If you happened to miss the Adobe x Blue Acorn iCi webinar, below is a recap that answers this question and more.

Speakers:

• Gina Casagrande, Director, Experience Cloud Evangelism, Adobe
• Emily Wilhoit, Chief Marketing Officer, Blue Acorn iCi
• Tyler Craft, Director of Engineering, Blue Acorn iCi

A Look at Where Companies Are

Did you know that 47% of users won’t wait longer than two seconds for a website to load? Those two seconds can be the difference between a conversion and a swift exit.

Casagrande prompted a question to the audience: What’s the biggest challenge you’re facing with your current CMS? The top two challenges were speeding up development cycles for faster times to market and accelerating and scaling content creation.

Casagrande continued to speak about the challenges that are often heard, such as how slow generic experiences do not engage customers, how content authors cannot quickly create and update experiences, and how long and complex development cycles limit business agility.

Blue Acorn iCi’s Website Refresh Project

Webinar guests Wilhoit and Craft were brought into the conversation to talk more about Blue Acorn iCi’s website refresh project, and how they determined to migrate to Edge Delivery Services.

“Blue Acorn iCi started to look for a better website solution in 2023. After evaluating that WordPress wasn’t fitting the business needs, the marketing team determined that they needed the ability to quickly add, remove, and edit new sections,” Craft stated.

Wilhoit elaborated on the decision, “We heard about Edge Delivery at Adobe Summit, and immediately our marketing team was captivated by the potential, exclaiming, ‘Wow it can do all the things we really need.’”

From a technical rollout perspective, phase 1 of this project from WordPress to Edge Delivery was a lift and shift of 400+ URLs and 373 blog posts, utilizing 3 team members in 3.5 weeks.

Headless vs Headful

Casagrande asked Craft if Edge Delivery Services is headless or headful since Adobe Experience Manager Sites acts primarily as a headless platform.

Craft responded, “Edge Delivery Services provides or improves the content authoring experience. The core functionality is to get the content as close as the user to reduce that load time. With this approach, it acts as a true content hub that is essential for that omnichannel experience. It can be used in headless scenarios but is a headful solution.”

After The Launch of BlueAcorniCi.com

Marketing experienced some amazing benefits of the new website immediately after launch. Now, Wilhoit’s team is more empowered than ever and can iterate on changes at lightning speed without needing to create IT tickets to resolve minor issues.

“Our lighthouse scores are consistently at 100 now, and we know a slow digital experience is not good for anybody,” stated Wilhoit.

Here are the four main benefits she shared:

1. Increased efficiency: The team is now working in a single tool, publishing content quickly and improving content workflows.
2. Improved performance: It’s quick to publish and quick to load.
3. Personalization possibilities: The department can easily create content for different audiences, allowing marketing to focus on marketing initiatives rather than technology.
4. Empowered team: Blue Acorn iCi’s marketing team has autonomy from IT, ownership of the entire site, and familiarity with the tool.

Casagrande asked Wilhoit if there was any advice she could give to marketers about transitioning to Edge Delivery Services and improving autonomy from IT.

“Collaboration is key, whether at validation stage, or migration. We have frequent connections where marketing is talking about our needs and we get on a call and show them our needs. This helps to get everyone on the same page instead of putting in a ticket,” stated Wilhoit.

After speaking about the benefits Blue Acorn iCi experiences, Craft demonstrated Edge Delivery Services live during the webinar.

Looking Ahead: Generative AI

Casagrande elaborated on where Adobe is headed. Soon, and thanks to AI enhancements, teams will be able to easily create different versions of the content they’re producing and look at how to enhance digital experiences. Expect to see more GenAI advancements in the future that will help organizations create content within tools of their choice and enable rapid development.

Do you want to learn more about the benefits of Edge Delivery Services and how it could positively impact your marketing and development teams? Contact Blue Acorn iCi for more information.