OUR BLOG

The Umbraco ecosystem has seen an unprecedented amount of change in the past few years. Changes in ownership of the platform, has injected capital and changed ways of working so we are now seeing a regular release cadence for the core CMS. This brings great benefits, like new features and better support for the underlying Microsoft .NET platform. But, as a Marketing Manager or project sponsor, it can be difficult to know which version of Umbraco you should use right now. Should new projects be built on the latest version of Umbraco, or should you chose the latest Long Term…

Umbraco Forms has been a mainstay of the Umbraco ecosystem for many years. As a paid for add-on to Umbraco, Contour as it used to be called, was one of the first steps into proprietary, licensed software, for otherwise open source Umbraco HQ. For many years, Contour, and then Umbraco Forms was rather unloved. With no dedicated development team it, it got upgrades to stay secure and compliant, but it's feature set didn't really change. But recently with a dedicated team, led by long time Umbraco veteran and Head of DXP Andy Butland, Forms is now getting more love and…

Integrating Umbraco with other systems can bring numerous benefits to your organization. Some of these benefits include improved efficiency, enhanced collaboration, better data management, increased security, and greater flexibility. Traditionally integrating Umbraco with other systems typically required the expertise of a developer or IT professional with experience in both Umbraco and the other systems you were integrating with. But more recently Umbraco has released a number of out-of-box integrations that can integrate with leading CRM and marketing system. So the specific skills and experience needed may vary depending on the complexity of the integration project. Overall, it is important to…

Last week I wrote a LinkedIn post about ChatGPT and how it could soon replace me in my role as a marketer, copywriter and technical sales person.  But how practical was that idea?  I've spent the intervening week trying to use ChatGPT in my everyday work life, and I'll share some observations about why I think it's ready for the mainstream. What is ChatGPT? ChatGPT is a cutting-edge natural language processing technology - a form of Artificial Intelligence - developed by OpenAI. It uses a powerful deep learning algorithm to generate human-like responses to text-based queries in a conversational manner.…

Carbon Six Digital announces today its merger with award winning digital agency Rubber Cheese, adding significant resources and further establishing its position as a leading CX design and development agency. The merger gives the award-winning agency an even stronger foundation to achieve its growth plans and strengthen its offering across design and development - delivering world leading digital solutions, with impeccable design at its core. The newly combined team of 15 will add huge value and expertise to both agency’s national and international clients operating within the visitor attraction, tourism, experience and technology sectors. Rubber Cheese MD Kelly Molson said,…

No one wants a nervous barber.  I’ve said this to new recruits, especially apprentices, for at least the last 10 years.   Why? Because if your barber comes at you with a cut throat razor using nervous shaky hands, you’ll probably be rightly concerned for your safety.   Barbering is a service industry just like a tech agency, and I've long been convinced confidence is a key part of our service standard.  We aim to be confident, authoritative, knowledgeable, supportive and friendly in all our interactions.  We call this “Waitrose-like Customer Service”, and it's an important part of what we aspire to…

I’ve been thinking lots in the last 6 months about how we make a better impact on the world, and focus on our agency purpose.  I want to move us to a position where we make an impact on the lives of the people we work with, with a light touch on the plant.   With this in mind I’ve been researching into the sustainability of the work that we do as a digital agency - I’m genuinely surprised by the negative impact of the work that we do. 15 years ago when I was a Project Manager at British Airways…

When developing a new website or making a major amendment to a site, a key decision that needs to be made is which version of Umbraco to use.  While this is a technical decision, we think that this has to be a business made by the client. Now more than ever this is a complex decision.  Just this week we’ve seen Umbraco Partners on the horns of a dilemma – they started a project a year ago on Umbraco 8, and now the site is ready to launch the client is asking why it is not on Umbraco 9.  With…

Azure App Service is a cost effective, reliable and resilient platform for hosting Umbraco. In fact, for sites that need anything beyond the most basic hosting, it's our preferred hosting platform. One useful feature of App Service is that it can be run in a load balanced configuration, which means that instead of a single computer serving content, you have many computers working together and taking it in turns to serve content.  Load balancing has a number of benefits:  By sharing the load across multiple servers, you increase the reliability of the website. So if a failure should occur on…

Azure is our preferred platform for secure, reliable and scalable hosting of Umbraco base websites, but for many clients it can be challenging to budget for, as one size definitely doesn’t fit all, and so pricing can vary quite considerably. The Microsoft Azure Pricing Calculator can help, as it enables you to model the costs of different Azure components but it does require technical expertise to build the right model. In this article we’ll look at some of the factors affecting the price of Azure hosting for Umbraco. Simple single instance hosting The simplest Use Case for Umbraco hosting on…