If you're looking to launch your website quickly, consider Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA). While some companies prefer to build their systems from scratch, others find accelerators to be the perfect solution for their development projects. Sitecore SXA is a framework that speeds up and simplifies web development.
So, why should you choose SXA for your business? For starters, it comes with pre-built templates and functionalities that can significantly reduce development time. Additionally, it has a user-friendly interface that enables marketers and content editors to manage and update content with ease.
Moreover, SXA provides out-of-the-box responsive design capabilities, which means your website will look great on any device. It also has multilingual support, making it an excellent choice for businesses targeting a global audience.
However, it's worth noting that SXA may not be suitable for all projects. If you require a highly customized website with unique functionalities, building from scratch may be the better option. Nonetheless, for businesses looking for a fast and efficient web development process, SXA is definitely worth considering.
Sitecore Experience Accelerator 101
Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) is a powerful web development approach that enables development teams to rapidly build websites. It allows for the reuse of templates, components, and layouts across multiple sites, separating design from development. This allows front-end designers, content authors, and developers to work seamlessly together to deploy multiple websites.
One of Sitecore SXA's strengths is its support for multi-tenancy by default. It uses themes, including scripts, images, and stylesheets, to enable easy and seamless customizations. Additionally, it provides pluggable theme options that make customization effortless.
Once you have set up an SXA tenant and site structure, all teams can start working with all resources across the platform. Content authors can create content for the wireframe environment, while marketers can easily create and define security roles for select content types. Meanwhile, front-end developers can focus on getting the theme up and running.
Sitecore SXA has several key elements that make it an excellent choice for web development. These include tenants and sites, the toolbox feature, grid and column layout options, pluggable themes, page and partial designs, Creative Exchange, asset optimizer, shared content and presentation, and data modeling.
Tenants and sites are supported in the SXA platform through a folder structure. This assigns security roles to help isolate content, and several sites can be built on a single instance with the help of a tenant. The toolbox feature enables you to find all reusable renderings and easily drag and drop them onto your page to build pages easily.
SXA uses responsive prebuilt grid layouts, and you can design your column and grid layout for each tenant/site. Pluggable themes split the site structure (HTML) from the design style (CSS). This makes customization easier, and you can apply pluggable themes quickly to change the look of your website.
Page and partial designs are vital elements of SXA, as they define the presentation of a page using renderings and partial designs. Creative Exchange allows front-end developers to work directly with static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, enabling them to export static pages or sites for creative designers to work on independently.
The asset optimizer feature improves the overall performance of SXA sites by optimizing JavaScript files and CSS. Finally, in SXA, you can share presentations, pages, and data sources between tenants. Additionally, SXA provides a JSON API feature for accessing SXA content.
Advantages of Sitecore Experience Accelerator
Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) offers several unique benefits to businesses, making it an excellent choice for those who want to build websites quickly and efficiently. Some of these benefits are:
Faster development: With SXA, businesses can have a faster time to market for their site. This is because it separates the design from the site structure, enabling your team to work concurrently on code, content, design, and deployment.
Cost-saving: SXA reduces development costs by leveraging reusable renderings and components. This means that you can build websites faster without starting from scratch every time.
User-friendly: The drag-and-drop feature of SXA makes it easy to build pages. Additionally, content authors and designers can simultaneously create prototypes and content as part of the entire design process, testing their ideas on live content as they develop.
Team alignment: SXA patterns include prescriptive processes that define the roles and responsibilities of team members. This sets clear expectations in the process, promoting team alignment and making it easier to work together.
Disadvantages Of Sitecore SXA
While Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) can help businesses build websites faster, it can also act as a straightjacket, limiting a company's future growth. Once implemented, you may have to navigate some stormy waters when adding functionalities that are not already included in SXA. Some of the challenges with SXA are:
Steep learning curve: To get to know the components and their customizations, there is a steep learning curve. This can make it challenging for some businesses to get started with SXA.
Bugs in components: SXA components do have bugs in them, and sometimes the only option to fix them is to upgrade. This can be frustrating for businesses that are already running on an older version.
Customization challenges: Customizing search functionality and related components that go with search can pose a challenge. As it comes prebuilt with a set of assumptions about search, any changes to these assumptions would require customizations at different layers.
While SXA works with both Sitecore Experience Manager and Sitecore Experience Platform, it remains to be seen what Sitecore will do with SXA now that the company appears to be headed in the direction of Headless and Sitecore Personalize (SaaS). These two initiatives appear to devalue, to some extent, the value proposition of SXA.
Sitecore XM: The Enterprise-Class CMS-Only Solution
Sitecore XM is an enterprise-class CMS-only solution that allows you to manage multiple websites across multiple digital touchpoints. It offers multilingual content and can integrate with third-party applications and data, including CRM, DAM, ECM, CDP(Sitecore customer data platform), and more.
Sitecore XM comes with a WYSIWYG editor that makes it easy for content authors to create and edit site pages and items. This feature enables businesses to empower their content authors to create engaging content quickly and efficiently.
Sitecore XP: The Ultimate Digital Experience Platform for Marketers
Sitecore XP is the ultimate digital experience platform for marketers as it builds on the CMS by empowering them with digital marketing solutions that include marketing automation features and advanced personalization. It offers several features that enable marketers to combine customer data from multiple sources to deliver personalized experiences across all customer journeys.
Sitecore XP provides a powerful set of digital marketing tools that allow businesses to create and manage personalized experiences across all channels, including web, mobile, email, social, and more. Some of the key features of Sitecore XP include:
Marketing automation: Sitecore XP lets businesses automate their marketing campaigns, reducing the time and effort required to create and deliver personalized content to their customers.
Advanced personalization: With Sitecore XP, businesses can personalize every aspect of the customer experience, from content and messaging to layout and design. This enables businesses to deliver tailored experiences that resonate with their customers and drive engagement and loyalty.
Customer data management: Sitecore XP allows businesses to collect and manage customer data from multiple sources, including CRM, social media, and other third-party applications. This enables businesses to gain a comprehensive view of their customers and deliver personalized experiences that drive engagement and loyalty.
Start Your Digital Experience Journey With QEdge
Enterprises are continuously looking for solutions that can help improve efficiency, accelerate product launches, save costs, and grow ROI. Sitecore Experience Accelerator helps businesses build sites faster, streamline development processes, and align their teams to work concurrently.
However, it may not be the best solution for enterprises to grow and deliver the best digital experiences. To do that, they need additional features such as personalization, CRM, DAM, e-commerce engine, analytics, or multilingual capabilities built into their digital experience platform. Sitecore XP is a better option to enable enterprise-class features to help adapt to ever-changing business needs.
QEdge is a Sitecore implementation partner that can help you assess and build your digital experiences. As a Sitecore implementation partner, QEdge can help you assess and figure out the best combination of Sitecore products for your needs. Also, QEdge is one of the best Sitecore hosting partners.
Feel free to contact us on QEdge LinkedIn. Our Sitecore expertise helps you reap the full benefits of implementing Sitecore, regardless of the product.
