How Marketers Can Build Web Pages in Less Than 2 Hours Using Acquia CMS

The majority of marketers today view marketing as the driving force behind an organization’s customer experience (CX) strategy, as shown by our global CX Trends Report. Yet, marketers and content creators typically are not seen as super savvy when it comes to actually building and publishing all of the content they need to shape these experiences. Many traditional content management systems (CMSes) require some level of developer skill or involvement to add new content or make updates to the website. This gap between the marketer’s vision for CX strategy and their skills to actually execute that strategy is inefficient and frustrating to all sides of the business. That’s why we’re proud to say that Acquia CMS is a marketer-friendly, easy-to-use CMS built on the trusted foundation of Drupal. Sound too good to be true?

As a new member of Acquia’s Product Marketing team with an marketing degree and zero previous experience in the technical or development space, I decided to put Acquia CMS to the test and see if it was truly marketer-friendly. Here’s what I learned when using our CMS to create brand new content for the recently relaunched Acquia website.  

Build Content Out Of the Box; No Technical Training Required 

Acquia CMS claims to be out-of-the-box ready from day one, so teams can build sites quicker without a lot of setup or the need to write a single line of code. Installing and opening up Acquia CMS for the first time, I could immediately access a list of preset content models and content types in Drupal 9 and begin building web pages. (There was an option to take a tour to see how to use the different features, but I wanted to dive right into the real work and trusted I could figure it out along the way.)

This admin menu in the CMS was easy to navigate and provides access to managing all of the different pieces on your site. For example, the “Structure” tab contained a list of links for managing things like layout and views; “Configuration” where you can manage admin settings including multilingual capabilities and security settings; “People” gives admins control over roles and permissions; and the Site Studio tab is where you can get all of your different low-code templates, themes and design systems to drag and drop across different pages. 

As an opinionated Drupal 9 distribution, Acquia CMS is compatible with pre-installed Drupal modules, and I didn’t need any prior Drupal experience or knowledge of the over 45,000+ modules available to access these features. Everything was already pre-integrated with Acquia’s DXP platform including Site Studio, Search and Cloud IDE, eliminating additional time spent installing and configuring the setup I needed before I could start building new pages for Acquia’s site. 

Site-Building Templates for Structured Freedom

Adding new content to our website in Acquia CMS was as simple as pointing, clicking and applying whatever text or media I needed directly on the page. Every part of the design, content editing and publishing process was organized intuitively in a series of front-end pulldown menus. The CMS’s opinionated content model made the most common Drupal content types (Article, Page, Person, Place, Event) available right out of the box. So, when creating team members’ profiles on our new website, all I needed to do was select the “Person” content type and start filling in the right fields with information. For marketers who already have content written and media selected, this is a super quick cut-and-paste process. When I needed to embed other media types and videos on the page, it was as easy as entering the link into a field and it automatically appeared. Overall, adding new structured content types to the site took around 10 minutes from start to finish. 

However, these pre structured content types and templates didn’t limit my options for creativity. For the more complex, unique pages, like our product pages, Acquia CMS gave me the freedom to edit and mix-and-match the different content components for a unique look and feel.

Creating and adding components in Acquia CMS 

As part of Site Studio’s design templates, we added in specific color palettes, like Acquia-approved pink shades for Marketing Cloud, that could be re-used when creating any new Marketing Cloud content. The options to adjust spacing and font options also allowed for more flexibility in building certain pages, while still making sure all users follow brand standards. Going from a blank page to a completely custom site page with multiple content types and dynamic content only took around an hour. For comparison, if we had to build all of these elements from scratch, it may have taken weeks to launch these new pages.   

Faster Time to Market with Less Maintenance and Fewer Developer Headaches

Even though Acquia CMS was designed to be intuitive for non-technical users, it still offers developers and IT teams the security and governance they need without the extra maintenance. All Drupal modules have been tested and vetted by Drupal experts to function seamlessly, and Acquia’s platform provides security best practices and testing baked in, so users don’t have to worry about any extra maintenance. 

This is a huge advantage for developers who would otherwise spend weeks to months setting up and configuring their platform from scratch. It also is a major win for businesses that can refocus the efforts of their Drupal engineers and IT experts on higher value activities. However, for those devs who do want to go deeper into the code, everything is open source and it’s simple to view and edit the source code and make adjustments that way. The easy setup means a faster time to market and lower cost of ownership on the organization. Acquia CMS gets right to the heart of what a CMS does best: creating great customer experiences and delivering them to the right audience on demand. 

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To get a first-hand look at exactly how simple and fast Acquia CMS is to use, request a demo and dive right in.