If you're responsible for the IT or strategic marketing in a medium or large business, this article will probably resonate with you! As medium and large businesses grow it's not uncommon for them to accumulate a collection of mismatched web solutions that were, at some point in time, all born from a business need. Indeed, international brands can have hundreds, if not thousands, of these types of solutions. And they are usually a headache to maintain and can in fact choke the growth of a business!
The types of solutions I'm talking about are:
- Campaign microsites
- Departmental or project sites
- Apps
- Multiple domains for a worldwide family of brands.
The challenges
As a result of a disjointed approach to the overarching web presence, businesses face the challenge of managing multiple content management systems which in turn are managed by multiple teams – which may be in-house, agencies or a mix of the two.
This patchwork approach is not only expensive, but it leaves the business vulnerable to reliability and security issues.
Not to mention the potentially poor customer experience arising from the lack of effective integration or an unstable platform that will often lead to internal conflict between your teams.
Multisite technology
On the surface, multisite technology might appear to be the perfect solution. However, there are inherent challenges of a typical multisite approach including:
- Quality assurance and testing of updates for all sites on a single platform can be high risk.
- Individual site customisation is challenging and may even be impossible
- If one site goes down, all will be affected.
- High levels of traffic to one site will adversely affect the performance of others.
- Back-ups can be problematic
- Segmentation of back-end services can be complicated resulting in reduced reliability of data and security.
The ideal solution
The ideal solution to these particular challenges is a reliable and secure approach that is cost-effective, whilst enabling innovation and delivering measurable results. A platform that enables you to have a dashboard view of all web solutions making strong governance of your web and digital assets almost effortless.
Imagine the business benefits of having a platform that delivered:
- Unity
- High performance
- Speed
- Reliability
- Security and governance
Then imagine that this technology was also able to translate across languages, infrastructure and frameworks in an instant, using cloud deployment to carry out automated maintenance and was even capable of self-updating.
The answer is to assemble a coherent solution
We've created a Drupal multisite solution which is fit-for-purpose and consolidates a myriad of digital and web assets into a single, high performing platform that saves you time and money, enhances brand consistency, and improves customer experience across your family of brands and gives you a birds-eye view of the business' entire online presence.
