Let’s take a look at one of Sitecore’s most important development modules, Sitecore Experience Accelerator otherwise known as SXA.
Sitecore Experience Accelerator is a faster and easier way of building experiences on Sitecore. SXA was introduced with the release of Sitecore 8.2 and since then it has been an extremely helpful tool. The goal of SXA is to create a standardized set of page layouts and components, based on best practices. The main purpose is that they can easily be reused across multiple websites. With SXA, experiences can be built and launched more quickly. This simultaneously allows for faster website iteration in response to changes in the market. So, what exactly makes SXA so useful?
Benefits
Speed
Normally, Sitecore development begins with creating wireframes followed by user-interface design and developing back-end infrastructure. When the coding is all said and done it is then left to the content editors to populate the website with information and data. SXA separates structure from the design so that front-end developers, back-end engineers, and content authors can all work in parallel and you can deploy and maintain multiple sites quickly and effectively.
Flexibility
SXA provides a lot of flexibility by allowing content editors to try out different ways to display their content. By simply clicking and dragging features, editors now have a wide pallet to build their experiences. This also saves everyone time because now they don’t have to wait for features to be pushed out.
Reusability
With SXA, you will no longer have to create a new layout for rendering content. Instead, you can now use variants, which change the presentation of data while keeping the same underlying data structure. This provides content editors with varying components that can be slightly altered to fit the flow of each individual page. This saves a lot of time when publishing because they don’t have to start from scratch.
How to install SXA?
If you would like to install SXA on your Sitecore installation then follow the instructions on this guide: SXA Install
On top of helping our enterprise clients with DataStax and Sitecore projects we also provide companies with project planning workshops and Virtual CIOs.
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