Whether you call it a portal, support community, or something else, a Salesforce Experience Cloud site can be an essential part of your customer, partner, and/or employee relationships. These sites allow you to create branded digital experiences for sharing information, providing enablement materials, explaining processes, or collaborating with the people who play an important part in what your organization does.
If Experience Cloud sites are part of your strategy, they likely represent a significant investment of time and resources. And if those sites don’t see much traction among your intended user base, those investments can seem like wasted effort. Poor UX may be to blame. External groups like partners and customers have particularly high expectations when it comes to UX, design, and accessibility. If your portal or support site doesn’t meet these high bars, they won’t keep visiting.
To avoid this situation, savvy organizations are working to create pixel-perfect, well-designed portal experiences that meet and exceed the expectations of both internal and external stakeholders. For many teams, that means turning to custom code. However, that’s not the only option for creating intuitive, branded portals. In this post, we’ll go through some difficulties associated with heavy reliance on custom code and share how Skuid can address them.
The limitations and challenges of custom code
Salesforce is great for admins, but Experience Cloud is often a paradigm shift for teams used to building flows and page layouts with the declarative tools provided by the platform. Delivery teams assigned an Experience Cloud project should be prepared for a significantly different build experience. Detail pages and list views will have new limitations, “standard” CRM functionality won’t be available, and higher design requirements will necessitate expertise in other tools like Salesforce CMS.
Even for those who are comfortable working within the Experience Cloud builder, the platform’s out-of-the-box components often have limitations, restrictions, or features that can only be worked around by creating custom code. Lightning Web Components, or LWCs, are the only Salesforce-native option for making Experience Cloud portals without compromising design objectives or essential UX needs like accessibility features — and they are 100% custom code.
While custom code allows teams to create the exact portal experience they envisioned, it comes at a high cost. Instead of delivering applications independently, SF delivery teams often have to submit requests to code developers for multiple LWC components to meet objectives. This takes engineering resources away from the developer team, putting additional pressure on internal groups and adding time to the project. Every request to an adjacent team has to be vetted, designed, and reviewed by devs and architects, which will raise concerns about missed deadlines and going over budget. After all, developer talent doesn’t come cheaply, and custom code takes significant time to write, test, and deploy.
In addition, the reliance on custom code means that any Experience Cloud site built with custom LWCs will be difficult and time-consuming to maintain. Most Salesforce admins aren’t equipped to maintain Experience Cloud code, so all maintenance will have to be done by developers.
Given these challenges around developer resources and site maintenance, many organizations might delay establishing or improving their Experience Cloud portals. However, there is an alternative option to custom LWC code.
Making Experience Cloud more admin-friendly with Skuid
Skuid provides parity with the Salesforce CRM functionality that SF admins know and love — or are at least experienced with. For example, Skuid pages in Experience Cloud can incorporate dynamic forms and custom list views, requiring no custom code. With Skuid, portal project delivery teams can:
Go from prototype to go-live in record time
Skuid lets you execute Salesforce portal projects at lightning speed (pun intended) and accelerate your portal project from idea to completion — all with little to no custom code. Reduce stress about meeting your project milestone deadlines and save costs by reducing reliance on developer resources. And once you go live, you won’t have to worry about maintaining custom LWCs.
Meet the high expectations of external users
Customer and partner expectations around UX, design, navigation, and accessibility are higher than ever. With Skuid, you can make your Experience Cloud portals feel like consumer-grade websites, increasing adoption and boosting user satisfaction. Deliver mobile-friendly portal experiences with responsive components and robust layout tools, and give users a seamless experience between devices.
Reflect the company’s brand and vision
Your organization’s brand has been painstakingly crafted over time, often at a high expense; understandably, you want your portal to reflect positively on those efforts. Ensure consistency and elevate the look and feel of your Salesforce Experience Cloud portal with pixel-perfect branding powered by Skuid’s Design System Studio. As you plan the ideal portal experience, our team will work with you to deliver on your key objectives and realize your full vision as efficiently as possible.
Drive self-service adoption
Create portals that customers, donors, vendors, and other groups want to use by leveraging human-centered design principles. Encourage self-service adoption through intuitive navigation and seamless design, reducing the process burden on your internal teams. Whether your portal users need to submit a ticket, locate their benefits information, or log a new partner deal, make it a simple, hassle-free, and well-designed experience.
Build low-maintenance pixel-perfect portals without custom code
There’s no need to choose between easy maintenance and a portal your users will come back to again and again. Skuid helps you break down silos and connect systems, data, applications, and content without incurring massive technical debt or tying up developer resources. With Skuid, you can create a portal that meets all your requirements without LWC code. To learn more about Skuid, request a demo.
