With the proliferation of channels for customer interactions, a strong website is still a central aspect of every company’s online presence and marketing strategy. With a site that provides a great customer experience which understands and meets the needs of target audiences, companies across all industries can find greater success in their online efforts. With the release of Liferay DXP 7.1, a host of new and updated features are available to create and refine websites in meaningful ways.

Through Liferay DXP 7.1, creating great websites that are uniquely suited to the needs of your company and customers is easier than ever. The following features in Liferay DXP 7.1 can help you build the website you need today.

The Power of Fragments

Websites need to properly react to the ever-changing expectations of visitors, but keeping up with shifting demands and producing new pages to suit new needs can take great amounts of time and effort. However, businesses must continually respond to such demands in order to keep up with what their audiences expect as, according to Impact BND research, 59 percent of consumers say that having access to content however they want it is very important. Fragments are a new way of creating and implementing content page designs in Liferay DXP 7.1. Web developers can now save page sections as fragments and reuse them across a Liferay site. This allows developers to create a library of design components that can be used to quickly create pages without having to touch code.

Fragments are organized in collections and leverage familiar asset management features, such as drafts, thumbnail previews, search and permissions. These elements are controlled by the Fragment Editor, a professional code editor within the browser that allows web developers to create or edit their fragments. Alternatively, developers can create fragments with their preferred tools and import the fragments. In using Liferay Fragments, businesses can keep up with shifting demands without a large amount of time and effort that was needed previously.

Visualize Your Experience with Page Editor

A great-looking website goes hand in hand with strong functionality, as today’s users expect their experiences to both look and handle well. When they do not, users quickly notice and may leave for a competitor’s website, even if their content or services are not equal. But poor design is simply more noticeable, as according to Sweor, 94 percent of negative website feedback in their user surveys was design related, highlighting the impact of such issues.

Liferay DXP 7.1’s new Page Editor allows for new ways to create pages and templates through a visual editor, in addition to traditional design methods. Page Editor users can visually lay out page designs and save them as reusable templates so they can search through collections and easily add, remove and position fragments on the page. Text can be customized with in-line editing and element swapping so businesses can create visually pleasing websites that complement the content and services they are presenting for a more effective user experience.

Speak to Visitors Through Audience Targeting

Understanding how your website as a whole, its individual pages and specific aspects of these pages perform are key components in continually refining and improving your online experience. Liferay Analytics Cloud provides users with insights regarding page performance and individual users so companies can better understand how users are engaging with their content and what aspects are positively or negatively affecting the customer experience.

By leveraging the insights gained from Liferay Analytics Cloud, businesses can make effective changes using Liferay DXP’s contextual personalization. This feature allows users to create audience segments based on user behavior, attributes, social media profiles and custom fields. This helps web content, functionality and features to be specified in real time depending on the user, providing personalized experiences designed to increase audience engagement and customer conversion.

Enhance Your Site’s Menu Navigation

While menus may be taken for granted when considering the elements of a great website, making sure that the navigation of a website is exactly what a customer needs is incredibly important. No matter how intuitive or beautiful a site, menus give visitors the ability to find exactly what they want and remain in control of their experiences. Research from KoMarketing shows that 50% of site visitors coming from a referral website will use the navigation menu to orient themselves, which will aid in their overall user experience.

Should a menu be difficult to use, frustration can quickly lead to visitor abandonment. In order to aid in creating great website experiences, menus are now decoupled from page navigation in Liferay DXP 7.1. This gives business users the freedom to create custom menus for sections of a website or remove menus for specific pages. A new drag-and-drop interface allows users to easily manage menu hierarchies and save different menu sets, helping to create strong menus that improve user experiences.

Optimize Through Adaptive Media

A fast and efficient website is crucial for great user experiences. Should a website poorly perform on a visitor’s device, he or she is much more likely to abandon the journey out of frustration. As discussed by Hubspot, 39% of people will stop engaging with a website if its images take too long to load. Oftentimes, the size of images and other media present on a webpage will cause slow load times, which result in frustration despite a company’s attempts to provide a great looking website.

Liferay Adaptive Media dynamically adjusts images and other forms of media on a site to fit the screen size of a device so that it looks great, no matter the format. In addition, Adaptive Media controls how these images are loaded, altering resolutions depending on the device and network speed. In doing so, a company can prepare for a wide variety of scenarios that are typically out of their control so that they can consistently provide the best possible experience.