Sitecore Tutorial

A Brief Overview of Sitecore Platform

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 developing 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 will cover all significant 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:

What is a Content Management System (CMS)?

A content management system is software that helps organizations manage their websites by simplifying 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 essential infrastructure for creating web pages, storing digital assets, etc.

How Does a Typical CMS Platform Work?

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.

Core Components of a CMS:

  • Content Management Application (CMA)
  • Content Delivery Application (CDA)

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, takes the components uploaded in CMA, and displays them to the website user.

What are the well-known CMS Tools Available in the Market

Following is the list of CMS platforms available:

  • WordPress
  • HubSpot CMS Hub
  • Joomla
  • WooCommerce
  • Drupal
  • Wix
  • Sitecore
  • Adobe Experience Manager
  • Shopify
  • Magento, etc.

What is Sitecore?

Sitecore is a digital experience platform that organizations use 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 delivers powerful features for managing the website's content and 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's advanced analytics features collect and analyze customer interaction data to help teams understand customer behavior and build more customer-centric products and services.

Want to become a Sitecore professional and get into a high-paying profession? Check out our expert-designed industry-oriented "Sitecore Training" course. This course will help you to achieve excellence in this domain.

 

Sitecore Features:

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.

1) The Experience Editor

The experience editor option simplifies your work by allowing you to modify the objects on the web pages directly. You can modify the web page, such as adding, deleting, etc. It is straightforward and takes very little time to create a page using Experience Editor.

2) Workflows

A workflow is a series of predefined steps defining your website's content creation process. Workflows act as a controller and publish the content after approval. 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.

3) Security

Sitecore offers robust 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.

4) Versioning

Sitecore versioning feature allows the users to create a new version of content. Also, it 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

  • Numbers versioning: Versions of an item in the same language
  • Language Versions: Versions of an Item in a different language

5) Personalization:

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.

6) Testing

You need testing to understand which content is performing better and which is not. Sitecore supports you in testing your content by facilitating support A/B and multivariate testing techniques. These tests give you greater control over your content and help you offer customer-centric content.

7) Marketing Automation

Sitecore offers a fully integrated marketing automation system available in the dashboard. This feature helps marketers automate most tasks during a customer journey. Sitecore's new marketing automation features allow you to extend automation functionalities with just a drag-and-drop interface.

8) Email Experience Manager

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.

9) Content Profiling

Content profiling helps marketers categorize content into segments to match customer interests. This feature helps you track your site's customer behavior, 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.

10) Sitecore Forms

Sitecore Forms application allows you to build any 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:

  • Create forms from templates
  • Apply validations to forms
  • Form customization
  • Understand the form performance
  • Extract data from forms to target databases.

11) Cortex

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, processes large volumes of data, suggests recommendations, and predicts outcomes.

12) Experience Commerce:

The Sitecore platform has developed advanced capabilities to address the various obstacles traditional e-commerce and in-store models face. Sitecore streamlines end-to-end e-commerce operations, optimizes processes, offers easy collaboration, and delivers personalized commerce.

13) Reporting

Sitecore offers a wide range of dashboards and reports for marketers and helps them understand marketing trends. Sitecore collects data from your website and external sources and presents it in a visualized format.

14) Publishing Service

Sitecore Publishing service simplifies the process of publishing large items and drastically minimizes the time it takes.

Related Blog: Sitecore Horizon

Sitecore Benefits:

Sitecore is a modern content management system that offers excellent benefits to developers and marketers to simplify their work and achieve more significant results. Let's understand the Sitecore benefits to developers and marketers:

Developer Perspective:

Sitecore eliminates the complex website development process and helps them with a seamless environment to build, test, and deploy websites quickly. The following are the developer advantages:

  • Easy deployment
  • Extensibility
  • Distinct environments for content management and content delivery
  • High flexibility & compatibility with external tools

Marketer's Perspective:

Marketers need accurate data and customer behavior to build and deliver the right products. Sitecore offers a 360-degree view of customer data and helps marketers understand and serve customers better. 

Following are some of the advantages that the markets can get by using Sitecore:

  • Tracking and analytics
  • Building marketing campaigns
  • Personalization
  • Gaining a single view of individual customers
  • Content optimization

Who is a Sitecore Developer?

Sitecore developers are the ones who have all the 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:

  • Developing automation for marketing
  • Migrating data from one website to another
  • Building integrations
  • Gather requirements & build websites
  • Managing and updating code
  • Code testing & deployment
  • Finding & fixing bugs to improve performance
  • Collaborating with different teams to design and build competitive products

Skills to Become 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.

Summary:

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 developers and marketers and helps the business achieve business goals. Thanks for reading this blog! We will keep updating this post with more concepts.
 

By Tech Solidity

Last updated on February 13, 2024