Elevate Your Salesforce Game with Visualforce: A Beginner’s Guide

One of the core attractions of Salesforce as a CRM is its comprehensiveness and the level of control you have within the Lightning platform. From Salesforce CLI that allows you to interact with the underlying platform directly to Visualforce, a custom User Interface (UI) development framework, numerous elements of the platform allow you to shape it to your needs.

What is Visualforce?

Visualforce is a development framework that can be used to develop custom User Interfaces (UIs). These UIs can be deployed on the Salesforce or more accurately, Lightning Platform natively (rendered and served inside the Salesforce environment).

Visualforce emulates HTML in a number of ways. It’s declarative, which allows developers who are already familiar with web and UI development to start developing UIs without a significant learning curve. However, you can hire Visualforce developers or even Salesforce API developers (who are also familiar with the environment and platform) to develop these UIs. A Salesforce development company is most likely to offer Salesforce development services, including Visualforce development, even if the expertise is not marketed separately.

Visualforce can be used to create the UI in the form of a Visualforce page, which has two components – Markup and controllers. Markup focuses on the individual components of the UI (buttons, segments, etc.), and the controller focuses on how they work and react when the user actually interacts with them, like clicking a button.

How Can Visualforce Help You Elevate Your Salesforce Game?

Salesforce is a powerful CRM choice for businesses from virtually any industry. So, no matter what the nature of your business is, you can do much more than simply using Salesforce to better manage your customers. You can bring out its full potential by leveraging frameworks like Visualforce in a number of ways.

Whether you have the development capabilities in-house or plan to hire Visualforce developers (or hire salesforce API developers), you have a reasonable chance of achieving the following benefits by using Visualforce.

Elevating User Experience: Creating custom UIs can help you improve how users interact with your business, elevating and enhancing that experience. Whether your goal is to individualize the UI for different customer segments or create a powerful and comprehensive UI (empowering the users), Visualforce can help. It can help you create and modify UIs for virtually any User Experience (UX) goal or need your business may have, no matter how complex or nuanced in nature.

Efficiency: Visualforce adds efficiency to the equation in two ways. The first is development itself. Its ease of development, coupled with native hosting and the predictive approach to development it allows for, all contribute to development efficiency, whether you are doing it in-house or have outsourced the task to a Salesforce development company. The second layer of efficiency is when it’s used for specific business functions, whether you are making a UI that encourages a large segment of your user base towards self-service or an internal UI that makes certain processes easier and more streamlined for all employees, reducing the need for specialized support, the business benefits.

Competitive Edge: From introducing the right level of visual appeal to increasing the ease of use (whether it’s for business employees or customers), there are a number of ways Visualforce can grant your business a sharper competitive edge. It allows you to enhance the potential of Salesforce for your business, introducing functionalities and options not possible in other environments and making digital resources more accessible for both customers and employees. By empowering the full range of stakeholders connected to the business, Visualforce can even augment intangible competitive edges like loyalty and morale.

Level of Detail: Visualforce allows for both coarse and fine-grained UI components. Coarse-grained UI components are broader in scope and more complex in nature, while fine-grained components have narrower, more fine-tuned functionalities. A healthy combination of both in a UI can enhance its usability, functionality, and appeal, resulting in a higher level of satisfaction from the user (both internal and external).

Scalability: UIs designed with Visualforce are highly scalable. So, no matter how your business changes in the future and what features you need to introduce in your UIs to reflect these changes, they are easier to design and implement with Visualforce.

Using Visualforce in To Get The Most From Your Salesforce Investment

It’s important to understand a few things before you start searching for a Salesforce developer to hire to create UIs for your business in Visualforce. These are:

• For internal UIs, it’s crucial to understand the needs of your employees. A more refined and limited UI might lead to better performance than a comprehensive and needlessly complicated UI. So before focusing on the wealth of features or its visual appeal, make sure you know the pain points of your user base, i.e., the employees. If you know about them and can find the right salesforce developer for hire who doesn’t just understand these pain points but is capable of addressing them in the UI design, you can maximize the benefits of a Visualforce UI.
• If you are contacting a Salesforce development service to get a customer-facing UI made, it’s important to make a concerted effort to learn what your customers want. Understanding the wants and needs of your customers regarding every facet of your business that they interact with is beneficial, and UIs within the Salesforce environment are no exception. If you have a tech-savvy audience, you can hire salesforce API developers to create comprehensive custom UIs that empower them. But for an audience that may need assistance and directions every step of the way, you can get UIs made with minimal components and an intuitive flow.
• Tying the needs of the internal and external stakeholders with your business goals is also critical. Before you hire Visualforce developers, you need to make sure that you understand how a custom UI might be helpful to your customers, employees, and the business. In some cases, the Salesforce developer for hire might offer you insights on the matter and allow you to see the full extent of what you can achieve with a custom UI made using Visualforce so you can make an informed decision.

The right Salesforce development service or Salesforce development company can help you improve not just your Visualforce ROI but the broader Salesforce ROI as well.

Final Words

While it’s important to understand the benefits of Visualforce and how you can maximize these benefits for your business, it’s just as critical to understand its limitations as well. While Visualforce is a strong, tried-and-true framework that most developers can work with (who understand the Salesforce environment at least), there are other options available. For some UI use cases, they may be better suited for the job. This includes Salesforce’s recommended Lightning Web Components. Still, Visualforce is a literal force in the Salesforce ecosystem, and you should leverage it to elevate your Salesforce game.