Force.com Sites enables developers to build and deploy public web sites and web applications that are directly integrated with your Salesforce.com organization – without requiring users to log in with a username and password. These Web sites can be assigned custom domain names, letting you run your own web sites on the platform.
Force.com Sites are built with Visualforce, and they can leverage the data, content and logic that reside in your own environment.
One can embed the Web-to-Case/Web-to-lead form in the visualforce to capture cases or leads to help customers solve issues that they are facing. You can publicly expose any information stored in your organization through pages that match the look and feel of your company’s brand. By using Force.com sites, one can make use of it as normal sites like marketing web site with rich content, dynamic pages for session information, sites to gather customer feedback, branded login and registration pages for your portals, payment processing, etc.,
Because sites are hosted on Force.com servers, there are no data integration issues. Since sites are built on native Visualforce pages, data validation on collected information is performed automatically. You can allow users to access your site through your unique Force.com domain and URL, or you can register your own branded domain or subdomain to redirect to your site.
Developers can create multiple sites according to company’s various business needs. For example, a software company could create one site for new developers, another for customers, and a third for marketing.
To create a Force.com Sites, Go to Setup -> Develop -> Sites as shown in the below screenshot. It will prompt the user to create a unique domain name.
Once domain name is created, you need to give the necessary details to run the site, like the home page of the site (which is usually a visualforce page), web address, and etc., as shown in the below screenshot.
If website users submit the web-to- ead or web-to- ase form by filling in the required fields, the Site will create a lead/case record in the salesforce. Salesforce users can then take over these records for further processing.
We can allow the customer or partner portal users log into the site, by embedding Visualforce code in a HTML page.
Website users can use Live Agent to get answers for any questions while browsing. You can also embed video link as well in Force.com site to show step-by-step procedures to solve any issues, training materials, etc.,
Website Users can also access the Public Knowledge base in Force.com site. Users can find solutions for their issues by searching articles from the knowledge base, and if the article provides a solution, then they can follow the steps described in the solution for a resolution.
Summary
Force.com Sites is an effective tool that enables organizations to utilize key business functionalities of Sites, by collecting customer feedback with branded login and registration pages on the portals, capturing Lead data using Web-to-Lead forms on their sites, providing articles from Knowledge base to their site visitors based on the topic they search, providing online support to the online visitors real-time using Live Agent, and etc.
