AEM Quick Site Creation Journey

Last update: February 5, 2025

CREATED FOR:

  • Admin
  • Developer

Start here for a guided journey through the easy-to-use AEM Quick Site Creation tool to streamline the front-end development of your AEM Site and quickly customize your site with no AEM backend knowledge.

Introduction

AEM Sites is a powerful tool set for creating and managing digital experiences. Content authors can easily create digital experiences using the sites editor and organize the content using the sites console, all while being able to see the content live as it is delivered by AEM to your audiences across channels.

The AEM Quick Site Creation tool allows non-developers to quickly create a site from scratch by using site templates. Once created, the Quick Site Creation tool also enables fast customization of the theme and styling of the AEM site (JavaScript, CSS, and static resources). This allows the front-end developer, who need zero knowledge of AEM, to work separately from and parallel to the content creators. The AEM administrator simply downloads the site theme and provides it to the front-end developer who customizes it using their favorite tools and then commits the changes to the AEM code repository, which is then deployed.

By eliminating any developer knowledge for site creation, eliminating AEM knowledge requirements for front end development, and allowing theme development to proceed in parallel with content creation, the AEM Quick Site Creation tool greatly accelerates your site’s time-to-value and increases your site customization and deployment agility.

Video Overview

For a quick overview of this feature in action, you can watch this five minute introduction.

This documentation journey will take you through all the features in the video step-by-step and in detail so you understand the workflow and can recreate the process in your own environment.

AEM Documentation Journeys

A Documentation Journey ties together many different, complicated topics and features by providing a narrative that helps the reader, who can be new to AEM, understand and solve a business problem from beginning to end, while assuming minimal prior topic or AEM knowledge.

Documentation Journeys are designed around best practices principles, informed by Adobe’s latest research, proven implementation experience from Adobe consultants, and feedback from customer projects.

If you want to know how Adobe recommends how to solve sites business cases with AEM, AEM Sites Journeys are where to start.

Audience

This journey lays out the requirements, steps, and approach to customize AEM Sites themes. Its primary audience is the front-end developer, who needs no knowledge of AEM. However, to illustrate the entire process, the journey involves administrators, who are assumed to have basic AEM Sites and Cloud Manager knowledge. In practice, multiple people can serve multiple roles and this journey supports perspectives from both admins and front-end developers.

PersonaDescriptionRole in Journey
Front-End DeveloperCustomizes the site themeTakes theme provided by the AEM administrator and customizes it so that is can be deployed to the AEM site.
Content AuthorCreates and manages content that is delivered as sitesContent Authors create content on AEM that is rendered with the theme customized by the front-end developer.
AEM AdministratorCreates a new AEM siteThe AEM administrator creates a new site based on a template and then provides the front-end developer with a theme to customize.
Cloud Manager AdministratorCreates pipelines and grants accessThe Cloud Manager Administrator creates the front-end pipeline and grants access to the front-end developer to be able commit customizations to the AEM git repository.