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When starting out on a new Umbraco Project it's really important to know and communicate what features and other requirements you have.   There are many ways of communicating these requirements, but here at Carbon Six Digital, we use a spreadsheet called the Prioritised Requirements and Traceability Matrix.  Long name, but easy idea. We’ve previously talked about producing a Prioritised Requirements List, which is a crucial first step in commissioning a new Umbraco site.  In this post, we look at the other side of this template, the Traceability Matrix. The purpose of this side of the template is to track the…

In our experience, it’s common for website buyers to treat hosting as a commodity - a bit like electricity and gas supply, website hosting is all the same really, the only difference is the price?  Wrong! There's a big difference in the hosting services on offer, and as a buyer, it’s crucial to understand what you need and what you're getting for your money. Requirements for Hosting an Umbraco Site  Hosting an Umbraco site calls for a number of minimum requirements: you must have Windows-based hosting, it needs to be in Full Trust Mode, and you may (probably) need a…

When starting out on a new Umbraco Project it’s really important to know and communicate your requirements and your desired features. There are many ways of communicating these, but here at Carbon Six Digital, we use a spreadsheet called the Prioritised Requirements and Traceability Matrix. Long name, but easy idea. First the requirements list. This is a methodical list of all the features the new system must incorporate alongside other factors, known as non-functional requirements, such as security and performance requirements. The functional requirements are often best articulated as a “User Story”. The list should be Prioritised so that the…

A website saddled with a bad Content Management System can often really impact the site from being developed to meet your needs. As Umbraco development specialists, we’re often approached by potential clients asking for their current site to be migrated to Umbraco. What we’ve learnt is that the impact of failing to properly brief an agency during a migration project can make a huge difference to the quality, timescales, and budgets of what’s being delivered. The Risks of Not Providing a Brief  It can be very difficult for an agency to provide an accurate or effective quote if presented with…

When you’re commissioning a new Umbraco site, it can be useful to start planning for the task of testing what has been delivered by your developers.  A planned and thoughtful approach to User Acceptance Testing can reduce the time taken and ensure better coverage of the system as well as one that is ultimately better at the end. Developing a Strategy for Acceptance Testing  During the early product planning stages, it’s worth discussing acceptance testing to understand the agency’s standard approach. Will they develop the system in an iterative way and expect you to contribute to acceptance testing during…

If you’re going to build a website or app you need to face facts: it’s going to have bugs.  Bugs have existed in software since Grace Murray Hopper found her punch card program failed because a moth got trapped in the reader.   Bugs are a fact of software life, because humans are fallible. We make mistakes, we misunderstand specs, we write algorithms incorrectly, or we use the wrong variable.  We believe that instead of trying to write perfect code, we should spend as much time trying to write a good trap.  Testing, therefore, is the saviour of poorly-written code. Approaches…

I presented at Code Garden for the first time today, talking about developing with Umbraco for a Chinese market. This was a lightening talk where I discuss some of the challenges of developing Umbraco sites that will be used by people in China, including getting the infamous ICMP License Find out more about our Umbraco work with Pulse Fitness in China.…

This article is part of a series on Performance Tuning Umbraco -- Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Performance is so important for the success of your site, and with Umbraco you have a number of levers to pull to optimise the performance of your site. Over the last 2 weeks we’ve written about how to squeeze better performance out of your Umbraco site, covering in Part 1 image and css/javascript optimisation and in Part 2 caching and database tracing and tuning. In this final part we look at stress testing tools and tuning infrastructure performance. Use a…

This article is part of a series on Performance Tuning Umbraco -- Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Last week we started a series of posts about performance tuning Umbraco sites, where we discussed Image Optimisation, Client Dependency Framework, Mini-Profiler and implementing caching.  In this article we’ll look at the relative performance of @Html.RenderTemplate and @Html.Partial, and also look at database profiling and tuning. Consider using @Html.Partial() rather than @Html.RenderTemplate In a previous Umbraco project we had a scenario where we had a shop page and needed to iterate over a collection of products, data of which were…

This article is part of a series on Performance Tuning Umbraco -- Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Site performance is always a critical factor when building a new web project. Site speed has, for a long time, been a critical ranking factor for Google. So how do you go about tuning performance of an Umbraco site? In this series of blog posts we look at different ways of optimising Umbraco site performance. Image optimisation Many sites fail to effectively use images.  Fat bloaty images that are resized on the fly by the browser or which haven’t been…