We provide custom Sitefinity Training for Developers looking to customize Sitefinity and Marketers looking to use Sitefinity.
In the past clients have asked us to assist with:
- Training their Marketing staff to use the CMS more efficiently and to make edits independently of IT support
- Training their development staff to learn exactly what they need with real world context to get up to speed with Sitefinity as quickly as possible
- Working with both Developers and Marketers to explain Sitefinity best practices
Developer Training
When your technology staff receives training from Inalign, they'll learn from experienced programmers who have hands-on experience in building, implementing and maintaining Sitefinity websites.
Sitefinity is a very developer-oriented content management platform. That said, it is built on top of .NET and SQL Server. It helps greatly if you have previous .NET experience.
If you do have past experience with .NET, you'll find much of what Sitefinity does as common place.
Topics we cover include:
- Sitefinity Feather & MVC: This is where any programmer should start. Get up to speed quickly with learning how the content (and data) within Sitefinity marries up to the design. Sitefinity uses standard Microsoft MVC techniques to build templates and controls.
Sitefinity comes with many existing out-of-the-box controls to do a wide variety of tasks that any CMS would need. We will review what Sitefinity provides, what it doesn't provide, and how to fill in the gaps. - Templates: Learn how to take a design and implement it into a reusable template. We'll review how to take any design and add the proper hooks to get the CMS working.
- Module Builder: This is one of the cornerstones of Sitefinity customization. Module Builder is used to easily create data storage and display of simple items such as company bios, portfolios, and other structured data.
- Master Pages: Create and update master pages along with templates based on these master pages. We review this for historical purposes if needed (if you're porting an old site or if you have to maintain an older Sitefinity installation). For the most part, master pages are built on Microsoft Web Forms technology and should no longer be used.
- Navigation: Set up navs for different places on the website, e.g. one menu can show only the top level pages, another menu can show pages only under a certain page; one menu may be horizontal while another may be vertical.
- Themes: how to properly create and style themes. Sitefinity uses Bootstrap, and integrates well with it. You will still need to understand custom Sitefinity CSS classes and how best to modify them.
- Widgets: Create and update widgets to add more control over your site. Widgets allow you to change the presentation of Sitefinity components. This is a very powerful way to configure Sitefinity.
- Custom Modules: Create custom modules to present custom data. If you need .NET code to gather and present data that is not in Sitefinity, this is the topic for you. The CMS easily allows you to create your own MVC controls. You can even use the Entity Framework for easy database access.
- Integrations: integrate Sitefinity with third-party software
- Third-Party Plugins: how to implement jQuery, KendoUI and Bootstrap with Sitefinity
- Configuration: Learn how to modify and configure basic Sitefinity modules and understand how the administration section works.
End-User Training for Marketers
Our Sitefinity trainers are also able to explain and demonstrate Sitefinity in a way that will make sense to non-technical end-users in your company. We'll have them up and running on Sitefinity like pros in no time. We cover the following:
- Pages & Templates: best practices for creating new pages and templates that don’t miss any details. Learn how to create templates and share content across pages. Updating a page should not be a chore, and once properly setup, you'll find that updating your site is a breeze.
- Editing Content: best practices for editing page content, such as adding links, images, tables, etc. This includes working with Lists and Module builder. We'll cover which built-in tools are best for your needs. You'll see first hand how to separate content from design and why that's so critical to a successful CMS launch.
- Roles: Add new roles, permissions and users. Everyone in your department can't do everything, right? So make sure that each person does exactly what they need to and nothing more.
- Setting Up Core Elements: How to edit common elements like News Items, Blogs, Lists, Events, etc.