What Is Sitefinity CMS?

Sitefinity is a content management system (CMS) designed and developed by Telerik, a multinational software vendor with several blue chip clients.

What is content management?

It’s basically a system that houses and maintains online content, ranging from a simple blog right up to fully featured web portals and E-commerce websites. All the various content strands that make up a web presence - blogs, websites, articles and other media - are controlled within the CMS.

A popular example of a CMS is Wordpress, which started life as a blogging platform and has broadened its functionality to provide static page websites and - through the use of add-ons (plug-ins) it can provide more specific functions such as membership and commerce sites.

What makes a CMS so desirable?

Accessibility and usability. A CMS enables various personnel - not just the tech-savvy people - to add and manage content. For example, someone who writes for the company blog can simply access the CMS, write and edit their blog post, maybe add an image or two and publish it without having to, say, submit work to the web designer or developer and wait for them to add it to the site.

What does Sitefinity CMS offer in particular?

Sitefinity is an ‘industrial strength’ CMS designed for heavy duty use although lighter users such as one-person enterprises.

It doesn’t require any special skills or knowledge - one user claims that if someone can use Facebook they can use Sitefinity. There’s no need to know web development languages either.

Sitefinity is highly customisable - although for this some web development skills would be required, as would knowledge of some languages such as Javascript, CSS and HTML. This customisation makes the CMS an ideal solution in that it combines the ease of a basic CMS with the full flexibility of a bespoke website design.

The CMS also provides inbuilt Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) while enabling you to customise basic meta-data such as the title and page descriptions. In today's competitive market, business websites must ensure that they are optimised for search.

Another feature is the way Sitefinity makes websites fully accessible on other platforms such as tablets and smartphones. This is important as Google now incorporates this ‘ease of access for mobile devices’ into its page rankings, and more and more people access the web through their phone or tablet nowadays.

Is hosting included?

No, you’d need to arrange hosting as you would for other types of website. You’d require a Windows server for hosting as Sitefinity is based on ASP.NET - the Microsoft web language.

How popular is Sitefinity?

A number of world famous companies with heavy web demands use Sitefinity. For example, electronics giant Sony use the CMS to provide an E-commerce portal, world famous news agency Reuters - with content reaching some 3.8 million Americans a month - use Sitefinity to provide a highly navigable website. Italian supercar manufacturer Ferrari are also committed users, and several more large companies have improved their online presence by using the package.

Karen Harding is the marketing manager at Objective IT, a Sitefinity Partner, and one of the South East’s leading web and software development companies.