Get stuck in a room with me and mention websites and it won’t be long until I bring the conversation around to a CMS (Content Management System) called Umbraco. Umbraco can be used to power websites and provide a complete back-office solution to allow users to edit and add content to their website. We’ve recently built a complete website solution around Umbraco for a customer with full booking and live availability and after this experience I’m a believer!
It provides the client with the ability to update their own content – without knowing or worrying about HTML or breaking their look and feel. It suites small five-page websites as well being scalable to large, enterprise solutions (Peugeot and Pizza Hut are two of the larger users).
Umbraco empowers clients, large and small, with a website solution where they are not chained into paying busy web designers for simple content changes not to mention all of the waits and charges associated. Keeping content fresh also helps your ranking with Google and other search engines, this along with all the other out-of-the box SEO features that Umbraco provides is invaluable!
Learning How to Use Umbraco
I was tasked with training some of our Services team on supporting the website as the project matures into the support phase. The site has been built on Umbraco with a heap of bespoke customer web controls with, of course, a Babel and Tr@veller integration to handle their reservations. Within twenty minutes I’d provided them with an overview of Umbraco and they could see immediately see how all of the pages were populated and how the site in general hung together and were confident they’d at least ‘know where to look’ to source content and controls.
To demo I’d enhanced the Runway Umbraco Demo and created a quick site with around five pages including a fully functional news section that any non-technical user could publish and remove news items to. It comes with full editing, publishing work flows and built in rich text editors etc.
Umbraco At Work
Functionality wise, what I had put together in an hour would suit most small businesses website requirements (assuming they don’t need online shopping etc!). Obviously one of the biggest time killers of a website is the design – and ensuring it’s eye-catching and search engine optimised and most importantly the client likes! This highlights one of Umbraco’s strengths – it allows you to use any website design in Umbraco. It provides an immense amount of flexibility – different to most of the other CMS solutions - which tend to restrict developers to a particular template structure that developers then have to learn various hacks and tricks to manipulate to do what Clients require.
If you took a design ‘off the shelf’ you could have a fully functioning Umbraco solution in days! If you want something a bit more bespoke they we can take you through a more standard design process.
Solutions engineering has become a lot simpler with websites that I’ve designed since - the question has not been whether to implement in Umbraco but how to implement it in Umbraco! All of this from a CMS that is free and open source. It’s only fair to note, in a BBC style, that we’re also a reseller for the Pro version which allows you to push content across servers, useful for implementing our standard UAT and live testing and release model – another way that Umbraco fits our business processes!
If you’d like any further information please don’t hesitate to contact me on the usual numbers or leave a comment!