Also known as Force.com Sites, Salesforce.com lets you build your website on top of their platform. What’s that mean?
- Your tech folks no longer have to build a database from scratch to capture whatever information your website is trying to get from its visitors.
- You no longer have to get your email inbox bogged down with unsortable data whenever someone fills out a form on your website. (And you really shouldn’t be using the outdated “send an email to contact us” method, because that just causes more pain for the person who has to receive those alerts)
- The information that’s captured goes right into a well-organized database (ie Salesforce) and you can make use of that data right away. Or at least run reports to get a better picture of who’s coming to your site.
Here’s a spiffy demo of what sites can do for you. I enjoy how there’s a good variety of websites mentioned: big consumer names like Dell and Starbucks, as well as those in other sectors (like a blood bank!).
Salesforce does provide a free edition of this so you can give it a test-drive. But please note the following (from the comments on the Youtube video:
- The Free Edition doesn’t let you register a domain name with the site. This is to prevent abuse or squatting of major domain names.
- The Free Edition lets you deploy a Site to up to 100 users for free. (Any more, and you’ll need to pay the piper.)
- If you are already a Salesforce.com Enterprise or Unlimited Edition user, you already have access to Force.com Sites.
- Enterprise Edition customers get 500,000 page views/month for free.
- Unlimited Edition customers get 1,000,000 page views/month for free.
- If you dont have a Salesforce account, sign up for Force.com Free Edition and get 100 users and 250,000 page views/month for free.
I think Force.com Free Edition used to be known as Developer Edition, but their re-branding efforts happen so often that I’m not entirely sure.