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Umbraco is a tool designed to make website editing simple and logical, meaning that Editors can keep their sites fresh and up to date without too much time input. But like any comprehensive piece of software it can be a little daunting for new users to learn the platform. Editors that are new to Umbraco can benefit from a number of great learning resources to fast track them to productive editing. The Umbraco Editors Guide is a great PDF which has a great depth of instructional content about using the core of the Umbraco CMS. Umbraco.tv has a number of…

TL;DR Almost certainly yes. Umbraco is an Open Source Content Management System (CMS), and is free for anyone to download and use for any purpose. It's designed for use on Windows Servers and compared to other leading Windows CMS's such as Episerver, Sitecore and Kentico, which are all proprietary, meaning that a substantial saving can be made in license fees. That doesn't mean it doesn't cost money to build an Umbraco site. There are costs including hosting, development and third party plugins, but these fees are no cheaper on the proprietary platforms and so in almost all cases Umbraco will…

Onsite or internal search is often a poor relation to other sexier features of a site such as the primary navigation or rich integrations with external systems such as CRM. On average 30% of users will do an onsite search, and doing so is a strong predictor of likelihood to convert (see Moz).  Onsite search is challenging though, internal search engines can never rival Google for quality and accuracy of results - because they can't rely on the many ranking factors that Google uses.  However, the Lucene search engine which forms part of the core of Umbraco does provide a…

Being an Umbraco Gold Partner means more than just a logo - its a guarantee that you’re working with a team well-versed and technically experienced to work efficiently with Umbraco. What does Gold Partner Status Mean?  Gold Partner status is an independent measure of the knowledge acquired by a Partner. All Gold Partners are required to employ at least two staff with a minimum of 400 certification points. Our Umbraco web developer team at Carbon Six Digital includes Certified Umbraco Masters - the highest level of expertise - as well as Umbraco Developers. We’re constantly investing in skills development through…

Becoming an Umbraco Gold Partner is a big commitment for many agencies. While it's a costly and time consuming investment, we believe that it offers many great benefits. Becoming a Gold Partner in 2013 for us was a demonstration of our commitment to the Umbraco product. Potential customers could see we had invested in training and gone all-in on the product. Being a Gold Partner has been an important part of our sales process, differentiating ourselves from other Umbraco development agencies that aren't partners, as we know more about the platform's roadmap, are able to offer better support, and have…

How exactly do you build a fast website? And if your website is slow, what can you do to improve it? Umbraco HQ asked Carbon Six Digital Director Paul Marden: “What’s your best tip(s) to improve page speed on a website?” Make sure you properly test the performance of the site under load before it goes live. This is especially important with sites with more complex hosting, such as a load-balanced configuration. Traditionally load testing was expensive as it required costly software and hardware all over the world to simulate close to real world conditions. But tools such as Load…

Umbraco is a very easy to use Content Management System. A well built and configured Umbraco website should make it super easy for Editors to make changes to their site, as well as adding new content. For those starting out on their journey with Umbraco editing journey there are plenty of resources to enable them to get started including: Umbraco Editors Guide; and Umbraco.tv. The Umbraco community is very strong and, while it's very heavily developer focused, it's incredibly helpful, and advice and guidance can be sought from the forum Our Umbraco or on the community Slack group. If you…

You know you need an Umbraco Developer, but where should you start looking and how will you know which is the right one for your project? Things to Consider When Looking for an Umbraco Development Agency Geography Think about whether locality is a consideration when hiring an Umbraco development agency. In days gone by it may have seemed important to hire a team you could meet face to face quickly and easily, but is this still the case? As remote working has recently stepped up a gear, and teams become more used to working independently of each other, you may…

I've touch typed since I was 12 years old, and any who does knows that stopping to pick up the mouse to click a button slows you down dramatically, I remember memorising all the keyboard shortcuts in WordPerfect 30-something years ago.  Keyboard shortcuts save a huge amount of time, especially when I've got my editing hat on and I'm writing posts or starting a skeleton site for a client. Last week a post by Owain @ScottishCoder when he found the keyboard shortcut for Save and Publish sparked my curiosity.  What are the other shortcuts available?  So I dug around and…

With the advent of Umbraco 8.1.0 it is now possible to upgrade a site from a previous version to Umbraco 8.  However, this is by no means an automated process. The new upgrade feature in 8.1.0 works similarly to previous Umbraco upgrades - they upgrade content stored in the database, but don’t provide provision to upgrade custom code written in Templates, Partial Views or Controllers. Umbraco 8 is a substantial breaking change from Umbraco 7, and so the effort needed to upgrade an existing site shouldn’t be underestimated.  Critically the code used by Umbraco Developers to create Templates, Partials and…