With the wise use and popularity of SharePoint in business organizations big and small, you might wonder why only a small portion of companies with SharePoint use it for their public-facing sites. Today, SharePoint continues to be the preferred option for business integration, and thus SharePoint development services are still highly sought after. Nevertheless, a survey stated that only 7percent of surveyed firms use it for public-facing websites.
Why not? SharePoint is a web management platform that’s highly capable. Its usability and functionality put it on the top of the bracket of systems. Moreover, organizations that are already using it experience savings over other technologies, even the open-source ones.
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Why Companies Hesitate to Use SharePoint
Experts in the platform, such as in particular a SharePoint consultant Sydney could tell you some of the reasons why companies are not keen on using it for their website design and development.
Websites don’t look good
The reluctance stems from the perception that SP sites do not and could not look good. This could be due to the historical experiences of previous versions with limited design capabilities. Of course, a company would not use it if the result would be a website that doesn’t look good because it won’t attract customers.
SP Websites Could not be Search-Optimized
The other perception is the inability of SharePoint to support SEO. The older versions often have heavy codes, which are not great, and the specifics of several on-page optimization groundworks were not always simple.
Design Companies don’t like SharePoint Sites
For a design company that is tasked to rebuild an enterprise website but is not a SharePoint development company, then of course it’s unlikely to design and create a website in SharePoint. With the concentration of the technical and UX skills being on a SharePoint developer, digital design agencies, in general, don’t have the knowledge and skills. The skills and knowledge around the platform could not be redistributed at a press of a button or a few mouse clicks.
Reasons to Choose SharePoint for Web Design and Development
It seems that the lack of use of SharePoint 2013 for public-facing sites has more to do with the misconceptions, and holding on to the past experiences instead of looking at the SharePoint technology reality of today. The platform could offer so much more than other tech platforms when it comes to delivering a high-quality, beautifully-designed, feature-rich, and public-facing sites. Furthermore, a SharePoint development company could build a solution that meets business requirements.
The power of SharePoint to manage big amounts of data in a way is what makes finding and using it for customer self-help systems and knowledge bases so much easier. The platform enables creating workflows, which could make customers’ lives so much easier and could make a business save a lot on costs. In the 24/7 world, we are living nowadays, using the power of SharePoint to add self-service functionalities to public-facing websites should not be ignored.
Global organizations should also possess a unified face, but content should be localized. SharePoint is powerful enough that it could provide you the ability to control and to delegate in the combinations you require. Moreover, there are efficient savings in using the same technology so the team only has to know one technology.
The platform also reduces training and make them more efficient since they work in the same technology across various uses.
Introduction to SharePoint Website Publishing for Designers and Developers
There are a site authoring and publishing model introduced by SharePoint to build publishing websites. These sites could be used to publish content on both the internet and intranet websites. Publishing websites varies from other SharePoint sites, mainly because of their purpose.
The SharePoint site publishing capabilities could be used for building, customizing, and maintaining publishing websites, which meet the specific business requirements. Whether you’re an expert designer with skills in JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, or a developer writing SharePoint apps and using custom .NET code to create websites and farm solutions, you could utilize the SharePoint site features to manage all the content life cycle stages, which include:
- Branding and designing the look, feel, and behavior of your website
- Authoring and reusing website content
- Metadata management to create a website navigation system that’s taxonomy-driven
- Accessibility. You could use it to boost the accessibility of published websites
- Smoothly publishing content to the present website collection, or publish content across website collections
SharePoint Authoring, Designing, and Branding
The Microsoft platform provides a new approach for website designing. It revised the content-creation workflow so you could create content with any branding and authoring tool to author great content. For branding your website without writing custom. NET code, you could use the Design Manager for importing design elements.
Moreover, with the Design Manager, you could also build a master page that’s HTML-based to define the shared chrome by all the pages of the website and build page layouts for designing templates for pages. You could opt to use .NET client, .NET server, JavaScript libraries, and Silverlight for writing custom code.
Publishing Client Object-Model Programming, Publishing Website, and the new SharePoint app model
The new .NET client object model to developing apps for SharePoint with the model for SharePoint Add-ins could be used. Moreover, you could use most of the APIs, which also are available for .NET server programming in the client object models of .NET. Some ideas to develop website apps include account management applications, surveys, social features integration, eCommerce support, and external data into publishing sites, mobile companion applications, and outsourced content additions.
Conclusion
With the information provided here on SharePoint for web designing, hopefully, the misconceptions about the platform being unfit for front-facing websites would be removed. SharePoint is in fact a highly capable web management platform. The only reason why a lot of companies are reluctant to use it for their web design is the many misconceptions and past experiences with the older versions.
SharePoint 2013 could truly make a website look terrific. Moreover, it could render an easy to navigate, and beautiful design.
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