Fast and Visual: Salesforce Commerce Cloud’s Page Designer

For those of us who had to manually labor away creating page designs — in my case for newspapers — we had in the back of our minds one question: Surely there’s an easier way? For ecommerce companies, creating visually appealing page designs with proportional images and text is foundational. And to get them up and running faster has never been more important.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud knows this. They identified this gap and have filled it with a new feature: Page Designer. First piloted in 2018 and rolled out in limited form since now, the new feature enables you to create and manage page templates, giving you more control over the merchandising experience.

Via one-time development templates, pages can be used, reused, and edited without depending on developers to make necessary builds and changes — saving pennies and hours. The new feature prompts you to choose a single layout option to build and mould yourself and a 5-row layout option that contains predefined regions to place images and text.

When using the designer, you can define your brand requirements before creating other pages. You want to keep that corporate look but swap out images and text with ease? Page Designer can do that.

Once your regions are defined on the page, your canvas is ready to paint (or at least primed for uploading images and adding text!) with the help of a new simplified media file picker, that not only offers a better visual experience and is smoother to operate, but is also integrated with your catalog.

And implementing headings and subheadings can be done with ease via clicks, without the need for code. Which is a key point because it means that you can implement changes yourself, part of SF Commerce Cloud’s focus on “clicks not code”.

One aspect which is magically simple is scaled proportionality. So that you can move an image from one sized tile to a differently sized tile while maintaining the integrity of the image. For example, for your banner image you have an image of a model sitting down wearing brown boots. But now you want to move it to a smaller tile while maintaining the appearance of the boots. You can select the boots to be the focus point, and with each time you move the image, the boots will always be in frame, whatever size or shape of the tile. (No more wasted time constantly tinkering around with minuscule adjustments!)

Page Designer is also set up to aid your marketing strategy: from the simply designed navigator along the left side of the screen, the time icon allows you to input scheduling for your big campaign push or annual holiday sales. And any changes can be previewed prior to pushing the live button. Just select a date and you can preview what your page displays — it’s that simple.

And a bonus for sites that hold various locales is that when a page is created, it automatically creates variants based on your locales — so you can keep the same page design for your Spanish variation while being able to select different images and SEO settings, and so on. 

So if you want to simplify your process for page designs through a slick, smooth and quick feature, then Salesforce Commerce Cloud’s Page Designer will become your best friend.

PS: UV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce Commerce Cloud experts. Contact us to see how we can work together.