If you are a beginner and come here to know more about this advanced content management system then this Sitecore tutorial is just for you. The evolution of the internet and the transition of customer interaction with business from offline to online have paved the path for the development of Content Management systems.
Sitecore is a powerful content management system with many advanced features to meet ever-evolving business requirements. In this Sitecore tutorial, we are going to cover all major concepts to give you a brief overview of the Sitecore platform & how it works.
Before going to the Sitecore platform details let's cover a few basic concepts:
A content management system is software that helps organizations in managing their websites by simplifying things like content creation, editing, publishing, and storing digital content. In simple terms, content management software is a web template that allows users to build, customize and manage a website with minimal or no technical knowledge.
A typical content management system offers the basic infrastructure to handle things like web page creation, storing digital assets, etc.
A typical CMS platform offers a simple graphical interface to facilitate end-to-end website management processes. A CMS platform works based on two core components and eliminates the complex process of building things from scratch.
CMA: It offers a simple graphical user interface to the users and allows them to perform things like content creation, modification, removals, managing, etc, without writing HTML code.
CDA: This component acts as a backend service and takes the components uploaded in CMA and displays them to the website user.
Following is the list of CMS platforms available:
Sitecore is a digital experience platform used by worldwide organizations to deliver a seamless, personalized digital experience to their customers. It combines the power of CMS and digital marketing tools to help organizations maintain a digital presence and achieve desired results.
Sitecore software not just delivers powerful features for managing the website's content but also renders seamless personalized content to website users. It allows businesses to create, organize, personalize content and automate the content delivery process to the right users at the right moment.
Moreover, Sitecore advanced analytics features collect and analyze customer interaction data and help teams to understand customer behavior and build more customer-centric products and services.
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Sitecore holds a global leadership position in the experience management systems segment and offers rich functionality that a business needs to delight its customers with personalized content.
Sitecore offers a rich pool of features and flexibility to build and manage dynamic websites. This section of our Sitecore tutorial covers each feature of Sitecore and its uniqueness.
The experience editor option makes your work far simple by allowing you to modify the objects on the web pages directly. You can perform any sort of modifications on the web page such as adding, deleting, etc. It is very easy and takes very little time to create a page using Experience Editor.
A workflow is a series of predefined steps that define the content creation process for your website. Workflows act as a controller and publish the content after it has been approved. The core elements of Sitecore workflows are:
States → Represent different stages of the content creation process
Commands → Moves content items from one stage to another stage
Actions → Controls Automatic actions when items are in a particular state or when a command is executed.
Sitecore offers strong security features and allows authorized people to have greater control over every aspect of the website. Security accounts and security domains are the two components that help provide or restrict access to content items to users.
Sitecore versioning feature allows the users to create a new version of content and also helps them check the difference between different versions of content and the editors who created them. This feature simplifies the process for tracking complete actions executed to content by each individual.
Sitecore supports two types of versioning
Personalization is the process of delivering the right content to the right users. Sitecore’s personalization allows you to increase engagement, enhance customer satisfaction and deliver highly personalized content in real time. Sitecore uses various implicit and explicit methods to achieve personalization.
To understand which content is performing better and which is not, you need testing. Sitecore supports you in testing your content by facilitating support A/B and multivariate testing techniques. These tests allow you to have greater control over the content you deliver and help you in offering customer-centric content.
Sitecore offers a fully integrated marketing automation system available in the dashboard. This feature helps marketers in automating the majority of the task during a customer journey. The new marketing automation features offered by Sitecore allow you to extend automation functionalities with just a drag-and-drop interface.
Sitecore offers to manage your end-to-end email management systems right from developing impeccable email templates to distribution and mail tracking. Using Sitecore analytics you can analyze the metrics of your email campaigns.
Content profiling helps marketers to categorize content into different segments to match customer interests. This feature helps you to track the customer behavior on your site such as which objects they are interacting with, etc. This feature helps you understand customer behavior more specifically and helps you create content around your customer interests.
Sitecore Forms application allows you to build any sort of form in minutes. You can leverage Sitecore forms to build web forms that can record and store the information provided by your customers.
With the Sitecore Forms application you can perform things like:
Sitecore Cortex machine learning presents the markets with rich insights to act based on the marketing conditions and make more informed decisions. Cortex captures customers' data from various digital interactions and processes large volumes of data and suggests recommendations and predicts outcomes.
The Sitecore platform has come up with advanced capabilities to address the various obstacles faced by traditional e-commerce and in-store models. Sitecore streamlines end-to-end e-commerce operations optimizes processes, offers easy collaboration, and delivers personalized commerce.
Sitecore offers a wide range of dashboards and reports for marketers and helps them understand marketing trends. Sitecore collects data from your website and also from external data sources and presents it in a visualized format.
Sitecore Publishing service simplifies the process of publishing large amounts of items and drastically minimizes the time it takes.
Related Blog: Sitecore Horizon
Sitecore is a modern content management system that offers great benefits to both developers and marketers to simplify their work and achieve greater results. Let's understand the Sitecore benefits to developers and marketers:
Sitecore eliminates the complex website development process and helps them with a seamless environment to easily build, test, and deploy websites. The following are the developer advantages:
Marketers need accurate data and customer behavior in order to build and deliver the right products into the market. Sitecore offers a 360-degree view of customer data and helps marketers to understand customers better and serve their customers better.
Following are some of the advantages that the markets can get by using Sitecore:
Sitecore developers are the ones who have all skills and experience required to build and manage websites on the Sitecore platform. They are involved in activities like building and optimizing various digital products of a business.
The following are the typical duties of a Sitecore developer:
The Content Management Systems (CMS) segment has become one of the promising fields due to technology & e-commerce development. Sitecore is a unique & powerful platform that has been helping organizations with next-level capabilities. To start your career as a Sitecore developer you need skills like CSS, ASP.Net MVC, JavaScript Programming, and C# Programming.
Huh! Finally, we are at the end of this Sitecore Tutorial for beginners' blogs. In a nutshell, Sitecore is a perfect & powerful content management system that an organization requires to meet ever-increasing CMS market demands. It acts as a powerful tool for both developers and marketers and helps the business to achieve business goals. Thanks for reading this blog! We will keep updating this post with more concepts.
By Tech Solidity
Last updated on April 3, 2023
