Global Site Structure: Part 1

Today, I am going to start a series of blogs to explore Global Site Structures. It is one of the most important decisions that you have to make while setting up your website. Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a very flexible tool and doesn’t restrict you when it comes to site structure or content architecture. Hence it is very important decision. Once you decide the structure, you will have to live with the structure. Changing a structure is possible, but it is an expensive processing with deep impacts on operational efficiency, SEO, governance etc.

Before we deep dive into several websites, here is a webinar on Adobe website, co presented by Christine Duran and Matthias Siegel.

https://docs.adobe.com/ddc/en/gems/aem-6-1–translation-integration-and-best-practices.html

In this webinar, Christine talks about two different Site Structures and Matthias then shows how to create those using AEM Translation features.

Here is a screen capture from the webinar. The two structures described are around translation optimization and shared content.


Corporate Centric Content Model (Language > Country Region)

This model works great for enterprises that have common global offerings. The website content is same across all regions. Here most of the content is authored centrally at a corporate location and is adapted at the country level.

Region Centric Content Model (Country Region > Language)

This model is designed for enterprises that have different offerings per region. A good example can be an eCommerce website. The goods sold at Amazon India are not the same as Amazon US or Amazon UK. In such cases, it is always advisable to have region-based content masters (which can share content from a Global Corporate Master), but then have significant adaptations in the source at the regional level before the content is sent out for translation.