How Adobe Experience Manager Sites utilizes the separation of concerns principle

Organizations across industries must quickly build and update their websites, mobile apps, and other digital properties to keep up with customer demand and achieve their business goals. Yet building and launching omnichannel digital experiences can be complex, often requiring multiple development cycles that take several months to complete.

Separation of concerns is an approach to ensure that each team that contributes to design, content, and code can work quickly to publish content. Read on to learn how Adobe Experience Manager Sites uses the separation of concerns principle.

This article will look at the following topics:

• What separation of concerns is
• Understanding separation of concerns in Experience Manager Sites
• How separation of concerns benefits businesses

What is separation of concerns?

Separation of concerns is a design principle in software development that breaks up code, content, and design to eliminate dependencies and accelerate web development. This principle separates these elements to each address a separate concern.

Adobe Experience Manager Sites with Edge Delivery Services takes the separation of concerns principle a step further. It takes a content-first approach, so the content teams can author at any time — while the development and design teams can work on their respective elements simultaneously. This maintains flexibility and agility in the development process so teams can define their content model in a way that suits their needs and allows them to build, iterate, and deploy web pages much faster.

Understanding separation of concerns in Experience Manager Sites

With Experience Manager Sites, authors can start populating a website with content without having to wait for the completion of the design and development phases. Creating engaging web experiences is an iterative and ongoing process. To keep up with increasing customer expectations, brands must deliver a wider variety of web and app content at lightning speed.

In Experience Manager Sites, when authors create content, a default output is available for previewing, which eliminates the dependencies on developers to set up the page, template, and components for rendering. In parallel to authoring, designers can create the design and developers can write the CSS, styling, and component functionality, maximizing efficiency and accelerating workflows. Additionally, Edge Delivery Services’ block architecture divides code into smaller, modular chunks, making it easier to maintain and update digital properties without impacting other code.

Separation of concerns plays an important role in governance by providing a structured, modular approach to content creation and development. With coding, content, and design separated, access for content authors, developers, and designers is inherently limited to areas relevant to their responsibilities and minimizes dependencies. Permissions are further controlled and assigned within the authoring and development tools — like GitHub, SharePoint, and Google Docs.

The separation of concerns approach allows developers, designers, and authors the flexibility needed to easily and quickly build and iterate digital properties.

How does separation of concerns benefit businesses?

The separation of concerns approach speeds up development, web content creation, and content migration which improves:

• Time to market and agility. This approach helps businesses quickly go to market and adapt to ever-changing customer demands and market conditions, no matter the channel.
• Revenue. Businesses can maximize opportunities to generate revenue and capture market share before competitors.
• Efficiency. Separation of concerns streamlines workflows so authoring, development, and design can operate in parallel to unlocking time and cost savings.

Traditional approaches require sequential development which creates web content bottlenecks. The separation of concerns approach, on the other hand, enables teams to rapidly develop web content, code, and design to reduce time to market, increase revenue, and improve efficiency.

How Experience Manager Sites can help you get started with a separation of concerns approach

Experience Manager Sites is purpose-built for organizations that need an agile, flexible, and streamlined development process. With its content-first approach to design and development, you can create content faster to keep up with customer demands for engaging web and app experiences.

To dive deeper into other ways Edge Delivery Services enables rapid development, check out our technical documentation here.

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