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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…

The California Consumers Privacy Act (CCPA), is a landmark privacy for Californian citizens due to come into force in January 2020. Somewhat akin to the EU’s General Data Protection Legislation, the new Act will provides Californian citizens with: a right to be informed what types of data are being collected by an organisation and what it will be used for (a notice at collection);  the right to request a copy of the exact data collected about them in the last twelve months (a Request to Know - similar to a Subject Access Request); the right to request deletion of that…

TL;DR For most scenarios yes.  #YMMV Umbraco 8 was launched with much fanfair in Feburary 2019, and as with most software there were some initial teething troubles which were quickly fixed.  But with 6 months passing, we began to wonder was Umbraco 8 ready for use in production environments. After much research and testing, including a practical Proof of Concept, we feel that without a doubt the core CMS is ready for use for most production scenarios.  However, there are some scenarios where you should be cautious before continuing, and some where Umbraco 8 is not production ready. One area…

An Umbraco Gold Partner is a business that typically provides website design, development and support services for the Umbraco CMS. Umbraco Gold Partners have been certified by Umbraco HQ as being knowledgeable about the Umbraco platform and how to install, build, configure and extend the product  All Umbraco Gold Partners have to employ at least two staff who are Umbraco Certified Developers who have achieved at least 400 Certification Points which are earned by attending a training course and passing end of module exams.…

This is a real "piece of string" question.  There are many factors that influence the cost of building a website, and the fact that the project is built using Umbraco makes little difference. Factors That May Affect the Cost of Umbraco Site  The key factors that we aim to understand during the early Discovery phase of a project are the size and complexity of the proposed website.  The complexity of functionality and volume of work have the greatest influence on project cost.   The key questions we use to understand this complexity factor are: How many types of pages will be…

The core Umbraco CMS is free to download and use for any website, it is free and Open Source. There are also many hundreds of add-on packages that have been written by the community which extend the functionality of Umbraco. Umbraco are completely committed to the Open Source model for the core Content Management System, and have always maintain that the CMS will remain free forever. This means that a large proportion of the Total Cost of Ownership of a website is substantially reduced, making it a tool well suited to business, academia and the not-for-profit sector. Alongside the free…