8.15.17
Companies around the world depend on Community Cloud to extend the power of Salesforce to their customers, partners and employees. Not only do these communities need to integrate with CRM and business processes, but they need to be reflective of the company’s brand while providing a seamless extension of the company’s website. And how do you do that? Whether you’re a small-to-medium size company with little design resources or a large enterprise with competing design priorities, how can you quickly spin up a community that is functional and also beautiful?
We’ve been focusing on building out Community Cloud’s design capabilities so it’s easier than ever to build captivating branded digital destinations with 50% of the work completed right out-of-the-box. This means faster time to market, less reliance on custom development, and an overall reduction in development costs and maintenance expenses. Read on to learn how you can quickly launch a templated community with easy-to-use drag and drop tools, or go above and beyond and create a completely unique and fully customized experience.
Design a Captivating Digital Community Experience with Ease
Start With Lightning Community Templates
In the first phase of community setup, you can select your desired template with pre-populated layouts and components already installed. All you need to do is add your custom branding, connect to your data and you’re ready to transform your customer, partner and employee relationships. Features like The Branding Panel update your template with simple, point-and-click branding properties. For example, you can choose a color scheme with new color palettes, which instantly apply a set of colors to your community.
Connect to Your Website for a Seamless User Experience
With CMS Connect, all of your external content and CSS is integrated with only a few clicks. Content automatically gets pulled in from your Adobe Experience Manager website without having to manually import, saving you hours of time. Bring your website content, such as headers, footers, banners, and fonts straight into your community.
100% Mobile Responsive, Right Out-of-the-Box
All communities are equipped with mobile-responsive design and each component is also 100% responsive. Without any additional work from your team, you users can instantly engage with your community from any device.
Built-In SEO Makes Content Creation Effortless
Each community is optimized for SEO with user-friendly and canonical URLs, community and page-level meta tags and automatic sitemap generation.
No-Code vs. Full Customization Possibilities
No-Code Builder
Our Lightning Community Builder features a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface for no-code development. This makes it easy to create and manage a branded experience without relying on IT or custom development. And you can see what your community looks like in real time with live previews in desktop, mobile or tablet modes.
Fully Customize Your Community
If you want powerful customization options, we have those too. Custom, pixel perfect themes are seamlessly created using your existing experience in HTML, CSS and some easy to learn skills in Salesforce Lightning. This gives developers full control over the visual presentation and UI without having to learn a new development language. And by leveraging the power of the Salesforce Platform, they can quickly integrate business data and processes with clicks, not code. Additionally, you can develop an original template from scratch, or transform the appearance of an existing template; you can also use a feature like The CSS Editor to override the basic styles of template elements and make it a true reflection of your brand.
Personalize Each Experience
For all customization options, we have a robust personalization engine that allows you to create personalized page experiences per group or user. You can base your customization off select criteria from your CRM and user data as well as standard web rules like geography or referring domain.
Add or Create Your Own Components
Pull in as many components as you like from Salesforce’s library of pre-built components, plus thousands available on App Exchange from our trusted partners. You can also easily create your own components using the Developer Console or your own preferred framework, such as Bootstrap. The possibilities are endless.
Ready to start building your own community and extend the power of your CRM? Capabilities highlighted in this post are generally available today at no additional cost with any edition of Community Cloud.
