Today, we are responsible for owning our digital experience. Site builders, developers, and marketers must be empowered to build and improve websites without being stuck in lengthy development cycles and slow processes. As one of the early-adopting agencies of Acquia Site Studio and with Acquia Site Studio certified developers, we have covered Acquia Site Studio’s basics and its advanced features in our previous blogs. In this blog, we will talk about how Acquia empowers Content Marketers in Drupal.
Acquia Site Studio is not only a low-code technology for Drupal developers but it is also a no-code tool for marketers.
There are plenty of site building tools in the market like Wix, Elemento, and Squarespace where you can have your own customizations easily. There was a time when the Site Studio tool was being considered as an abstract concept in Drupal. But, now, all configurable features are available under Drupal’s hood as a site builder tool and that too with Dynamic content mapping.
Many of you must be thinking that how could it be helpful for the marketers?
Expediting Site-Building
Ever wondered how many times the marketing team is unsatisfied with site-building and are dependent on developers, despite possessing the required skills to create the promotional pages with different types of layout using CSS?
Acquia Site Studio is essentially slicing the frontend layer and presenting it as a user interface, where the frontend code can be directly applied along with the User Interface. It essentially serves as an accelerator for building your site with tools to create your own components and templates independently.
Having a component-based frontend layer available as a UI, it is really simple to create different layouts in no time by a mere drag-and-drop. Building new components is made effortless with an intuitive component builder tool in the UI. All these can be achieved without writing a single line of code.
This enables the development teams to focus on high-value features, while your marketing team can create beautiful experiences with Site Studio’s admin interface. Content editors can create pages and content rapidly by simply dragging components into the canvas editor without writing any code.
Styling Components and Elements
Site Studio not only empowers marketers with creating/building but also allows them to style components - such as colour, background image, font, and responsive breakpoint settings. This means marketers can tweak components without making design revisions or assigning a developer to implement them. These modifications can be previewed and changed in real-time, without deployments or site updates.
Components and styles are managed in Drupal and can have baselines set according to the branding guidelines of the organization, maintaining design and brand integrity. The style guide editor allows site managers to change the site-wide presentation of allowed elements in just a few clicks to go-live.
After creating the above Input button style it can be used like below screenshot on Dx8 Elements or Components through Style dropdown.
OR
Styles can be applied directly to the component as stated in below image
DIY Components
Site Studio provides the freedom and flexibility to respond to varying marketing demands by creating new components in no time. Since it leverages the established styles and design, developers do not need to update CSS styles or add HTML markup to enable the presentation of the new components.
Build once, use everywhere
Acquia Site Studio allows features and content to be reused across pageshttps://www.qed42.com/sites/. Editors can export their components, templates, styles, views, and site configuration and import them to other sites using Site Studio. This is especially beneficial to marketing teams that have numerous sites they need to get up and running quickly. The reuse provides tremendous value for companies building sites at scale.
Now, let’s look at an example.
Marketing teams often need to create landing pages for a promotion or campaign, with brand new layouts and components. However, they are dependent on the development team and are compelled to follow the process of creating new features or components for the landing page. This hampers the quick turnaround time that the Marketing team requires to execute any campaign.
Marketing teams need a design system, developed by following the style guide consistency, containing scalable, granular, reusable components which can be assembled to create ‘n’ number of pages.
Acquia Site Studio (Cohesion DX8) allows marketing teams to use the existing crafted components quickly and effectively from an existing component library. Allowing them to create multiple page layouts making sure they function perfectly in tandem, following the brand guidelines.
Once the design pattern is ready and available as components, it is very easy for the marketing team to use those components in the layout canvas field to create the desired layout, that too, without worrying if brand standard guidelines have been followed or not.
Acquia Site Studio also builds the design patterns device friendly using the breakpoints which have been set as per the brand guidelines. One example could be of Heading font size for different breakpoints or stacking of inline items in smaller breakpoints. Design systems and patterns show how much we think ahead in this digital age and Site Studio provides the platform to achieve our required page presentation effortlessly.
Start Today
Currently designing and deploying 3+ Acquia Site Studio projects, our team of experts can help you plan, execute and deliver the digital ROI. If you wish to significantly reduce your time to market and explore Acquia Site Studio with Drupal, please reach out to us at business@qed42.com.