When it comes to Sitecore, we’re always quick off the mark here at Codehouse.
Within a month of the latest version of Sitecore – Sitecore 9 – being released, we had already upgraded our new website to Sitecore 9. We reckon our website was probably the first in the world to be on Sitecore 9 post its release!
So, what’s our website doing and what do we love about Sitecore 9?
For hosting, we chose a truly scalable and flexible option, namely Microsoft Azure PaaS (Platform as a Service). As a global Sitecore Partner, with a local Codehouse presence “Down Under” in Sydney, we have used geographically distributed publishing to local Azure data centres to give a great experience to all visitors around the world. Azure PaaS is a complete development and deployment environment in the cloud, avoiding the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with developing and launching a website.
As a global digital agency with offices in UK and Australia, we’re also making full use of Sitecore's geo-personalisation features. The content you see in London will be different from what you see in Sydney, for example.
Our new website was built in line with Sitecore Helix; a set of official guidelines and recommended best practices for Sitecore development. This means better quality in implementation, faster time-to-market, and it makes extending, changing, and upgrading easier than before.
We love that Sitecore 9's website forms module is now easier to create, use, and publish, which means less time building forms and more time thinking about how to collect and use valuable prospect and customer data. We have already extended the Save Action options with some of our own.
We have created the goals, integrated Sitecore campaigns with Adwords, etc. and used the Sitecore marketing taxonomies and analytics reports to get a handle on who's doing what on our site. The xConnect API helps us with collecting Forms data and integrating with Salesforce.
Marketing automation has really taken a step forward. You can easily drag and drop engagement plans together and construct marketing automation workflows with triggers based on any combination of goals. Fantastic!
Cortex is the new machine learning application built into Sitecore 9. It’s not quite live yet, but it’s coming soon. Cortex will be able to manage personalisation for you on the fly, automatically substituting content and calls-to-action based on how visitors are interacting with your website. We can't wait!
In addition to this, upgrading to Sitecore 9 can help compliance with the GDPR.
As time goes on, we’ll be integrating more of our systems with the website, making full use of Sitecore’s advanced personalisation and testing tools, and running more campaigns through Sitecore 9 – and we’ll be sure to let you know how this goes!
If you’d like to talk to us about Sitecore 9, its new features, Microsoft Azure PaaS (or IaaS) and how Codehouse can upgrade your solution to Sitecore 9, then do get in touch with us today.
