are search engine friendly. Filter tools help you to locate pages with missing titles and descriptions. Once a site is removed or renamed, you can configure a redirection to redirect visitors to an alternate site, like your home page. These settings are easy to create with minimal user involvement and give you good rankings. Sitefinity also includes built-in web analytics. Member and visitor data for all your sites is available at one point which means you have the complete set of data to work with.
Sitefinity, powered by Azure
Sitefinity coupled with Azure can work wonders as you can now efficiently manage multiple sites with the added benefit of autoscaling. Azure brings you the scalability of cloud so that you can scale up and down depending on your traffic.
For world-class websites built on Sitefinity that are SEO optimized and guarantee a rich user experience, contact services@suyati.com.