Beautiful Not Boring: Standardizing Your Sites the Right Way
Websites are a brand's primary digital representation. They can be a prospect's or customer’s first impression of your organization, potentially setting the tone for the entire relationship. So, you want to put your best foot forward and ensure their online experience of your brand is consistent from one channel to the next, be it your mobile app, social media, and yes, website. Inconsistency can cause visitors confusion and frustration, causing them to distrust your organization, which can hurt its bottom line.
But how do you ensure that each of your sites has a great experience, the right content, and consistent branding at scale? The answer: Standardization and templatization. Together, they allow organizations to deliver better websites in a scalable way.
That's how Acquia Cloud Site Factory approaches site development. To us, standardization doesn't equal boring. In fact, Acquia Cloud Site Factory helps organizations create stunning, consistently branded digital sites via templates — from simple to more feature-flexible — built off a single code base. Standardization doesn’t come without drawbacks, though, including limitations on certain architectural decisions.
However, bringing uniformity to your website strategy means all of your sites are brand-compliant and consistent. Also, a standardized approach to site design, its look and feel, as well as user experience, can entice visitors to stay longer, deepening the connection between customers and the organizations that serve them.
That all sounds like an ideal approach to multisite, but where's the proof? We know we can get lost in the weeds with our tech-speak, so we wanted to take a step back and showcase a couple of great examples of the beautiful but standardized sites and digital experiences from Acquia Cloud Site Factory customers.
University of California Davis
After a thorough rebranding effort, UC Davis developed a web style guide using PatternLab and rolled it out to existing Drupal 7 sites and all new Drupal 8 sites on Site Factory.
UC Davis has a number of stakeholders on campus from academic and administrative departments to research labs, centers, and initiatives. Each of those groups have different web audiences that vary in what they believe is relevant to them. To meet that range of use cases across the campus, UC Davis developed its SiteFarm distribution for consistency yet flexibility.
SiteFarm is in the process of being implemented beyond UC Davis and throughout the University of California system.
Warner Music Group
Warner Music sought a platform that would allow the company to provide standardized templates with customization abilities for each of their artists, who have plenty of needs. Warner also needed a platform that made it fast and easy to spin up sites.
With Acquia Cloud Site Factory, Warner Music produced terrific, customized sites that all had a similar UX and information architecture so that visitors could easily find what they were looking for on each of the artist's sites. For example, most artists have a “home” page, “tour” page/section, “store” page/section, and “social media/news” page/section.
Interested in learning more building your platform with Acquia Cloud Site Factory? Check out this ebook.
Former Product Marketing Manager Acquia