The ServiceNow Content Management System (CMS) application enables you to create a customized user interface for your instance. You can use your organization's colors, styles, fonts, and branding to make your instance truly unique. The CMS application is flexible and can be used for everything from creating complete websites to integrating with other products.

Over the years we have seen customer projects created with the CMS, learned from customer experiences, and answered many questions. Through these conversations, we have developed some best practices that can help you use the CMS more efficiently and complete your CMS projects faster. The multimedia team has done a great job distilling these best practices into a new video:

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Here's a quick outline of the best practices obtained from experts, partners, and customers that are covered in the video:

What to do before building a site:

• Create a team of people with different skills, including active users
• Plan and research to build requirements and leverage existing information such as a company style guide

Tips to consider while building a site using CMS:

• Identify and map the data you are bringing into the site
• Run reports to determine the search terms your users are actually using
• Create mockups of pages and share them with active users to obtain their feedback
• Use base system content to create feature-rich pages faster
• Visit the ServiceNow Community to obtain help from experts, particularly if you run into issues customizing your site
• Consider using a front-end framework (for example, Twitter Bootstrap or Base) if you are planning extensive customizations
• Create a working master so you always have a copy you can revert to if necessary
• Use cms versioning for items you want to protect
• Develop your cms site on a sub-production instance where you can safely test, find bugs, and fix them

For more information on CMS, see:

ServiceNow product documentation: Content Management

CMS101: Content Management System overview

Content Management System Overview - YouTube

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