Sitefinity by Telerik is one the top trending CMSs in the world right now. While in an earlier blog we discussed the role of Sitefinity from a marketing and business perspective, it’s now time to look at its awesome designer and developer friendly features, which help in designing and developing websites in a cost effective manner.
For developers
Let’s look at the top six developer friendly features of Sitefinity:
1) Built on .Net Technologies
Sitefinity is built on the strong platform of Microsoft Dot Net. It’s based on standard dot net technologies including master pages and themes .net controls that developers can easily use to develop great websites. In addition, the availability of a wide variety of Telerik tools assists in cost effective development.
2) Visual studio integration with Mvc and Razor support
Sitefinity has integration with visual studio with a plugin called Sitefinity Thunder. Thunder is an extension for Visual Studio making it easy to install and update themes, widgets, and modules from within the visual studio. Sitefinity is the only cms which supports mvc and helps to switch easily between web forms and mvc along with their coexistence.
3) Built in Content Types
Sitefinity has a wide variety of in built content types like news, blogs, lists, forms, images, videos etc. Developers can simply use these standard content types to build their websites quickly. Sitefinity allows the customization of the standard content types as well.
4) Module Builder
Apart from content types, Sitefinity also provides flexibility to define dynamic modules with the help of Module Builder. This helps developers to achieve the desired customization they need, based on requirements. For example, they can build a module for creating and storing press releases.
5) Flexible API
Sitefinity has a well-developed fully exposed API, which helps to manage all parts of Sitefinity with minimal effort. It’s quite easy to use the API with Intellisense support in Visual Studio. Also, Sitefinity provides the facility to integrate website with external applications through restful wcf services.
6) Fully Supported Resources
Sitefinity offers fully equipped training opportunities for developers along with useful video tutorials, blogs and documentations. It provides a very active online community for users and has a very responsive support team.
For Designers
The top six designer friendly features of Sitefinity are:
1) Built-in Templates
Sitefinity gives a set of standard templates for designing pages and widgets of websites. A very useful feature for designers, it provides the foundation to construct new templates, based on the creative thinking. Template Builder has the provision to export and import options; it has multiple styling options and makes it easy to share created templates, which facilitates molding of designs well.
2) Mobile Friendly
Sitefinity gives options to design mobile apps, mobile websites with responsive capability and optimized mobile experience for unlimited devices. This optimization can be previewed using its own built-in emulator, which simulates website’s behavior in different devices.
3) Design layouts in an effortless manner
Sitefinity has a set of standard layouts to design website page templates. Once placed, Sitefinity takes care of the layout structure applied to the pages, and through adaptive rule-sets, optimizes these layouts. Designers have to simply make use of them to develop custom layouts within a short period of time. It gives full control of the HTML rendered on a page.
4) Supports Responsive Design
Sitefinity has a responsive design engine, which helps to design websites that adapt to any device. It helps to define different transformations that automatically fit each visitor’s screen by using responsive rule sets and responsive layouts with customization capability.
5) Drag and drop layouts
Sitefinity provides drag and drop layouts that can be placed on any page and speed up the process of website design. These layouts are based on DIV, and not on table. It’s simple and easy to apply any custom CSS styles and Media Queries to fine tune the layouts and fit them onto any web pages.
6) Themes for style management
A Sitefinity theme makes the website design easier for designers; since it will be familiar to them. Basically it consists of traditional CSS that provides full control over website styling. It provides the flexibility to fine tune the design with new themes and also enables customization on existing themes.
So, those were the 12 reasons why developers and designers dig Sitefinity. Wait no more! Start creating eye catching websites with Sitefinity in an easy, convenient and cost effective way. Feel free to contact our Sitefinity experts for any queries at sales@suyati.com.
About the Author: Ajai Mani
Ajai Mani is a hardcore technology evangelist specialized in Microsoft Technologies with a bundle of Microsoft certifications. He has been associated with Suyati for the past two years. He is currently working on Suyati’s CMS projects. Apart from problem solving and technology, he passionate about singing romantic melodies and traveling.
