Sitefinity Workshop Highlights What Makes a Top CMS

Emakina hosted a workshop in Brussels with its friends from Progress Sitefinity.
The invitation to the event was very clear: ‘your web presence deserves better’. And that’s exactly what Progress Sitefinity offers, as the participants discovered during the well-filled afternoon programme.

The meeting started with a short introduction by Bob Bogaard, Manager Sales & Partners at Progress. His key message: It is time to benefit of the multiple possibilities a solid CMS can offer, because today you really need to take ownership of the Customer Journey.

Bob Bogaard discusses business outcomes of digital transformation

How do I identify who and where my visitor is?
How can I easily implicitly and explicitly personalize my content?
How to build my 360° customer view and create value out of it?

To answer these questions and create value, Bob Bogaard insists you need to segment your audience well, using unique identifiers, refine your messages and calls to action, go where the conversation is and then optimize strenuously.

Emakina’s One-Team Department Director Christophe Heerinckx gave his ‘peek behind the screen’ in the construction of a major website using Sitefinity, with a real-life case.

Christophe Heerinckx introduces a rich Sitefinity implementation case

He showed how content can be easily adapted to fit multiple parameters, making the experience for each user personal and to truly the point. The participants especially applauded the simple setups, and the flexibility of the many out-of-the-box widgets Christophe introduced.

Next up was Progress Solution Engineer Richard van Tol, who zoomed in on content management, location and personas using Sitefinity, while creating a new demo website ‘on the fly’. Sitefinity clearly scored well on ease of use, fluent sharing of rich content (also in various places of a website) and making web experiences interactive.

The CMS makes the unknown user known
and opens up opportunities to expand the customer portfolio.

Alexandre de Haan, Emakina’s Client Service Director, then took a step back, to give his best advice on what to look for when selecting a CMS and kicking off your new web project.

Alexandre de Haan answers to what makes a CMS the right one

As the Cheshire cat in Alice in wonderland says: if you do not know where you want to go, any road ‘ll take you there… so his first advice was to get your strategy straight and develop a business case built on clear goals and strategies. This also means you really need to know your users and their behaviour.

Choosing the right CMS takes time

Alexandre de Haan warns not to be seduced by fancy functionalities if you will not use them. Also, it is unwise to make a selection as if the new website would be a technology-only project. After deciding on your short list, you must evaluate the candidates’ vision, services and support, and their developers community, products stability and focus.

It is wise to keep your requirements reasonable,
while keeping an eye on your future needs.

The selected CMS has to answer functional, technical and organisational needs, but Alexandre warns checking boxes on a spreadsheet is not enough. The right CMS must offer a fit for multiple stakeholders, so it’s wise to create a cross-divisional team to select the one and only for your needs.

In short, this workshop offered an intense and to the point overview of an excellent tool (that is moving up in the Gartner Quadrant studies and other relevant reports) and in how to choose your CMS wisely.

Here’s a link to 10 criteria that make for a good CMS.
And of course, if you want to learn more, Alexandre and his team are happy to help you move forward.

Contact Alexandre de Haan here.