Agile Website Authoring For Marketers

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Animation showing multiple channels and the complexity making changes to a website today.

To win in today's competitive digital landscape, marketers must embrace technology to effectively reach an increasingly distributed and segmented customer base. At the same time, they need a centralized, intuitive tool that empowers them to quickly adapt to changing consumer sentiment. Pivoting to deliver content and campaigns across multiple channels such as the web, mobile, social, and email is critical to generating new demand. Drupal provides a strong foundation for building Web Experience Management solutions with an agile, intuitive content authoring environment that allows marketers to personalize and adapt to constantly changing business conditions and campaign requirements without coding skills or bottlenecks from IT.

To start, we are going to demonstrate just how easy it is for a Digital Marketer to create a new page in Drupal.

1. The marketer has a few simple options based on a particular site or their particular role and permission on that site to enter new text or media as required. In fact, digital marketers can easily control all their content updates without any coding skills whatsoever. They can easily edit headlines, create new paragraphs, add images or videos, and manage workflows for edits. To change the content of a paragraph, you can just click into the paragraph itself and make content edits just as easily as if they were in one of the word processing applications they use daily.
2. Here, you can start by entering a new headline and body text into a WYSIGWIG text editor. You can also add new headlines, new paragraphs, or even change the layout of existing paragraphs. You can even use copy and paste funcationality to quickly copy text or undo text or revert to previous changes that you just created. Even drag those edits to another part of the page or add bullets as needed.

As you’d expect all the traditional editing tools are available in the toolbar above including adding in line links….selectively bold and highlight….or even insert in line images.

The marketer also has the freedom to import images directly from their desktop or device. Once rendered, Drupal dynamically resizes the image with the optimal rendition so it is scaled and cropped appropriately for different contexts.

1. Drupal also enables successful Search Engine Optimization by having the system generate a path to the content it on the fly via keywords or just the title as the URL, or even allowing the marketer to create the path from scratch with a well known search term perhaps from analytics reports. Integrated search with Apache Solr helps marketers take control of how site visitors find relevant content or products and services across web and mobile channels.

Now we simply hit publish for a simple text and image document, but we want to enhance the look and feel for a more captivating web experience. So we click on customize page for a drag and drop interface to move content blocks and columns around freely. They are also free to add an entirely new pane to the document filled with dynamic content as Drupal pulls backend content seamlessly to the front end experience. Content such as a slideshow or sidebar.

Here we see an easy to navigate drop down menu to pull in other relevant content such as tables, maps, images, or even videos. Here we select a hi resolution video directly from the desktop, or you could reuse media that we have already uploaded such as a logo. Or you even pull it directly from the web. In this case all the marketer has to do is copy a link from Youtube and paste it in. There is no requirement to understand the technically how to embed, format, or transcode videos into the page from a particular provider. Drupal obfuscates all of the complexity and empowers the digital marketer to control their own destiny in making content changes. Marketers are empowered to quickly leverage both the technology and community that comes with links to popular sites like Youtube, Facebook, LinkedIn, or even Pinterest.

1. With the youtube video embedded in the page, we can simply change the layout by dragging the cideo to the top of the page. Click save and we have live rich media on our site. I can also change the layout of the page, let’s say we want the look and feel to switch from a left rail alignment to a right rail alignment. In two easy clicks, the layout is rearranged exactly as the marketer wants without have to setup a ticket with IT or wait for resources to free up. The site is optimized instantly and it’s easy and intuitive to simply choose a different display template as needed.

With Web Experience Management in Drupal, marketers aren’t limited to media and text content. You could also include, for instance a Google map. Here we are showing Acquia’s Global Headquarters in Massachusetts, and that map moves to a live preview of what it will look like on the site with one click. After hitting save, that content is published and live.

Thanks for viewing this video on Drupal for Web Experience Management: Enabling agile website authoring for digital marketers. Get in touch with Acquia today to learn more about our hosting, support, training, and other value added cloud services. Be sure to view our other videos on Drupal for Web Experience Management.