A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins by… Logging into Your Sitefinity Backend

To produce great content, you need to take that first step. The new Sitefinity 11.1 release adds new SEO, performance and security features to help you quickly produce your best work.

Have you ever tried rock climbing? Here it is how it works: first you contemplate and look at how others are doing it, then you decide to try it for yourself.

How hard can it be?

We were born to climb, right? After some hesitation, you reach for the handhold, only to realize that looking down from a 50-foot height can be an intimidating experience. This is the moment when your palms start to sweat, your muscles start to ache, and your heart starts to race frantically. This is the moment, when you start questioning your partner, the rope, the harness and the entire universe.

Climbing is fun—it just takes some practice. Once you have reached the next hold and have made it past the next incline, your confidence starts to grow and all the happy hormones kick in. At that moment, it really does not matter if the route is hard, or easy. You have made it to the top and this is what counts. Take a moment to enjoy the view from the top. It was totally deserved.

How to Get on Top of Your Content Management Chores

How does rock climbing relate to content management, you may ask? Well, back in the day, when I was tasked with training a cohort of marketers on how to use Sitefinity CMS (which, by the way, is a gem of a CMS when it comes of ease of use) in their day to day work, I met Cynthia. I could sense and feel her frustration the moment we started the training session. I could literary slice through the air, and every word echoed across the ocean during our online meeting.

Trying to explain what a piece of software does to a novice user, is like telling a novice climber all about the ropes, knots and the gear… and asking them to put it into practice on a 100 foot high cliff right away. 

Fast forward, Cynthia became one of the more advanced Sitefinity users, happily pushing content out, without reliance on me, or IT. She would work on her own but kept her lifeline.  She would often ping me on IM to discuss ideas for improvements and we discussed many complex business and marketing challenges. This is how several product features were born.

Cynthia was in the zone—an empowered, effective, productive marketer, who now could focus on what she did best. Nothing gets me more frustrated than having to rely on other team members for something I could do on my own, and I could see why Cynthia was happy taking on everything that involved content updates on multiple websites.

Practice Makes Perfect

Regardless of your marketing capacity, you should feel as empowered as Cynthia. Practice makes perfect and surely makes you more effective at taming your day to day marketing chores. Having the right tools out of the box can only help you ace that marketing challenge and beat that project deadline.

One thing I have learned from climbing is that what gets planned gets done. Even if you fell, or stopped for a minute to take a breath or scout the route.

And while we would leave the planning to you, Sitefinity CMS can help you get things done safely, securely and just in time for that awesome view from the top.

A Picture Says a 1000 words

As we gain experience, we tend to look at more challenging tasks, try new things and ask more questions. After Cynthia had mastered her content management skills, she started to look for ways to improve search engine rankings, social sharing, internal search and user engagement. She kept asking about website performance, personalization and more creative ways to share content on social media. I could not believe how transformative her content management experience had become.

Cynthia had outgrown her role of writing and publishing content -- she was now looking into better ways to collaborate with other offices across the globe, to easily reuse, localize and personalize content.

For Cynthia, the first tutorial about simple content management had transformed into a multichannel, digital content management experience.

See, in every company there are people like me and Cynthia who face the same challenges and need to deal with frustration. Only when we collaborate and understand the pain points, do results follow. Platforms like Sitefinity CMS are there to help enable us to publish content, and to reach and engage with the audience.

As your business grows and expands, your customers’ demands change—if you can adapt and transform, chances are good that you will continue to prosper.

Marketing tactics evolve, but content is still king. Whether you own a small website, or orchestrate multichannel, multilingual and personalized digital experiences at scale, the quest for perfection never ends.

Tools of the Trade in Sitefinity 11.1

When it comes to web content management and delivering digital experiences, Sitefinity keeps evolving and moves in sync with your customers’ growing demands. Sitefinity CMS was designed to help you work smarter and do more in less time, regardless of whether you are a marketer or an ASP.NET developer. That’s why we have added even more goodies to the box in the new Sitefinity 11.1 release to help you ace more than just SEO rankings and social shares.

Ok, What’s in the Box?

Marketers can now leverage out-of-the-box support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which can help increase mobile visits and engagement. Users love them, and so does Google, so give AMP a try and watch as your engagement goes up and those bounce rates are kept in check. 

As unique as your content is, you can now add custom SEO tags to any page and any module. If you, like us, believe in organic traffic, your SEO and social media teams will truly appreciate this feature. And if you want to go up close and personal, campaign landing pages can now be personalized through URL parameters. No need to create multiple pages anymore. Launch one and personalize at will. Sweet!

And if you happen to get dragged in those water cooler chats, don’t forget to tell your web team that Sitefinity CMS 11.1 bundles multiple performance improvements, distributed cache, and support for Bootstrap 4 to get that mobile-first website out there in a snap.

Improved security and content governance are just some of features that should help you get the peace of mind you have been longing for, and that work-life balance in check.

Now that’s a very compelling reason to upgrade.

Don’t take my word for it. Why not head to the what’s new page, request a demo, or try Sitefinity CMS for yourself? You could begin a fabulous content management journey with a great multilingual, multichannel and personalized digital experience. Be sure to share, comment and subscribe for more updates.