When we chose Umbraco, we were focused on our client’s needs.
What is a Content Management System (CMS)?
A CMS allows a non-programmer to update and maintain a website. This includes adding pages, updating a blog or press release, uploading new images and videos, updating your calendar and more. It hides the complexity of HTML and CSS, while maintaining the ability for a non-technical user to edit the site.
Benefits of a CMS
The key benefit of a CMS is that it allows for distributed authorship of your site. Your entire team can be trained on its use. You no longer have to wait for your “Webmaster” to post updates. The webmaster or IT bottleneck goes away when the CMS is easy to use and can be accessed by more than one person.
Our clients come to us because they want a great looking site that they can maintain themselves.
What is Umbraco CMS?
Umbraco is an open source content management system (CMS) built on Microsoft’s ASP.NET technology. It’s a proven tool for organizations looking for the flexibility and robustness of a modern CMS.
The term ‘Open Source’ does not just mean FREE. The true benefit of open source software is the flexibility that it gives you. By its very nature, open source software can be extended to fit your needs.
Umbraco features
- Umbraco has all of the standard features you would expect in a modern CMS
- Create, edit and delete pages
- Schedule to publish/unpublish content
- Version history, rollback
- Custom content/data types
- Preview on mobile
- Multilingual site/pages
- User Roles
- Custom editing permissions based on roles
- Image Cropper
- Media Library
- Dynamic page builder
- WYSIWYG editor
- Custom page templates
- Form builder
- Manage 301 redirects
Benefits of Umbraco
Umbraco is built on a strong foundation that benefits all involved in the design, development and maintenance of a website. It benefits everyone from designers, developers, content creators, website owners and users.
Easy to use
The editing experience is very intuitive. Umbraco is an extremely fast and easy-to-use platform for non-designers and non-developers. Anyone with the basic browser skills can quickly learn to edit and maintain a website.
Umbraco’s content hierarchy allows you to easily visualize your site’s structure. It’s easy to locate pages and content and make updates. Publishing changes takes a few clicks. Umbraco supports many different types of content. Users can easily upload photos and videos, or even create an image slider directly on a page.
Since our client’s technical skills are diverse, it was important to find a tool that is easy to use.
Flexible
From a web developer perspective, Umbraco is completely customizable. It allows you to take complete control over the presentation of content regardless of the platform. Building responsive websites and custom data types lets you create an editing experience that’s user focused. Developing custom pages and modules allows us to integrate Umbraco with external systems. We have integrated with variety of APIs, from Applicant Tracking Systems, Google Maps, Google Calendars and proprietary Learning Management Systems. Since our clients have very specific needs, we wanted a tool that could be extended.
Free to use
The core of Umbraco CMS is free. There are no ongoing license fees. There are some paid packages if you need specialized functionality such as custom forms.
Secure
Umbraco CMS is built on Microsoft’s ASP.NET which provides a higher level of security than other open source development languages.
Umbraco vs. WordPress and other CMSs
WordPress was a built on PHP as a blogging platform. It has been expanded to be used as a CMS to build website pages. But managing a large website with WordPress can be a challenge. WordPress relies heavily on plugins and third-party tools, leading to security vulnerabilities in these add-ons that can cause sites to get hacked more easily.
Umbraco was built on ASP.Net as a robust web site management tool from the beginning. Since it’s designed for building complex sites, it’s easy to scale from a small site to a large, comprehensive website. Umbraco lets you manage and maintain more than just pages. You can easily move entire sections, pages and content around your site. The development environment on Umbraco enforces consistency and helps programmers find their mistakes earlier, leading to higher quality, more secure code.
Selecting Umbraco as our primary CMS was driven by our desire to offer our clients the most secure, easy-to-use CMS for their websites. The initial investment may be more with Umbraco, but the overall value is well worth it.
Let's talk about building a site for you that’s easy to use with custom functionality and prioritized user experience.