Sitecore Tutorial: An Ultimate Guide for Beginners
Welcome to Sitecore Tutorial! Marketing is considered as the heart of any business and the strategies used in marketing have constantly evolved over the years. The digitization process has moved businesses to market, sell their products online.
Companies worldwide are using websites as their medium to maintain their digital presence and get in touch with customers. CMS platform is software that simplifies the process for building and managing websites efficiently. In this tutorial, we will deep dive into the fundamental concepts of the Sitecore CMS platform and how it has been helping global organizations by offering content management solutions.
Following are the contents that we are going to cover in this Sitecore tutorial:
- What is Sitecore?
- Sitecore History
- Why should you use Sitecore?
- Sitecore Architecture
- Sitecore Core components & features
- Publishing in Sitecore
- Deployment in Sitecore
- Sitecore Career opportunities
- Prerequisites to learn Sitecore.
- What are the prerequisites to learn Sitecore
What is a CMS Platform?
A CMS platform is abbreviated as a Content Management System, and it’s a software application that allows users to build, customize, and manage websites with minimum or no coding knowledge. CMS platform acts as a medium to create, modify, manage and publish content. To give you clarity, here are some of the top CMS platforms such as AEM, Sitecore, Drupal, Zoomla, WordPress, etc.
What is Sitecore?
Sitecore is one of the widely used enterprise-level CMS software built on ASP.NET and used by organizations worldwide to build and manage websites. It allows content editors and marketers to easily manage tasks like providing personalized experiences, managing social handles, blog posts, eCommerce, and much more.
Sitecore is the CMS software behind the world-famous organization’s websites and offers a fully personalized experience to customers and drives revenue. It is an integrated marketing platform and allows seamless integration between various digital marketing platforms. Moreover, Sitecore is highly flexible and scales according to the needs of organizations, and integrates seamlessly with software like CRM, DAM systems, and other digital tools.
Sitecore History
In 1998 Thomas Albert, Peter Christensen, Jakob Christensen, Ole Sas Thrane, and Michael Seifert co-founded a company named Pentia A/S, which was a systems integration company. The company was mainly involved in the implementation of websites built on Microsoft Technologies.
In the 1990’s building and managing, websites were aligned with programming languages and Developers and needed skilled professionals to code and manage websites. Ole Sas Thrane and Jakob Christensen have decided to tackle this problem by automating the process using various methods. That’s how they have built this Sitecore CMS platform.
Are you aspiring to become a Sitecore developer by learning in-demand skills?
Then, Checkout our project-oriented, real-time Sitecore training here.Why Sitecore?
Sitecore has advanced features and acts as a centralized platform to manage website content and deliver outstanding customer experiences. Sitecore CMS platform sets itself apart from other platforms with its innovative features such as seamless integration with third-party applications like CRM, SharePoint, Analytics, and much more.
Moreover, Sitecore helps organizations improve web traffic, user web experience, and tracking market & sales campaigns. It also improves your web presence and converts traffic into leads and sales.
Sitecore Architecture
Here we are going to gain a clear understanding of Sitecore Architecture:
Following are the three core Products of Sitecore Architecture:
- Sitecore Experience Manager (XM)
- Sitecore Experience Platform (XP)
The above product comes with multiple logical entities that interact with several Cloud services and build the complete functionality of the Sitecore platform.
Let’s discuss each product in detail:
Sitecore Experience Manager (XM):
Sitecore Experience Manager is also called web content management (WCM) and is considered a core of the Sitecore Platform. XM consists of advanced features that help in creating, managing, personalizing, and delivering content. The availability of features depends on the type of XM installation you have.
Sitecore Experience Manager (XM) allows users to quickly scale content, drag-and-drop, preview capabilities, and visual editing. XM optimizes the experience for all types of channels such as mobile, voice, etc. Moreover, it also offers high security, easy integration, and delivers personalized feed.
Sitecore Experience Platform (XP)
XP Combines experience manager (XM) with customer intelligence and marketing offered by xDB and xConnect. xDB and x Connect introduce more additional storage mechanisms and server roles.
- xConnect: This group of services sits between xDB and any trusted interface, client, or device that wants to collect and search experience data over HTTP.
- xDB: This is a name assigned to the storage roles and services that store and process experience data.
Sitecore Experience Commerce (XC)
Sitecore Experience Commerce (XC) is an innovative, integrated, and advanced commerce solution. It is deployed on top of the Sitecore Experience Platform. Sitecore Experience platform integrates multiple content management, customer intelligence, marketing, personalization and acts as a powerful enterprise-level solution.
