Paywall Websites: A Sitecore CMS Solution
October 13th, 2011
Most businesses have been slow to maximize the value behind strategic web content management and search. While it's a large undertaking, the evolution of an organization’s core business processes to the web can offer enormous ROI.
This technical whitepaper unpacks a solution addressing the needs of high-capacity and high-value websites that provide the main revenue model for their organizations. The solution is built atop standard interfaces provided by Sitecore, Coveo and Salesforce, in order to make coding clear and minimize the impact of future upgrades. The solution also provides a robust infrastructure with the flexibility to alter and expand business logic based on ongoing needs.
For the last two decades, publishers and research organizations have struggled to effectively utilize web tools to redefine and monetize their business models. Two such organizations, operating in very different industries, approached NavigationArts for full enterprise website redesigns. Both companies sell research subscriptions with complex and varied subscriptions levels. The challenge was to evolve their 30 year old business models of paper and PDF reports distributed through email into robust and searchable online databases personalized to each subscription type. A change of this scale would deliver more value to subscribers and provide the organizations a platform on which to maximize revenue from their research, retain customers, attract new business, and generate more revenue from existing accounts.
The same technical solution can be extended to serve a variety of other types of business models:
- “Freemium” websites that do not have paid content, but collect user information to drive advertising revenue or marketing opportunities
- Intranets and extranets which serve targeted, secure information to users
- Knowledge bases and document repositories that rely on access-restricted searching of content
- General websites with complex role permissions that are administered by content editors who need a simplified interface for controlling page access
- Sites which can benefit from a specific aspect of the solution, such as custom membership providers or Coveo integration, with the potential to expand capabilities
The ability to serve vast amounts of content, tailor that content to varied subscription types, and use it to increase revenue relied on complex interrelationships of a log-in/paywall website with an enterprise search system and a customer relationship management database, all tied to a tagging taxonomy which relates back to roles and subscription types.
Not technical? Read about how we are unlocking content through Enterprise Search.