Sitecore - you have to dig for the gold, but the gold is there!
July 19, 2017
Sitecore - you have to dig for the gold, but the gold is there!
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Sitecore Web Content Management
Sitecore is used for all elements of content management, like updating advertising banners, descriptions, terms of service, etc, for our airline booking path. However, where is comes into it's own is giving the ability to move around components of the page to ensure certain changes can be made to the site without the need for software development or code releases. Other benefits that we make use of are the A/B testing of the changes mentioned above but most significant is the ability to personalise the user journey through the booking path (and visual elements) based on what we already know about the customer - for example location, search preferences and such like.
- Personalisation of advertising banners based upon knowledge of the customer, like location or previous searches enables us to target customers with products and offers that they are more likely to engage with, which has been done to good effect.
- The use of Sitecore for content management enables the business and design team to perform changes to things, like images, content and page structure, which would otherwise have required a code release, which is costly in terms of man power.
- The A/B testing in Sitecore is good because it allows us to statistically verify minor changes to the site - like advert changes or component ordering on the page - as to whether or not they positively impact conversion.
- Sitecore is complicated. Software developers need (costly) training to get the most value out of it and business users do not find it intuitive to use. Concepts like the content tree can be difficult for the business users to grasp.
- Despite everything being possible in Sitecore, virtually nothing comes out of the box - you need to develop every component and do so within a defined process and framework, which can be a fairly big development overhead.
- Since moving the site to Sitecore we have had an increase in conversion - that's the ultimate goal of all these things. It's likely to be partly tied in to the re-design that happened at the same time, but the way in which you can personalise and change things really helps give the best customer journey.
- The negative impact we've seen is mainly due to expectations around how easily things can be shared between separate instances of Sitecore - if you haven't built stuff sharable it won't be sharable, but the business have been sold Sitecore (partly) on the basis that things would be easily sharable.
- My developers don't all like working in Sitecore - it takes time to learn, takes a long time to build and run as well as requiring a few processes around it, like Unicorn Sync, etc. One of my devs has actually asked to not work on it again! So, a potential recruitment issue.
Sitefinity is improving but at the time of decision making it had nothing that could compare with the A/B testing and personalisation features that Sitecore offers. This was a key differentiator and ultimately ensured Sitecore was purchased. WordPress isn't really comparable and isn't within our technology stack, which is mostly Microsoft.