Marek Blotny's Blog

Recently, I had a privilege to post, on official Cognifide’s blog, my thoughts why building platforms over websites can be a better approach. This article is a result of experience gained in past year while working on Investec Platform.

Below is a excerpt of my post, 7 reason to build platforms over websites:

Building new websites based on Digital Marketing Suites like Adobe CQ or Sitecore is one of Cognifide’s specialisations. For some of our clients, like Investec and Roche, we have built dozens of them. But we realized some time ago that if there is a constant need to launch new websites, building one after another is generally, not the smartest and most cost-effective approach. The approach which we have proposed, implemented and now proved to be successful is to build a platform instead of replicating dozens of independent websites. When I say “platform” I’m thinking of an application, built on top of the Digital Marketing Suite, which is capable of hosting multiple sites. Yet, is still flexible; each website has the autonomy to customize design, layouts, functionality and also expose a number of extension points so that adding new functionality is easy!

Below are key benefits for the business which the platform brought:

1. Quicker time-to-market – it now takes us, 1 day from request submission to the point where the new website is ready for content entry. We are able to be this responsive because we have a set of standard designs; a set of components and most important, the flexibility to lay pages out in almost, an arbitrary way. There is no need to do any development to set up new website; it all can be done by configuration at the platform level.
2. Quicker content entry – their editorial team has been trained to use the platform, they know what the platform can do and how to fully utilize all of the available functionality. We don’t have to teach them everything from scratch for each website. They are effective because they work in an environment which they are quite familiar with.
3. Lower costs of launching new websites – as I said before; setting up a new website now does not involve any development. There is a bit of configuration that needs to be done and on top of that, new domains have to be set up, which is of course, inevitable. However, the entire process takes only a few days for the engineering team.
4. Lower risk – risk of launching another website is minimal. All elements have been tested before and are already stable in production environment.
5. Easier brand governance – all websites live on a single platform which makes changing anything trivial. Single platform also enforces consistency, assets re-use, easier maintenance.
6. Improved scalability – process of building a website is always the same. It’s well defined, which means that it’s easier to outsource some tasks/aspects to external agencies. And as more companies/agencies can work on the platform, it is easier to scale and jump from 1 -2 launched websites per month to 20- 30+ .
7. Greater reuse and sharing of components built across the platform – there are always new cases, new requirements or new systems to integrate with. Component implemented once, can be re-used across entire platform, all other microsites can use it. It’s a massive reduction of costs.

Read full post on Cognifide’s blog.