General content modeling recommendations

Recommendations - Digital marketing

• If you want to leverage the built-in on-line marketing features, use pages to store content.
• We recommend using the Page builder on pages in which your editors might benefit from content personalization configurable directly in the Xperience administration. That is, personalization based on personas or contact groups, for example, on campaign landing pages or thank you pages.
  • For example, an “Articles” listing page can contain an editable area with a “Featured articles” widget. Editors can personalize the widget and offer different featured articles to visitors who fall under different personas.
  • To enable the personalization, develop custom page builder widgets that allow editors to personalize content based on personas or contact groups.
• We recommend using the Page builder on pages in which your marketers want to optimize content using the built-in A/B testing feature.
• Use media libraries to store images and other assets for email marketing and marketing automation email campaigns.
• For collecting data from users, we recommend using forms. Developers should leverage built-in form section properties in the custom code. Editors will be then able to adjust the layout of their forms to match the rest of the pages.
• To ensure your website stays within the legal boundaries, we recommend using the Data protection functionalities.

Routing and URLs

We recommend using content tree-based routing for most scenarios. Content tree-based routing ensures the system generates ULRs based on predefined rules set by developers. It also allows editors to easily change URL slugs of their pages, store URL history in the Former URLs application, or provide alternative URLs.

To ensure editors don’t use characters that are considered invalid or suboptimal for URLs in specific environments (e.g., characters from extended Latin alphabets, such as ö), use the field validation. Use it on any URL-related page type fields to constraint forbidden (or suboptimal) URL characters. 

Aim for content reusability

Follow a simple rule of thumb: if there is a chance that a specific content will appear on the same website in multiple places or different channels of marketing communication, we recommend creating structured content.

Ensure a seamless editing experience

When you build the structured content hierarchy, we recommend that every developer participating on the project steps into the content editor’s shoes and creates several pages in the content tree from scratch. Developers will try out the editing experience, and might propose improvements.

• For example, you can often improve the editing experience just by slightly flattening the content tree hierarchy.

Group the fields on the Content tab into categories to help with the editing experience.

• For example, you can use categories such as: Page content, SEO-related, original content, Page categories, etc.

Using the Description and Explanation text page type fields (Description adds a tooltip and Explanation adds an explanation under the field), you can help editors understand what content the corresponding field expects and its behavior. We recommend focusing more on the type of content that editors are supposed to provide rather than describing where the content is used/displayed. Focusing on the substance of content rather than its presentation helps with strengthening its reusability.

Set restrictions for content creation by using the Allowed page types or Page type scopes. This ensures that editors won’t unintentionally break the website composition by adding a page where it doesn’t belong.

Ensure seamless content workflow

Make sure that editors have complete control over their content. The Preview view mode in the Pages application gives editors the option to see what their content will look like before it’s published to the live site. Similarly, we recommend using Content staging to help with testing and proving the content on pre-production before synchronizing it with the production site.

To manage the content life-cycle identified in the content audit, we recommend using Xperience built-in features, such as content locking, versioning, ACL permissions, and content management workflows. To store archived pages, consider building a custom module. 

Use inheritance to your benefit

Use inheritance in page types. Create “base” page types with properties and share them across different children page types. For example, you could share SEO-related fields or page categories.

Localization and multilingual websites

Xperience can store multilingual content within one site through a localized content tree or host many sites, each localized to a targeted culture. For pages in the content tree, editors can switch between language versions, create new language versions or manage translations. Find out more about localizing content in the Multilingual websites section.

If you’re planning to use on-line marketing features on multilingual websites, note that:

• Xperience contacts are global objects shared across all sites within one Xperience instance. This means that marketing teams working on one Xperience instance have access to contacts from all websites of that instance.

Therefore, consider deploying websites running on a single instance into multiple instances with separate contact databases in regions where you need to meet specific e-privacy requirements. 

• For localizing content that doesn’t need to be represented in the content tree, use resource strings.
• To create localized content variants, use the hreflang tag.
• If you don’t need to create localized variants of the whole content tree, consider using the content personalization features. For example, you can assign users from different regions to different personas and handle displaying localized variants in code rather than in page builder widgets.
• Consider using the culture alias to change the default .NET language prefix in the URL at the project’s beginning.

Decisions on how to store and present localized content vary based on:

• Your content types.
  • If the content types are the same for different languages, use a localized content tree.
  • If the same content type needs to differ between languages, use a different site for each language version.
• Your marketing team structure.
  • If the marketing team is small and oversees all the localized versions, use a localized content tree.
  • If your company has independent marketing teams in different cultures or every team uses different workflows, it’s usually better to separate the content into multiple sites.

E-commerce features

Based on your project requirements, we recommend evaluating whether to use SKUs with pages versus the standalone SKUs option of storing products and deciding on how to approach the website’s language variants. See the E-commerce customization model and Developing on-line stores for more information.

Recommendations - Modeling navigation

We recommend using the built-in “Navigation item” feature for small projects, typically websites for small businesses (such as our own Dancing Goat sample site).

For larger projects where you want to create multi-layered navigation menus, we recommend creating a dedicated section in the content tree and defining a custom “Menu item” page type.

Recommendations - Search

Considering your project requirements, we recommend using the Azure Cognitive Search.

Use smart search to index files uploaded as page attachments. For indexing files uploaded to media libraries, we recommend building a custom smart search indexer. 

Recommendation - Sign-in and Registration

Website administrators should be able to define which roles have access to which content themselves. Create custom functionality that allows website admins to grant specific user role access to secured sections from the Xperience administration.

Secure media library files on the IIS level as the media files are always be accessible via their URLs.

Allow for content personalization on the sign-in/registration page.

Recommendations - Consents

To ensure marketers stay within legal boundaries with their marketing activities, we recommend leveraging the Xperience data protection functionality for collecting and managing every piece of visitor data in the customer life-cycle. From cookie tracking over data submitted through online forms up to e-commerce specific data.

To allow users to manage their consents, we recommend building a consent settings page.

Recommendations - SEO

We recommend doing a custom implementation of the sitemap generator, including a mechanism that enables editors to decide which page URLs to include in the sitemap, as well as a way to canonicalize URLs. For example, by adding a dedicated URL canonical field to the page’s Content tab.

Recommendations - Errors

Give editors the power to personalize the content of error pages, e.g., by enabling the Page builder feature on the error page. It can help in case your website contains a lot of content and the menu on the website doesn’t provide for quick navigation. The most frequently used error pages are:

• 404 - Page Not Found.
• 403 Forbidden - You do not have permission to access this page.
• 400 Bad request - Your browser performed an invalid operation.
• 500 Internal server error - The server encountered an error while processing your request.

Recommendations - Indexing

We recommend to provide editors or administrators means to disallow parts of the website from search engines:

• To disallow indexing of individual website pages, add dedicated fields on the Content tab. Selecting the fields should include the no-index directive into your output markup.
• To disallow indexing parts of the website, create a dedicated page for Robots.txt with, e.g., a Text area form control on the Content tab and use a custom code to process the directives administrators input into the Robots.txt file. The implementation could also allow restricting indexing the website by specific search bots.