Blue Acorn iCi creates fast experiences with all new Adobe Experience Manager Sites
How can developers build and update websites in less time while alleviating the pain points of marketing teams? Using Adobe’s latest Experience Manager Sites innovation, Edge Delivery Services, teams can launch a new website in a few weeks. Discover how Blue Acorn iCi reimagined its content authoring process and optimized website performance.
Analyzing content workflows
Blue Acorn iCi struggled to create and publish content easily on WordPress, and when the marketing team needed to quickly change an existing page, they typically encountered roadblocks. While trying to update legacy content, marketers didn’t have the proper access. Other issues that seemed like easy fixes proved to be complex problems that involved the internal IT and development teams.
The team knew they needed a more flexible content management system (CMS) that could accelerate the content authoring and publishing process.
As Blue Acorn iCi started a formal process to determine their website's next iteration, they looked for a more accessible tool that the team could easily manage. As they evaluated their existing content creation process, the marketing department recognized that every piece of website content began in a Google Doc. Team members would copy and paste approved content into WordPress, and that additional step created a longer timeline before a piece of content is published.
Migrating from WordPress to Experience Manager Sites
Before talks of a new company website came to fruition, Blue Acorn iCi received early access to Adobe’s beta program for Experience Manager Sites with Edge Delivery Services as part of their Adobe Platinum Solution Partnership. A lightbulb went off as developers learned more about the product benefits, and through the partnership they were able to co-deliver the next experience.
The Blue Acorn iCi marketing team could now publish content directly from Google Docs and eliminate the tedious copying and pasting step in the content publishing process. Content such as blog posts and landing pages could go from the editing stage to being live on the site within seconds.
“Hearing how Edge Delivery Services could allow us to stay in the tools we are used to and deliver great user experiences on the frontend made us really excited to migrate to Experience Manager Sites for our own website,” said Emily Wilhoit, chief marketing officer at Blue Acorn iCi.
The new Experience Manager Sites was a huge advantage to Blue Acorn iCi’s marketing team. Without having to involve IT or development teams to publish content , the team saves the back-and-forth time between departments and no longer faces delays when under tight deadlines to publish new content. Now, they can quickly update the website in seconds and stay on top of the organization’s evolving needs.
Tyler Craft, Blue Acorn iCi’s director of Adobe Commerce Cloud and development lead on this program, said, “Edge Delivery Services does a good job of taking it back to the basics. Because we weren’t dealing with heavy backend frameworks that we were used to dealing with, a team of three was able to lift and shift our existing WordPress website to Experience Manager Sites in a matter of three and a half weeks.”
The new and improved Blue Acorn iCi website
Not only is Blue Acorn iCi’s website delivering faster experiences to users and improving the content publishing process, but now the company has a website that properly reflects the brand and meets its needs as a lead generation tool to drive new business.
After launching the new website, the team immediately saw how fast and responsive it was. Now the site has a Google Lighthouse score of 100, and users can navigate the site with ease.
“Experience Manager Sites with Edge Delivery Services not only provides developers an environment to rapidly produce experiences that outperform the leading CMSs but it also makes content creators' lives easier by using familiar tools with the ability to rapidly produce content,” said Gary Howell, VP of Adobe Experience Cloud Practice at Blue Acorn iCi.
Blue Acorn iCi recognizes there is even more potential to use the latest innovations in Experience Manager Sites with a forward-thinking approach, the organization plans to improve processes for both internal and external users with React components. As their team works on React components in a composable architecture, they can serve pages in a scalable way to save even more time with AI-driven content creation right within the tool.
Using familiar tools such as Google Docs and Microsoft Office, the new Experience Manager Sites allows marketing teams to publish content faster and accelerate the rate at which experiences are delivered to customers. Contact Blue Acorn iCi, an Infosys company, to learn how Adobe Experience Manager Sites can provide your team with a rapid development environment to drive customer and employee success.
Sarah Grathwohl is a senior content marketing manager at Blue Acorn iCi whose current projects include hosting The Funnel podcast and sharing customer stories.