Acquia Site Studio: A delight for Marketers!
How Acquia Site Studio is transforming the web content management perspective.
Today the word ‘digital’ has a ubiquitous influence on the human mind that has evolved to a whole new meaning in the current global context. In an attempt to adapt to the growing digital needs, brands have been accelerating their digital transformation, moving on from merely having an online presence to investing in the continuous enhancement of digital experiences. However, in doing so, simply using advanced technology is not enough. Nurturing a mindset for creating a holistic and integrated environment for digital content creation is imperative. Earlier web development meant an instant mental picture of complex syntax and codes, making it inaccessible for marketers, content creators, and non-technical users to update and modify digital content. This created a fragmented digital ecosystem resulting in poor customer experiences. Today’s evolved consumers have generated an ever-increasing demand for faster information and contextual, seamless experiences.
With most traditional CMS tools, it is a challenge to ensure the process from development to end-user experience is seamless. Not to mention a long-drawn-out process that exhausts both time and highly-skilled resources draining out a company's pockets. Acquia Site Studio, a powerful plug-in to the Drupal architecture, reforms the architectural landscape making content management far more streamlined, giving a lot more flexibility to designers and marketers, and reducing technical dependencies. Site Studio is an intuitive low-code UI solution to building and editing Drupal sites much faster without compromising on functionality and scalability. With this tool, marketers and designers now have controlled access to site-building that smoothens out the creases due to the wide technical gap enabling the launch of on-brand sites up to four times faster!
Building a Drupal site just got a whole lot easier!
One of the common areas of concern during web development and site maintenance is the constant back-and-forth between the designing, development, and marketing teams. Most CMS frameworks are not optimized for non-technical use, and the majority of the website content publishing tasks are dependent on technical expertise. And, more often than not, there is a discrepancy between design and code due to platform challenges with the intended messaging getting lost in translation.
Site Studio’s low-code solution targets a gamut of users, especially those who are involved in creating, designing, and strategizing digital experiences. With a powerful visual interface, Site Studio facilities a ground for content editors, site builders, designers, and marketers without deep-coding skills to create, edit, and update content much easier and faster with the desired creative liberty. A favorable flip side to this approach of enabling marketers and alike to make the style and format changes to everyday content is the release of developers from routine tasks to focus more on complex functionality and integration ones. This reduces the TCO considerably, which would otherwise mainly consist of budget allocations for specialized technical resources.
Create once, Use everywhere! — a reusable component building structure
Enabling a component-based design system, Acquia follows the doctrine of creating digital assets only once and harnessing them for various layouts using a mix of elements for creating a fresh look each time. This sort of component pattern-based system is advantageous when compared with the traditional style of web development. Instead of having to develop the website page by page, a component structure breaks down the design into smaller chunks simplifying the individual build. Site Studio enables the rapid creation of a vast component library of templates containing the layout, style, and functionality that can be re-used by non-technical users through a drag-and-drop interface, without having to worry about coding. The components, designed as independent editable content blocks, can be added to the Layout Canvas to create new layouts through various combinations. These reusable assets can be exported to other sites as well, and the intended experience can be replicated across multiple projects.
The component structure facilitates brand and experience consistency while at the same time speeding up the development process considerably. Site builders can minimize the time spent on rebuilding and redesigning similar content types making use of the existing ones to upgrade and enhance their web experience at scale.
A low-code approach to redefined digital experiences
With Acquia Site Studio’s drag-and-drop interface, marketers and content editors can create and update content with ease. The Layout Canvas and View Template, in particular, help define the look and feel of a webpage without delving into code. With minimal developer input, features need to be created only once leaving the non-technical users to leverage them across pages. For designers, as well, the platform acts as a creative playground to try out different styles and create elements, layouts, and templates without having to be dependent on the development process to see their designs live. The interface aims to present an intuitive user experience that helps build pixel-perfect, responsive sites. This low-code approach smoothens out the wrinkles arising in a traditional CMS setup due to technical dependencies, transferring the publishing control to marketers and content authors, and gaining more flexibility over the display and appearance of digital content. In most cases, tasks such as swapping an image or changing the existing style of content, or theming a view on the website required UI developers to write code for every minor change of pixel. Site Studio eliminates this additional step with the templated structure of building a site that simplifies the authoring process, with each element just dragged and dropped. This helps in understanding the appearance on the front end and can be accordingly modified to fit the digital strategy.
Marketers and brand executives face an urgency to deliver differentiated customer experiences every second. And, at a time when digital is the primary ground for brand competition, digital experiences are thriving to be pushed to the next level. Customer behavior is constantly suggestive of the need for more immersive, contextual, and personalized experiences. With path-breaking digital platforms like Site Studio, design-focused brands can move faster, empowering marketers and digital decision-makers to have more control and prominence over the site-building and delivery coming up with the desired customer experiences.