Sitecore Experience Commerce (XC) helps marketers offer a personalized marketing experience to the customers throughout the shopping journey. It provides all the tools required for managing an e-commerce storefront.
Sitecore Components /Features
Earlier, we have discussed that Sitecore is a unique platform and what makes it different from other Platforms? Following are the core features that set Sitecore apart from the rest of the CMS platforms and popularize it. Let’s discuss each feature in detail:
Personalized Customer Data:
It is one of the essential features of the Sitecore platform and powers the business to understand every customer interaction and store the captured data. Using this data, organizational teams can build customer-centric engagement models and enhance returns.
Sitecore Experience Database (xDB)
The Sitecore xDB collects & stores the customer experience information from multiple sources and makes it available. It acts as a central data repository and gives the business users a clear view of each customer journey.
Sitecore Experience Profile (xProfile)
On top of the xDB customer interaction information, Sitecore XP creates a profile of every customer. This will list out the profiles of each signal customer and provide all the details of every single user, which include what they buy, where they are from, how they interacted with different services, what they prefer to buy, and the time they spend on your site and much more.
Engagement Analytics:
Engagement Analytics is one of the advanced features offered by Sitecore and presents you with the score and rank for the visitor interactions. Using this score, you can segregate the leads and follow up them for sales. Sitecore Path Analyzer tracks and provides you with a clear view of how your leads are traveling through your website.
Sitecore xConnect
Sitecore xConnect APIs help your developers to collect and enable data movement between Sitecore and all other systems that a business uses for its marketing and Sales. The other systems include CRMs, ERPs, POS, PIMs, and more.
Customer Geolocation
Sitecore’s Customer Geolocation feature enables you to deliver advanced personalization benefits to your customers. The Geolocation feature lets you develop GeoIP personalization rules that display nearby store locations by analyzing the customer’s IP address and eliminates the tasks to enter their zip code.
Integrated Campaigns
Sitecore Experience Cloud provides you with a clear overview of your marketing campaigns. It gives a single tracking code that tracks all the engagements, whether an internal or external channel.
Print Experience Manager (PXM)
Sitecore PXM enables you to develop content at scale without compromising on your brand guidelines. Using PXM, you can virtually share any content from your Sitecore environment and make it print-ready.
Multi-Language Support
Sitecore offers multi-language translation services to fulfill the marketing needs of global enterprises.
A/B and Multivariate Testing
Analyzing customer data gives you clear insights to make your site better. Sitecore supports A/B and multivariate testing and helps you find strong and weak areas of your website. You can also conduct this test at the audience or demographic segment level.
Basic Concepts of Sitecore Platform
1) Database in Sitecore
When Sitecore is installed, it will create a few databases for supporting internal CMS functionality. In general, there are three different databases are created, which are
Core Database: This database is majorly used for saving CMS configuration-related data.
Master Database: This database is a place where different versions of data.
Web database: It is a database used for storing the live version or published version.
2) Publishing in Sitecore
Publishing in Sitecore is a process of transferring content from one database to another.
3) Deployment in Sitecore:
Deployment is a process to push changes from one Sitecore instance to another.
Sitecore Career Opportunities
Sitecore is a CMS platform behind the top tech giants worldwide and helping businesses leverage digital customer interactions and maximize sales. Organizations ranging from global to local are increasingly adopting Sitecore to manage their digital presence effectively, and Sitecore popularity has also increased over the years.
Sitecore Platform constantly comes up with new features to cater to the ever-evolving requirements of organizations. By observing these trends, we can predict that the increased adoption rate will indeed create a good number of jobs and demand for trained Sitecore professionals.
Who Can Learn Sitecore?
Following are the professionals who can learn and become professionals in Sitecore eLearning.
- Sitecore project managers
- .Net Professionals
- Azure Developers
- IT Professionals
- Candidates who wish to shift their domain to top CMS software.
What are the Prerequisites to learn Sitecore?
To learn Sitecore, you need to have a basic knowledge of the below areas:
- Web development
- .Net
- MVC Architecture
Conclusion:
With this, we have come to the end of this Sitecore tutorial. Sitecore is a powerful and advanced CMS platform that has been helping the organizations around the world in managing the websites. I hope you have found this Sitecore helpful tutorial and have gained a clear overview of Sitecore. Happy learning!
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