The content management system that drives a website or customer portal has a huge impact on the overall experience. At Habanero, we’ve been building our expertise in Sitecore to complement our customer and member portals practice. This is the best find the best sitecore developer.

Sitecore enables us to create incredible digital experiences and support any aspect of the customer lifecycle. Its digital marketing suite, integration capabilities, and overall potential make it an exciting and compelling platform for organizations to consider when building a public website.

Our team is incredibly passionate about working with Sitecore! We wanted to share the perspectives and opinions our team has about the platform and how it can benefit organizations.

Why do you love working with Sitecore?

Mallory O’ConnorFirst of all, it’s an enterprise-level platform – it’s not an entry-level product. Instead, it’s aligned with the middle and upper segments of the market, which also happens to be Habanero’s sweet spot.

Second, it appeals to the marketing and communications side of a business, as opposed to being purely an IT play. This helps these teams within organizations get more value from both the content management system and the website as a whole. Sitecore helps to expose valuable information about user behaviour to inform design and business decisions.

Sitecore is also a .NET suite with good support and a great community. It integrates well with most line-of-business systems, and the ecosystem of third-party products around Sitecore make it even stronger. Coveo for Sitecore, for example, is a product that helps us create a compelling enterprise search experience for Sitecore.

Mike JensenPlus, if you’re picking a platform and want to be strategic, just look at the Gartner quadrant. Sitecore always ranks super high. If you have a need as part of your digital strategy for digital marketing, Sitecore is the big player in that space.

How is Sitecore different from other enterprise-level content management systems?

Andrew Wright (Habanero Alumni)The personalization capabilities in Sitecore are incredible. I really like being able to craft a more personalized experience based on known behaviours or known attributes of a visitor to try and deliver a more customized and relevant experience. It’s not always appropriate, but when it is, it’s really nice to be able to do it.

The best part? This type of action is in the hands of content editors. IT and developers don’t need to be involved when content editors and authors want to do this, which is different than other systems. Sitecore really is a marketing tool, and marketing and communications should be involved in using and evaluating this kind of tool.

Mike JensenOther content management systems have a lot out-of-the-box components, whereas Sitecore focuses more on the core authoring experience. It’s intended for you to extend and customize. It’s always going to need to be customized and built on top of the basic framework that they give you. That’s what I like about it. It doesn’t get in the way of the best way to do things. You’re not weighing out-of-the-box with how much to customize.

The level of control and the constraints in Sitecore are also different, but in a good way. This is especially evident in the way the authoring experience works. You can set up the experience in a way that enables people to start writing and placing content in the right parts of the site quickly and confidently. Authors can focus on getting content where they need it, instead of getting bogged down in other considerations and layers that are common with other CMS platforms.

What other technical strengths does Sitecore have compared to other platforms?

Mike JensenAs a development platform, it’s nice to be able to write in a CMS using ASP.NET MVC. It’s incredibly extensible; you name it, you can change it.

And because it’s an ASP.NET application, just like SharePoint, you can write anything custom to integrate with other systems. There are some products out that will have connectors to negate the need for customization, but you have the ability to build whatever you need.

Overall, it’s flexibility that Sitecore gives to developers. It provides just the right amount of framework to allow you to customize it the way you want to.