Some of our customers, like global multi-product corporates or the UK government, need to run a lot of sites. When we say "a lot" we mean hundreds.
Managing multiple websites are now a key part of any organization's online strategy, “website proliferation” is seen as an invaluable tool for the marketer and communicators – but is seen as a huge problems to IT and corporate governance.
A site that makes you appear local, or in touch with a community or demographic within your audience or is focused on a great product or campaign is the first stage in personalization – of web engagement.
Large global organizations need to think not just about translated versions of their corporate site, but of localized sites, with marketing specific messaging, adherence to local customs and laws and a navigation structure to suit.
Government organizations need to have demographic focused sites that are easily accessible and targeted at the young, the elderly or citizens that need information and wouldn’t associate themselves with a big government website.
In many organizations these often urgent needs are easily met, by going outside the corporate standards and IT with disparate, temporary, short term and agency solutions. This can result in content duplication – with their associated costs, the loss of content into bespoke silos from the corporate knowledge base, a loss of brand control and a loss of agility as the corporate web strategy becomes fractured.
Alterian Content Manager (ACM) provides organizations with the ability to support web site proliferation and yet centrally maintain control the key elements such as branding and compliance issues.
Creating sites is fast and easy with ACM. Within a few mouse clicks a business user can create a new site and as it's so easy to, the business can deploy sites very dynamically to support tactical events, like a short advertisement campaign or an exhibition.
Sites can be organized into groups, making it easy for users to navigate to their site or for acccess control to be imposed on users accessing these sites. It may also be that the business process for publishing content may be different across these sites and ACM enables this flexibility, very simply.
Instant Sites
An agile business needs to respond by communicating rapidly, reacting to unplanned and tactical events. In response, with just 10 mouse clicks a business user in ACM can create a fully featured production strength website, through a simple Site Builder Wizard. We call this feature Instant Site.
This wizard offers the user a palette of predefined layouts and styles, using the ability in ACM to share content, extending this to offer the user a selection of pre-built website elements; combinations of commonly used content types and functionality.
Share Content
Managing multiple sites would have no value, if each was a separate silo of information or if publishing a page to two sites, with two different URLs and branding meant maintaining multiple copies of the same item. In Site Planner a user can choose to publish any content item in the content repository to their site, assigning a unique URL and associating it with a template that is relevant for this channel. Yet, when the page needs to be updated, it is managed centrally, so an update is instantly reflected on all of the sites.