I have not used SXA (Sitecore experience accelerator) a lot and I am not sure why. The fuzz has not been about SXA, but maybe there should be more fuzz about it. It is a handy tool for enabling the fast creation of sites. It should really be considered, at least when creating campaign sites or smaller solutions.

In this blog post I will set up an Example site and add some controls to the first page of it. I know this is very simple stuff, but when I got started with it I couldn’t find basic information about how to do this, so this could be helpful. I suspect that I will come back to SXA a lot in later posts.

Setting up a tenant and a site

Right click the content node and insert a new Tenant.

Right click the new tenant and insert a new site.

Choose a host name for the site in the settings window that appears.

Choose a theme that can be used for the site. I went for Basic2.

Editing the fist page of the site

Find the home node of the site and click Publish -> Experience Eitor

The SXA toolbox should be visible on the right side of the screen when the Experiene Editor has finished loading. In case it is not enable it in the view tab.

I added an image in the header section and a title in the main section of the page.

Apply the theme in the experience accelerator tab.

Publishing the site

To make the site actually appear we have to do some more work. First we do of course have to publish. So go ahead and publish the site. Further more the host name has to be added to the IIS unless there is some wildcard binding in place. Add it to the bindings. Also don’t forget to add it to your hosts file (c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts).

Open up a new incognito window, browse to mysite.local and voilá, your site should be visible. As I said very simple!