How to Create Great Websites on Salesforce Lightning Platform?

Everyone, including businesses and professionals, needs to build great websites. There is fierce competition in terms of web presence among business organizations irrespective of the size and domain area. However, building successful websites and running them successfully is not an easy job. It’s complicated and also an expensive affair to succeed.

A lot easier would be using a platform like SendPulse to create a landing page that can serve as a mini-website, an online store, or a lead generation funnel.

With many options available to build your custom website and run it successfully, the latest in vogue is Force.com sites, which you can easily build and run public. There is no need to worry about running a data center by yourself to host servers, and there is also no need to maintain various software applications. You can find that building Force.com applications is about five times faster and the cost is also cut to a half compared to the traditional software development platforms.

Now, by simply leveraging the advanced functionalities of Force.com and using the data from your Salesforce account, one can easily build their websites which the users can access using a custom web address/domain. In this excerpt, we will discuss some common use cases for the functionality of such websites, how to build them, and web development best practices to consider.

Building Various Sites

Some of the sites may be suited well for the capabilities of Force.com sites, but some others may not be an ideal fit. Further, we will discuss some general use cases.

• The intranet of corporate sites which display information to the users are the easiest sites to build. Someone with basic HTML knowledge can do it. You can use CMSForce free applications from AppExchange to build pages. With only static pages, you can easily create static pages.

• Product catalogs and store locators by capturing the push info about visitors are interactive sites, which can leverage the page functionality of Force.com and the Apex code. These are more flexible to build, but you may ideally require the support of a developer to build these.

• Even management apps or insurance-related applications can be built and integrated to Salesforce account using Force.com developer. There is no need to capture information or push information back to the visitors but needs to bring data to the applications. If your visitors fill in an application or sign up for any event, then the information needs to be recorded to the Salesforce. As building these sites use some page functionality of Force.com and custom coding, you may need a development team support by Flosum.com for this.

Other website types are not a good fit for the functionality of Force.com, including those which require larger bandwidth requirement. As those sites have the need for heavier file downloads, uploads, and intense processing, these are not ideal for Force.com development.

Force.com Best Practices

While building websites on Force.com, here are some primary considerations to make.

• Content – As the websites are made available on the public domain, never publish any unfinished or inappropriate content.

• Testing – First test the website for all types of users and all functional demands of the website. Even if your site performs ideally for one desired group of users, there are chances that it may fail for many others. The site should also be tested for various browsers and ensure a unique user experience across the platforms.

• Daily limits and overall performance – Force.com has some limitation in terms of website pages. Make sure that you are fully knowledgeable of such limits and restrictions in order to ensure an optimum experience. Refer to the Salesforce trail-heads and usage policies to gain more information.

• Schema design – Keep an eye on the design models which influence effective database management. You also should make sure proper information retrieval. Proper scheme design and careful querying is the key for top schema performance, especially for high-traffic websites. You should do proper indexing of the design schema for optimizing data retrieval.

• Design of website – While building a site, you should consider whether you have plans to port the existing website or the need for a fresh website. Porting of the existing website may affect the overall performance of the site.

• Web authentication – If there is any user authentication of password protection, then you need to make your site using various user communities to allow or prevent access to different content.

Website Integration with Salesforce

In fact, there is an increasing demand for integrating existing websites with Salesforce. The basic application for this is to generate a web form or lead form. Doing this will let you build a Salesforce form which will access data which you want to collect. Salesforce has an HTML form for this, which you can easily build through cut and paste. All submissions through this form can be put into Salesforce to be further followed up. You can get many tutorials to learn this online.

Another similar thing is Cases. These are entities in Salesforce which can track an issue to someone on your site. The Request Support type of forms collect info and then put it into the Cases on Salesforce. These submissions may not always be associated with a Contact of a Lead in Salesforce, but this may gather needed information and then use the workflow of Salesforce to makes sure that all such submissions are properly followed up with desirable action.

The HTML Salesforce forms can generate information for you, which is not error checked. So, you need to do proper auditing by an expert to check the data and implement CAPTCHA or other criteria to make sure that your Salesforce instances aren’t cluttered with spam. If you need your website with an advanced Salesforce connection, then developer API has many options you can leverage. However, these implementations require more technical skills and need a programmer to perform it.

Leveraging the benefits of the framework, which is existing for website connections will let you ensure that you organize it well at one place. It will also help prevent multiple users from contacting a single lead. Combining this with other effective content marketing and digital marketing strategies will ultimately help improve your conversion rates to the maximum.