Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Understanding Sitecore SXA: Why SXA?


Traditional Sitecore implementations have always been a “custom build” proposition. And with each custom build often comes a different approach and methodology. How can organizations overcome the cost, time and stress involved with a fully custom build?

Once regarded as a “small site” tool, SXA has evolved into an enterprise-class framework. 
Organizations can embark on projects large and small, secure in the knowledge that best practices are already baked into the solution.

When leveraged to its fullest, SXA allows organizations to redefine the process for building and maintaining sites, in a way that shortens timelines, reduces reliance on development, and promotes team collaboration. Projects are accelerated by utilizing a toolbox of pre-built components, and by embracing a compressed project cadence that promotes collaboration and brings the work of many teams into a more parallel arrangement.

Your New Development Process

With SXA, Sitecore itself becomes central to solution development as well as content development, bringing together the visual and UX designers, content creators, back-end and front-end developers.
Serving as the wireframing tool, SXA allows content creators to develop content and construct pages in a wireframe mode, as designers and front-end developers style the site in parallel. These “themes” are applied iteratively to content being created in flight.

Improved Time-To-Value

With development and content being developed in parallel, project timelines are shortened. Unexpected conflicts are uncovered as design meets real world content, allowing adjustments to be made sooner, with a less regressive remediation cycle.

In a multi-site environment, content and presentation can be shared across sites, streamlining development as additional sites are added.

Lower TCO

Much of the classic development cost for a typical site can be avoided, by leveraging the impressive set of components that ship with SXA. Many tasks once relegated to developers and requiring code deployments are now accomplished in the Sitecore UI and simply published.

Page editors have more control over the styling and composition of common presentation components, freeing developers to focus on domain-specific custom features.

SXA’s framework, with strong separation of presentation from design, promotes multi-site development with heavy re-use of components, further lowering development cost.
Reduced Organizational Stress

SXA allows organizations to start with a strong foundation, using a fully supported and tested framework that makes the entire process more reliable and reduces rework. Solution structure is consistent across sites, making development more predictable and allowing developers to switch between projects with less ramp-up time.

Developers are relieved from mundane tasks, allowing them to focus on more interesting challenges, while content creators are freed from reliance on development to achieve commonplace requirements. Having fewer code deployments reduces friction and removes barriers to content publishing.

Upgrades become more approachable, because less coding means fewer regression issues to remediate.


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