THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO COHESION:Empowering Your Teams to Build Brand-Compliant Websites

CONTENTSSECTION 1:What Is Acquia Cohesion?

SECTION 2:Who Is Cohesion For?

SECTION 3:What Makes Cohesion So Easy to Use?

SECTION 4:How Does Cohesion Redefine How We Create Digital Experiences?

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How did your company build its website? Did you bring in a designer or design agency? Then hire developers to build it? Then task content writers with creating the content? How much time did this take? Three months? Six months?

And how much did that cost?

Utilizing traditional CMS tools, you can build any site you want, the way you want it. However, doing so will require a lot of time, money and highly skilled people. On the other end of the spectrum, consumer site-building tools such as Wix, Squarespace, etc., enable people with little technical acumen to build impressive websites fairly easily. Unfortunately, the site you end up with will almost certainly be off-brand, unable to scale for high-demand use cases and remain unendorsed by your IT/Operations teams.

What if there were a way to build beautiful, powerful, scalable, on-brand websites up to four times faster than it takes with traditional CMS tools?

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It Shouldn’t Take So Long and Cost So Much to Build On-Brand Websites

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Whether you’re a developer, site builder, designer or marketer, there is one thing we can all agree on: Building enterprise-grade websites with the functionality, scalability and branding you require should be much faster, much easier and far less expensive. You can do all this with Acquia Cohesion.

SECTION 1What Is Acquia Cohesion?

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Acquia Cohesion revolutionizes the way Drupal websites are built through a low-code, visual interface. Cohesion gives Acquia customers the ability to build enterprise-grade Drupal 8 websites in weeks—not months—with minimal developer input. It brings to Drupal 8 the fastest, most powerful drag-and-drop page creation and editing experience available for any CMS in the industry.

With Acquia Cohesion, you don’t have to be a developer or have extensive knowledge of coding to create rich, immersive websites. Cohesion enables people with minimal coding skills, which may include designers, marketers and content editors, to easily build, edit and manage the websites they work with. This empowers organizations to launch Drupal websites up to four times faster than with traditional methods, while still offering unprecedented creative freedom, brand consistency and governance.

What Is Acquia Cohesion?

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SECTION 2Who Is Cohesion For?

Marketers and Content EditorsCohesion makes it easier than ever for content editors to simply browse to a web page they want to update and edit the content and settings directly on the page. Need to rewrite a header? Swap an image with a text box? Embed a video? No problem. It can be done in seconds. Using only a visual interface, all users can easily add or rewrite text, change fonts, styles, colors and images, as well as create pages using components from their library.

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Acquia Cohesion is available to Acquia customers and partners using Drupal 8. If you have not yet migrated from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, Cohesion will greatly simplify and expedite your migration by cutting the time spent completing theming work.

Cohesion is designed for:

Who Is Cohesion For?

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Site BuildersCohesion enables site builders to build Drupal 8 websites end to end, as well as create the editing experience for their content and marketing teams. Site builders do not need to be Drupal developers. Some basic understanding of website concepts is all that’s needed to begin creating websites.

Brand ManagersUsing Cohesion’s templates, brand managers can ensure that your organization’s branding and design standards are followed completely. Define headers, footers and other site-wide elements and easily assemble them into a site or page.

If you’re a large enterprise with multiple brands in multiple regions, you can easily create sub-brand versions of your sites at a local-market level. There can be stylistic differences between sites, but essential brand consistencies will remain.

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IT Teams and Developers Cohesion will release precious senior Drupal developers from routine tasks, allowing them to focus on more complex, valuable activities, such as e-commerce, application building, business integrations and business rules and functionality. The result is more developer time spent on high-value areas of the website. This also greatly reduces the total cost of ownership of your websites, freeing up budgets to invest in things that will bring in more revenue, such as demand-gen and marketing automation tools.

SECTION 3What Makes Cohesion So Easy to Use?

