Under the Hood: How We Built a Microsite in Record Time with Acquia Source

Marketing teams are constantly challenged to do more with less: launch campaigns faster, create more content, and drive growth, all while operating with limited budget and developer resources. This is a reality we face every day at Acquia, and it was the driving force behind a new project we recently took on. We needed to launch a new branded microsite, the Acquia Source Club, on a very tight timeline.

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This wasn't just about getting a new site live—it was about testing a new approach. We wanted to see if we could accelerate our time to market, empower our marketing team to be more self-sufficient, and ensure brand consistency without the usual development overhead. This is our story, a transparent, behind-the-scenes look at how we planned, built, and launched the microsite, and what we learned along the way.

The Challenge: Defining Our Goals

Before we wrote a single line of code, we defined our core goals for the project. These weren't just technical requirements; they were business imperatives that would determine the success of the project.

• Speed to Market: Our primary goal was to get a branded campaign site live on a tight deadline. This meant we needed a solution that would allow us to move from concept to a public-facing site in record time. Traditional development cycles simply wouldn't work.
• Empowering Our Marketers: We wanted to reduce our marketing team's reliance on IT and development partners for routine content creation and page builds. The ideal solution would enable them to be more nimble and self-sufficient, putting the power to create and manage content directly in their hands.
• Ensuring Brand Consistency: It was crucial that this new microsite maintained a consistent brand experience. Even with the goal of empowering marketers, we needed guardrails in place to ensure that every page was on-brand and visually cohesive with the rest of our digital properties.

The Solution: Why We Chose Acquia Source

To meet these goals, we turned to a new tool in our stack: Acquia Source.

Acquia Source is a fully managed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution designed to streamline the process of building digital experiences with less overhead. It’s built on a decoupled architecture with a React-based frontend and a Drupal-based backend, but it abstracts away all the complexity of hosting, maintenance, and code deployments. It’s designed to allow teams to focus on what matters most: creating great content.

Choosing Acquia Source aligned perfectly with our project goals:

For Speed: With Acquia Source, there’s no installation, no initial site setup, and no complex configurations. We were able to start building immediately through a self-service interface without needing custom code deployments or a long-winded setup process. This significantly accelerated our time to market.

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For Empowerment: Acquia Source provides a user-friendly CMS with Drupal Canvas that features a visual drag-and-drop interface. This made it the ideal solution for a marketing team with less technical expertise.

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For Consistency: The platform allows for a centralized collection of styles and components. This means we could ensure that all pages were built using on-brand elements, making it easier to maintain visual and functional consistency across the entire microsite.

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Our Build Process: A Step-by-Step Look

Phase 1: A "Page-First" Mindset

Acquia Source encourages a different approach to content creation. Instead of the traditional Drupal content type workflow—where you create a content type, define its fields, and then build a page—we adopted a “page-first” mindset.

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Our team planned the necessary components and content for each page, and then content creators had the flexibility to build pages by curating what they needed. It’s a much more intuitive and dynamic way to build.

Phase 2: Building with Drupal Canvas

With a plan in place, we jumped into the build. The heart of Acquia Source is Drupal Canvas, a visual drag-and-drop interface. We were able to leverage existing components and create new ones by writing a simple React component. All of this component building and site configuration happens directly in the browser—no formal code commit or deployment process is required.

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Phase 3: The "No-Code" Deployment

One of the most powerful benefits of Acquia Source is its fully managed SaaS nature. This means there’s no server maintenance, no security patches, and no complex code deployments required on our end. When our site was ready, we simply hit “Publish.” It was a truly transformative experience compared to traditional development pipelines.

Phase 4: Understanding the Guardrails

No solution is perfect, and it’s important to be transparent about the trade-offs. Acquia Source restricts the use of community-contributed modules to a list curated by Acquia. While this might sound limiting, we found it was a worthwhile trade-off for this project. These guardrails ensure the platform is more secure, scalable, and performant, which significantly reduces maintenance overhead.

The Results: Faster Time to Value and a Happier Team

The results of this project were clear and immediate. We went from an initial concept to a fully live microsite in just two weeks. We estimate we saved approximately 200 hours of backend development and configuration time. Plus, a fully managed CMS eliminates the time and resources spent on backend updates and maintenance, freeing up our team to focus on more strategic work.

The qualitative results were even more impactful. We heard from our marketing team about the ease of use and the freedom they now have to create and manage campaigns without waiting for a developer. The platform also supports collaboration, allowing us to invite team members with specific access levels.

Conclusion: Who Should Build on Acquia Source?

Our journey building the Acquia Source Club microsite was a resounding success. It proved that we could achieve speed, empowerment, and consistency without sacrificing brand integrity or quality.

So, who should consider building on Acquia Source? It's a powerful option for teams that need to quickly create and manage landing pages and microsites. It’s an especially great fit for smaller teams, simpler use cases, or organizations that want to accelerate their digital campaigns without the complexity of a traditional Drupal workflow.

Have you had a similar experience with a headless or low-code solution?