Sitecore Pages – The End of the "Hard to Use" Saga
One of the greatest assets in Sitecore’s new XM Cloud, SaaS, Composable DXP (boy, that’s a mouthful!) is Pages. For all the cool technology behind a SaaS based DXP simply editing pages has me all happy inside.
I’d be a rich man if I had a buck for every time I heard someone say Sitecore is hard to use for us mere mortals, or marketing folks.
Of course, it isn’t, as an Aceik guy (read, we do a LOT of rescues) and a Sitecore veteran I can tell you its mostly hard to use because it’s been badly built, or not maintained, or just flat out mismanaged into the ground.
Sad, but ultimately very true.
Every agency takes on a legacy Sitecore build as if they were opening a box of highly venomous Cobras. And more often than not, they are. It’s not the platforms’ fault – its plain old technical debt.
As a result, many marketers have a dim view of tools like Sitecore, believing it’s hard to use precisely because of the relatively poor condition that the platform is in.
BUT – and it’s a mighty but, XM Cloud has a thing called Pages. Which is the next-gen Horizon styled WYSIWYG editor. This is a SaaS based editing environment. Amazing.
But wait, there so much more….
Pages has a built-in component builder.
Read that again – XM Cloud Pages has a built-in, no-code component builder.
This lets marketers build functional UI components from scratch and connect these components to a wide variety of data sources. They can even populate them with data from 3rd party content providers like Contentful, or other headless CMS products.
- XM Cloud has analytics. Tick.
- XM Cloud has 20 popular and useful personalisation rules to get a lot of cool stuff done, out of the box. Stuff I use every single time I optimise a site with XP. Tick.
- XM Cloud can be added to with CDP, Personalise, Send and a bunch of composable products, either Sitecore kit, or whatever Martech product that floats your boat. Tick
Finally – Pages lets you build entire sites from a template library in a low code/no code model.
Entire sites…pages…drag and drop content…component builder…analytics….personalisation
It doesn’t get much better than that.
So, please, please stop with the hard-to-use mantra. Get whatever is flaking your site or authoring experience out fixed (I know, I know, actually spend money to keep stuff maintained or fix poor previous work), or even better, consider getting ahead of the curve and redesign/rebuild with XM Cloud.
Rip that Band-Aid off; it's what your mum would do.