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Just Drag and DropAcquia Cohesion uses a simple, intuitive drag-and-drop interface that provides all the power of coding without having to write it. Marketing and content teams can create pages, update layouts and edit content without the need for any technical help. Meanwhile your designers and site builders can build the entire website, without any coding using Cohesion’s out of the box functionality and our simple visual interfaces.

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What Makes Cohesion So Easy to Use?

Bespoke EditingThis first-of-its-kind, low-code approach also allows site builders to create a bespoke editing experience for marketing and content teams. A centralized, permission-based approach to all parts of the website makes it easy to manage brand compliance globally, even across large, disparate digital estates. Site builders can also designate which content is not editable, such as legal disclaimers, standardized boilerplates, brand elements and so on.

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Reusable AssetsWith Cohesion, your digital assets are reusable across all pages on your website or any of your other websites. You can export a page’s design and style configuration in full or in part and replicate it on any other page or on any of your other sites. This allows you to synchronize brand styles, components and templates quickly and easily.

For example, if you have a page you would like to replicate on other sites (i.e., a landing page that gets a lot of hits, a marketing page that gets a lot of conversions, etc.), you can easily save the page as a “Helper” and then replicate it wherever you want and change the content accordingly. Enterprises that have done UX testing on a landing page and know it converts well can create a Helper for their marketing teams all over the world to use so they don’t have to go through the process of testing again.

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“There’s enormous pressure to deliver differentiated and personalized customer experiences...Acquia’s acquisition of Cohesion is aimed at giving powerful, low-code solutions to marketers and site builders, enabling them to move fast and take a bigger role in site creation and delivery. 451 Research Voice of the Enterprise, Customer Experience and Commerce data shows that 68 percent of digital leaders are investing in more modern digital technologies like Cohesion to address customers’ demand for new immersive experiences and more contextually driven interactions.”

— Sheryl Kingstone, Research Vice President, 451 Research

SECTION 4How Does Cohesion Redefine How We Create Digital Experiences?

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Design Pattern Approaches (UI Components) Components are mini-templates that contain the layout, style, functionality and editing experience to be used by editors on web pages. Component-based design systems allow you to create one digital asset and then reuse it as many times as you want. Rather than designing page by page, you break a design down into smaller component parts. Individually these can be quite simple, but when combined together they create effective, intricate pages and sites. At the heart of component design is the philosophy: Create once, use everywhere.

Component-based design creates a shared general knowledge of the components available to designers, developers and project managers. It also creates a more consistent design and UX, expediting the creation of new digital products by minimizing time spent redesigning and rebuilding similar components.

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How Does Cohesion Redefine How We Create Digital Experiences?

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Component LibrariesAcquia Cohesion includes a library of elements that you can use to create your components, ranging from basic HTML elements to sophisticated interactive devices. These flexible, adaptable component libraries empower teams to adjust layout and/or styling themselves within the component editing environment.

Once you’ve created a component (or template, style or website setting), you can export it from one website and import it into another using Cohesion Sync. The component will take with it any styles, fonts, colors and other assets on which it has a dependency and create a package file that can be imported into another website. From this, you can import them into your other projects when you need them, creating a reusable component library to deploy across multiple projects.

These flexible, adaptable component libraries empower teams to adjust layout and/or styling themselves within the component editing environment.

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Acquia Cohesion is the easiest, most intuitive site builder on the market today. Its revolutionary low-code, visual method of building Drupal 8 websites is a complete game-changer for organizations, enabling them to launch their sites up to four times faster while still remaining one hundred percent brand-compliant.

With Acquia Cohesion, everyone, regardless of technical acumen, has the ability to create, update and edit Drupal websites, with no coding required. This means marketing, design and development teams can work together more efficiently to achieve true agile marketing.

What Are You Waiting For?

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Acquia is the open source digital experience company. We provide the world’s most ambitious brands with technology that allows them to embrace innovation and create customer moments that matter. At Acquia, we believe in the power of community — giving our customers the freedom to build tomorrow on their terms.

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