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Site.com, a CMS (content management system) that equips business users with drag-and-drop tools for building websites, was made available today at the Salesforce.com CloudForce event in San Francisco. You can read more about CloudForce news here.
Intended for sales, marketing and other corporate departments that use Salesforce.com as a platform for business operations, Site.com provides website templates, integrated forms and connectors to the underlying Sales Cloud database. While speedy setup was touted as one of the main reasons to use Site.com–the phrase “marketing at the speed of social” was used during the keynote presentation–website security will likely be another key point that will tempt users to the latest Salesforce offering.
After speaking with Salesorce.com officials and using a no-cost trial account to set up a basic website, I can say that while Site.com is simple to use, business pros should be ready to roll up their sleeves to get satisfactory websites.
To try out Site. com, the first thing to do is to get an account. New users should watch the short training videos that demonstrate some of the basic features of Site.com. For example, even when using templates to create website pages that post available jobs or that promote a product and provide a lead form, there are scores of options available to customize the look and feel of the page. And while Salesforce.com has done a good job of setting up nicely designed templates, users will undoutably want to make tweaks. Making these tweaks means knowing what design tools are available and having some idea of what design elements are essential for effective web design.
Let’s just say that I was able to quickly create some fairly mangled websites very quickly using Site.com. So, while the site will provide a way to integrate a website with backend Salesforce.com capabilities, organizations will still need to have one or two people who actually know something about good design to make effective use of the service.