OUR BLOG

Website performance is critical to all our clients at Carbon Six Digital, and we work hard to simulate and monitor real world performance during development, then we setup monitoring tools to make sure that we maintain great performance in production. In this article on monitoring website performance for Umbraco HQ our Technical Project Manager Alex discusses some of the tools and techniques we use to ensure that websites we build are highly performant, and stay that way.…

Umbraco HQ asked Carbon Six Digital's Alex Meyers to share his insights on how performance monitoring can be used to ensure your website performs from day one - and keeps performing.   Establishing a baseline during development Website performance is critical to all our clients at Carbon Six Digital, and we work hard to simulate and monitor real world performance during development, then we setup monitoring tools to make sure that we maintain great performance in production. During development we run Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights to establish a baseline of performance, as perceived by Google, as this is a really…

Finding the right CMS for your business can be a a potential minefield. At Carbon Six Digital we find that, more often than not, businesses approach us needing to find an expert delivery partner, having already chosen the CMS platform they wish to work with. As part of a blog post by Umbraco HQ, Director, Paul Marden, asks two clients why they chose the Umbraco CMS.   Michelle Hughes, Head of Marketing, Wright Hassall LLP Our old CMS was bespoke, so we were tied to one agency, and it limited us in terms of the experience we were able to offer…

For a recent article in Skrift magazine, Gareth and Paul spent time, comparing and contrasting the different Umbraco ecommerce packages for version 8. Traditionally on Umbraco 7 brands have been left to integrate Umbraco with an off-platform solution such as Shopify, or to use one of three third-party Umbraco packages, Tea Commerce, UCommerce and Merchello. There are substantial differences between each of them, but chiefly Tea Commerce and UCommerce were paid-for proprietary systems and Merchello open source. With the launch of Umbraco 8 and it’s substantially rewritten API, a lot of work was required by most package vendors to enable…

E-commerce is a critical part of many websites, but it’s not something that is served by the Umbraco core, instead Umbraco HQ have focussed developer resources on building the CMS product, and developing cloud and headless options. Vendr from Outfield Digital is a new e-commerce package for Umbraco, and we've chosen it for our next major e-commerce project for Nextbase. In a new article for Skrift Paul and Gareth introduce Vendr, compare it against the key competition, and then demonstrate how to build a simple webshop using Vendr.…

Coronavirus has had a substantial impact on lives and businesses worldwide.  Riding on the back of BREXIT however, the UK economy was not in rude health, placing UK businesses at greater risk of substantial impacts. We know we aren't saving lives, however, our work has a substantial impact on our customers and so we have been preparing in earnest to ensure that our services continue as normal. However, in these turbulent times we also want to ensure that we are doing as much as possible to support our clients while remaining robust and profitable ourselves.  We're already thinking of grand…

Fine grained management of Users’ permissions isn’t an exciting subject for a blog post, but for websites managed by anything more than one or two people, knowing who does what can be critical. We’ve worked on a number of websites and content management systems where Editors bemoan how locked down the system is, and as a result everyone uses the same super-user login. But with a little thought and effort, tweaking the permissions settings in Umbraco can mean that the right people can do their job with the minimum of effort, and still remain compliant with security best practice. Permission…

If only I had a penny for every time I’ve heard an editor say “I’ve no idea how those changes got there”.  Helpfully, this is the point at which I get to demo the awesome power of the Umbraco Audit Log and Rollback features. Umbraco keeps track of every single action that’s applied by a user in it’s Audit Log, including when a page was changed, saved and published.  So there really shouldn’t be any surprise for Editors when a change has occurred that they weren’t expecting. Jump straight into the Audit Log and see who was making changes. The…

Users are less intimidated by shorter, more meaningful URLs that consist of words (not lots of numbers and codes), and while Google is good at indexing even complex URL structures they consider it to be best practice to choose page URLs that are more human friendly. That means using a web CMS which enables editors to choose their own URL, such as Umbraco, and then choosing names that are short and meaningful, and not stuffed with keywords in a vain attempt to game the Google indexing bot. Read more about good URLs in the Google SEO starter guide. At Carbon…

Reasons Why We Love Umbraco  it’s open source meaning there are no licence fees and so offers a considerable cost saving to clients in comparison to Umbraco’s competitors such as EpiServer and Sitecore that can cost tens of thousands of pounds per year; it offers a solution to fit your exact needs - giving you the freedom to build your websites, Apps or other solutions exactly the way you want;  it’s flexible - providing a perfect framework for any type of project whether big or small, complex or simple, private or public; its integration possibilities make it simple to build…