From zero to Sitecore Hero!

Welcome to new series on the blog. Here I will show you how to start your journey with Sitecore Experience Platform.

Let’s start from the beginning – what is the Sitecore? It is CMS ( Content Managment System) based on .NET which have a lot of powerful tools to create personalized digital experiences. If we go in details the CMS is the application which allows users to create, edit, and personalize digital content in this case – web pages, blogs, e-commerce shops etc.

What are the advantages of choosing a CMS solution? And why it is worth to invest a little bit more time on the development stage… I will present it in some points.

1. Content management: we can easily create, edit, post, and manage web content (including text, images, video, and any other type of files).
2. Presentation: thanks to Sitecore we can easily deliver content to different devices like laptop, tablet, smartphone. The content will always suit the device and we can also use marketing tools everywhere.
3. Integration: platform allows users to integrate with other applications like CRM, ERP, also it supports integration with social platforms as Facebook etc.
4. Commerce: this platform is really powerful for commerce there are a lot of pre-built components that you can use to create an online store. More info available here: https://www.sitecore.com/products/sitecore-commerce
5. Personalization: all contents that you create can be personalized by tools of Sitecore which means that you can target relevant content for specific site visitors, they can be recognized as a user or by location or past interaction with your site.
6. Analytics: Sitecore analyzes traffic on the site and thanks to that we know how much people saw some blog article, how much they like things that you sell in the store and which one is the best.
7. Multilingual support: Sitecore also supports multilingual content you can easily create the site where content is served in different languages.

How to start with Sitecore?

It is easy! You can start your journey now, all you need to do is request for a 60-day trial here: https://www.sitecore.com/getting-started/developer-trial and after you get a license you can download Sitecore and start developing. It is good to look at best practices how to develop solutions for Sitecore you can find it here:  https://helix.sitecore.net/ and based on that principles and conventions for Sitecore development Habitat project was created. You can look on source code here: https://github.com/Sitecore/Habitat/ I also recommend to join Sitecore Slack Comunity chat there are a lot of nice helpful people. How to join? Here you can find all the information: https://www.akshaysura.com/2015/10/27/how-to-join-sitecore-slack-community-chat/ There is also one more very important link: https://dev.sitecore.net/ here is all that Sitecore developer needs!

See you in the next article! In the next article, I will introduce how to create a first Sitecore component, stay tuned!