Sitefinity CMS is a large Web CMS which is designed for business and industry. It has been used to build websites for large organisations, government departments, community portals and intranets and is designed to meet the needs of content authors/editors, marketing people and developers.
It is easy to use, conforms to international standards and is a powerful, mature system. It contains a range of ‘out of the box’ features which are used to help build and manage websites.
Support, integration, hosting and training are provided by partners: these partners are people with expertise in Sitefinity who provide advice about integration with other applications, hosting services, training and consultancy.
Further support is provided by the online community, newsletter, resources, webinars and documentation such as user/content authors guides.
Characteristics of Sitefinity
There are several features of this CMS which help support user experience. These include usability, scalability, search engine optimisation and content accumulation from a variety of sources to engage with the wider community.
Extensibility is a major feature of this CMS which enables integration with applications such as legacy systems which handle critical business needs. There is also the option to customise this CMS by means of third party add-ons which can improve its functionality or to develop new ones via the API.
Sitefinity is built upon the ASP.NET framework, supports well known databases such as Oracle and MySQL and offers integration with Visual Studio as part of the development project.
This CMS caters to not only developers needs but those of content authors/editors, business users and IT professionals who all have different priorities in regard to their websites and their CMS.
It features a range of templates and a built-in WYSIWYG editor for people with little or no technical expertise in content creation. These plus the ability to re-use content, to drag and drop elements, produce multiple language versions and upload images are an essential part of any system.
The template system, ability to switch between themes, version functionality, and workflow and user administration appeals to business users. Plus a range of built-in add-ons such as forums, blogs, wikis and events enables communication between users as well as achieving business goals.
There are also tools available for marketing purposes which are designed to increase conversion rates and drive traffic to the website. These include SEO tools and multi-channel distribution to mobile devices and social media, e.g. Twitter.
This CMS integrates with other systems and applications such as digital asset management, analytics software and e-commerce which help to improve business efficiency and its ROI (return on investment).
For more information about these and other features visit the Sitefinity website at www.sitefinity.com.
Other Sitefinity features
We have discussed the main features of this CMS but there are a few others to mention which include:
- Powerful platform for development
- In-built services, e.g. Search function
- Open-ended architecture
- Export tool which enables an existing website to be exported as a template. This can then be re-used for new projects.
- Technical and community support
- High level of security
The features discussed here are common to many CMSs and enable this and any other commercial system to form an important part of any company’s web strategy.