Siteglide Spotlight

If you're new to Siteglide or don't know our story you might not know that in 2012 we set out to solve the day to day issues we'd experienced with web development projects in our Digital Agency.

In 2018 we were forced to completely reimagine everything we'd built, but, as proven so often in life, the challenge presented huge opportunity and ultimately a better end result. That change was Adobe announcing the closure of their Business Catalyst platform that we used as our core technology. Initially, there was a 2 year 'End of Life' phase that was later extended to 3.5 years, partly due to Covid 19. Business Catalyst finally shut down permanently on 26th September 2021 ending a period that, for anyone who was involved in some way with Business Catalyst, will have felt relief mixed with a little sadness - it was the end of an era.

We took on a pretty big challenge in 2018...to help provide an improved alternative to the thousands of agencies and site owners that would have to move their websites. We had to try to reduce the 14 years of innovation (including 9 of which that had Adobe's resourced behind it) and provide the tools to not just replicate those sites but bring them up to the latest standards. It's been the busiest 3.5 years imaginable but some big milestones and successes along the way:

• We've had hundreds of agencies (and some site owners) across the globe migrating websites from Business Catalyst as well as building new ones.
• We were one of 3 platforms recommended by Adobe for migrations.
• We were (and still are) the highest rated Digital Experience Platform (DXP) on G2.com for small business.
• The agency team built a Community and Marketplace for the fastest growing Enterprise software company in the world, UiPath (IPO in 2021 at $35bn).
• The agency team then launched SiteGurus to offer outsourced Siteglide development services direct to agencies and worked tirelessly to help migrate sites.
• Siteglide was featured on Zapier's 'App of the Day' joining the likes of Slack and Microsoft Teams.

But what we really want to share is how excited we are about the future and show how Siteglide was always going to be far more than a Business Catalyst replacement. 

Firstly though, we'd like to send a huge thank you to our friends and partners at platformOS, led by Business Catalyst's co-founder, Adam Broadway. We selected platformOS as our DevOps partner so that we could focus on realising our vision while letting them deliver the Enterprise-grade infrastructure that now supports the likes of Intel, Hallmark and even an international bank. They have the tough job of providing the most flexible, powerful, secure, reliable and scalable infrastructure available.

A final thank you goes out to all our early adopter customers who saw the potential early on and have genuinely made all the hard work worthwhile, it's a pleasure working with you and seeing the Community grow!

Let's focus on the future. Our mission is to enable SMEs to build limitless digital Experiences that use Logic to leverage Data without the cost and complexity of Enterprise solutions.

There are various Enterprise tools out there that allow you to do some pretty clever things but they're often pretty cumbersome to setup/manage and have a hefty price tag. SMEs simply cannot justify $40k per year and a whole team of people to setup and manage it. 

We're excited to share our Roadmap and vision for the future. Here are a few slides from our recent Townhall, we'd recommend watching the recording too!

Some of the key features to expect in early 2022 are: Triggers and Workflows, Custom API, Studio Editor expansion, granular User Roles and dynamic documentation to help you build in record time.

We're determined to ship even these hugely powerful features in early 2022 and then focus on enabling our Community to grow our Marketplace and build things we haven't even thought of yet! We've seen some sneak previews of what's behind the scenes including a Personalisation Module and enhanced shopping experience. More to come and why not try building your own Modules for the Marketplace!

We're excited about where we can take Siteglide and truly believe that making data accessible to all will give SMEs the ability to compete with any competitor small or large.

If you want to find out more about our Roadmap and vision for the future you can watch our recent Townhall recording.